At this point it’s not really notable to say “Canada won a bronze medal!”. We’ve won lots of bronze medals this olympics (10 so far out of 16 total with 5 silver and 1 gold). But Mark Oldershaw is a third generation Olympian trained at a small local canoe club by his dad, which is […]
I’ve heard this episode maligned a little bit but I really think The Newsroom has very clearly found its footing. After the triumph that was “Bullies” last week, “5/1” found a way to hold on to that honesty while bringing back the funny Sorkin was trying too hard to incorporate early in the series. The […]
I may have mentioned this a couple times, by I’ve never really been a Danial MacIvor fan. He’s a beautifully poetic playwright but I haven’t found his stories compelling enough to carry his poetry. That said, I loved The Best Brothers. It has a story simple enough to be told coherently and fully in one-act […]
Come Back, Little Sheba is a disjointed play. During the first act, it feels like a trivial tragedy not tragic enough to earn that description. The characters are fretting losers with problems so superficial that it’s remarkable how easy they would be to fix. Marie: date nicer boys (and try just one at a time); […]
“I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?” -Benedick to Beatrice (IV.i) The 2012 Stratford season isn’t very good. 80% of the reason I say that is Much Ado About Nothing. There are places to improve Henry V, Charlie Brown, The Matchmaker and so much else, but they […]
Present Laughter isn’t particularly remarkable. It’s a pretty standard Shaw production despite being written by Noel Coward and not George Bernard Shaw (who only wrote two plays slated for the 2012 season, actually). The costumes are pretty, the set is impressive if not interesting and everybody has British accents. Shaw’s Festival Theatre is a typical proscenium arch- […]
In a season where Stratford is struggling a bit, I haven’t seen a bad Shaw production yet. Ragtime is Fantastic (more on that later) and His Girl Friday is pretty good (again, more to come) but it’s French Without Tears that surprised me the most. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into at […]
“Bullies” was the darkest Newsroom episode yet as Sorkin used an insomnia-prompted therapy session to explore a bit more of the darkness in his principal “hero”. The format is a winner, as we’d already learned from a pretty good Sports Night episode and a spectacular West Wing episode (season two’s “Noel”- one of television’s greatest […]