The Footlight Club’s production of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, staged at Eliot Hall in Jamaica Plain, leans more heavily towards the exhausting, grinding facet of living through a dysfunctional family’s foibles than towards the uneasy, occasionally violent expression these foibles give way to. The audience is led through the darkly funny strangeness constantly burbling […]
Last week, two excellent productions opened in Toronto that each told the story of a fascinating musical theatre artist through songs they composed themselves. The first was On the Rocks, a limited engagement cabaret-style showcase of Canadian musical theatre great Louise Pitre. Accompanied by the superb Diane Leah at the piano, Pitre took to the […]
I am a Manhattanite. If I make it north of 14th Street, I am probably on my way to see a show or am playing tour guide to visiting friends. God forbid I have to cross water to get somewhere. However, last Saturday night, I headed to Bushwick in Brooklyn for the first time, which […]
Season Ranking: #2 Lady Windermere’s Fan is the best production at this year’s Shaw Festival that is great mostly because of what the company has done with it. Oscar Wilde’s script is fun and full of giddy twists but it’s inventive director Peter Hinton (with an MVP assist from set designer Teresa Przybylski) who makes […]
Season Ranking: #5 Don’t take the title of this article the wrong way- Old Hat is just fine when it comes to Guys & Dolls. In fact, it’s the only way to do it. A musical so firmly rooted in its time and style shouldn’t really be tampered with. It should just be performed somewhat […]
Season Ranking: #6 I was really looking forward to The Light in the Piazza. I love small, contemporary musical theatre and I’d never seen Adam Guettel’s work though I’d heard wonderful things about it. But it didn’t quite capture me. The classical bent of the music, language-barred lyrics and awkwardly rushed love story just aren’t […]
Season Ranking: #7 It seems genuinely weird to me that, in a season of 10 shows, Major Barbara is the only George Bernard Shaw text being produced at The Shaw Festival in 2013. Now, I’m not a great George Bernard Shaw fan so that’s not a huge problem for me, it just seems a little […]
Season Ranking: #3 Every time I’ve reviewed Moya O’Connell in the past, I’ve made some mention of how beautiful she is. The reason I do that is two fold: 1- The major roles in question were Maggie the Cat and Hedda Gabler, characters whose beauty is talked a lot about in their respective plays; so […]