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: #1 Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is a genius text written by a genius about geniuses. It gets better every single time I read or see it and The Shaw Festival’s 2013 production easily continued that trend. The play is complicated and rewarding but also fun and diverting. It’s filled with scholarly concepts the full […]
Welcome to this year’s My Theatre Awards. This is our chance to weigh in on what we think were the best productions, performances and other theatrical contributions of the year. Any production that one of our reviewers saw between January 1st and December 31st 2012 is qualified for an award. (Remounts only qualify if we’re […]
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 […]
My mother is a very nice woman. She’s lovely, really, and everyone who has ever met her in the history of her existence on earth likes her because she is very nice and very lovely and generally crafts her life in a way that will produce as much happiness as possible. My older brother is […]
Ranking: #2 What makes The Admirable Crichton so notable is that it’s the only Shaw Festival production in my top 5 that really fits with the festival’s brand. While not a GB Shaw script, This JM Barrie play enjoys the conventional staging, English accents and Shavian commentary on the class system that proved so ineffective […]
Ranking: #11 At 2 hours and 15 minutes, The Shaw Festival’s weakest production of the year drags unforgivably. The story of a weak-willed Prime Minister whose sudden socialist enlightenment causes great tumult, On The Rocks has within it some great themes of idealism in government and the importance of standing for something, but it falls […]