What is your morning jam? You know what I mean. Your go to song when you are heading to work, the song you blast while getting ready for the day, or the song you set as your alarm because it is impossible to hate (or, worse, sleep through). Periods of my life are inextricably linked […]
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It’s time, once again, for the On DVD series featuring new releases from Paramount Home Distribution and Elevation Pictures. Prestige Films from Elevation The Gunman: This low-profile, high star-power formula action movie is everything you either really love or really hate about action movies. The film isn’t anything special but the actors- Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Mark Rylance, […]
When I was six years old, I fell madly in love with The Sound of Music. And I mean madly, as in I went absolutely mad. My poor parents and older brother were subjected to an endless stream of six-year-old Julie Andrews imitation on an 8-hour drive to Montreal. 8 hours, nothing but “do-mi-mi-mi-so-so-re-fa-fa-la-ti-ti!” (see, […]
The Stratford Festival is having some women issues this year with a season that includes a dispiriting number of plays with misogynistic themes and not enough female-led works (though the late openers may help matters, hopefully). In contrast, at least in my opinion, The Shaw Festival is killing it on the female front despite the gender […]
When the epilogue ended and the house lights came up in the movie theatre where I saw Love & Mercy, no one moved. The real Brian Wilson was on screen in unflattering close-up as he sang the title song, live and imperfectly, accompanied by barely a breath of sound from the audience watching the credits […]
Director Jim Mezon’s staging of this GBS classic is full of light and laughter though its thematic consequences are limited once you excuse the dated gender politics (which, at a certain point, one learns to do automatically with dated texts). At one of the higher points in the play’s tumultuous central romance, frosty “New Woman” […]
There’s a reason my precocious 14-year-old cousin Reagan rolls her eyes when I try to tell her about her badass Shakespearean namesake. Shakespeare’s boring, people. It’s dated (in the case of Taming of the Shrew, offensively so) and irrelevant and sort of hard to follow. Why would I go see Hamlet when I can see […]
Performing with a symphony orchestra is a tricky thing, especially for a musical theatre performer. On a stage that likely has better acoustics than your usual proscenium, in a space traditionally occupied by concert cellists and world-class operatic sopranos, without the help of your costume or your co-stars, the story or the special effects, you […]