Fiddler on the Roof aside (because I maintain that it is a great musical even if people like to laugh at it), the Stratford Festival is having some content curation problems when it comes to musicals lately. There are hundreds of decent musicals out there but the festival keeps coming back to outdated, kitschy pieces […]
I’m supposed to tell you that The Mountaintop is about Martin Luther King Jr.’s fictional encounter with a motel maid the night before he is assassinated. That’s not what The Mountaintop is about. I mean, technically, yes, that is what happens in the play but The Mountaintop is much much bigger than that. It’s just […]
It’d been 5 years since I last saw my favourite Shakespeare play live, and many years since I’d seen it done well. So I was more than excited to see Stratford’s current production, despite my whole-hearted belief that the company’s chosen leading man was at least 20 years too young (and a sprightly man to […]
Occasionally (and I mean very occasionally, sadly) I see a Shakespeare play that makes me deliriously happy. This was one of those plays; the first at Stratford since Des McAnuff’s glorious 2011 Twelfth Night. I got a little bored in Act 5 (Act 5 of Midsummer being one of my least favourite things ever) and […]
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays to stage. The action is fairly simple and the characters generally pretty accessible but there’s magic, a monster, a spirit, multiple apparitions and a big on-stage storm. A big budget, a brilliant directorial brain or, ideally, both is required to pull it off without things looking […]
Like 42nd Street before it, Crazy for You is made of nothing but charm and tap dancing. But one can get pretty far on charm alone and, if you’re as good of a dancer as any member of this ensemble, tap dancing can get you even further. Written in 1992 and forged Mamma Mia/We […]
StageWorks Toronto is an incredibly ambitious company, especially when you consider that they’re really a community theatre organization (mixing new theatre grads with part-time performers, I’m pretty sure all un-paid). Year after year they choose an interesting, contemporary and thematically challenging musical and mount a full-scale production, never shying away from a hard vocal score. […]
No Chance in Hell (A) Did I see all the Fringe musicals this year? I at the very least came very close to seeing all the Fringe musicals this year and, at least of the ones I saw (which I think was all of them), No Chance in Hell is far and away the best. […]