On a particularly stormy night, I ventured out to Boston University Stage Troupe’s production of Bug by Tracy Letts, directed by veteran Chris Hamilton, hoping for a night of horror and suspense. Unfortunately, I was less than smitten with the results. Billed as “the play that gets under your skin,” I was not moved by […]
Happy Medium Theatre’s production of Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom by Jennifer Haley is often funny, endearing in a nerdy (and sometimes intensely angsty teenage way), and engrossing. The basic story is that in the creepy/Stepfordian suburb of an unnamed town, all the teenagers have become totally engrossed with a videogame that uses satellite photos of the […]
Verdi’s brilliant 3-act opera is given a beautiful if sometimes silly staging at The Canadian Opera Company this fall. Tenor David Lomeli was my favourite of the very capable company of singers, performing the role of the lascivious Duke with aplomb and a cold, delivering a memorable vocal performance throughout, specifically in the painfully famous […]
Sonus Stage Company’s Sondheim revue Side by Side just opened at the Walmer Center Theatre. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to enjoy excerpts from Acting Up Stage’s Both Sides Now, a revue of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell songs. Sonus’ production, a less polished restaging of a pre-existing cabaret has none of the […]
Theatre Smash’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s dystopic one act The Ugly One is a whole lot of funny and whole whack of unsettling all wrapped into a tiny 1 hour package. Director Ashlie Corcoran and designer Camellia Koo pair to stage Maja Zade’s superb translation of the excellent play in a unique and effective […]
Ranking: #2 My first tears of the 2011 Stratford Festival Season came in the Studio Theatre one afternoon as I took in a play about which I knew nothing. John Mighton’s original work The Little Years was the surprise delight of the season, a new play I loved so much that it usurped some of […]
Ranking: #3 A lot of people consider Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy trashy, vulgar, somehow incomplete and most certainly inferior (to the bard’s more “sophisticated” later works like Hamlet). But some of the smartest directors I’ve ever met are convinced there’s a certain darkly comic genius to it. That seems to be the trick with the grotesquely […]
Ranking: #4 After I read late Stratford artistic director Richard Monette’s beautiful memoir This Rough Magic, I couldn’t wait to buy a copy of the play that made him famous. But when I finally got to read great Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay’s groundbreaking 2-man play Hosanna, I was surprised by how much I didn’t like […]