*Originally Published: Sept 10, 2014* Director Richard LaGravenese did right by Jason Robert Brown and his off-Broadway masterpiece The Last Five Years. From casting to small script additions to keeping Hollywood out of it and presenting the original songs and structure fully in tact, LaGravenese made a lot of smart calls that make The Last […]
Sheila: So it used to be that—so what happens in the play is there are these two families, the Oddis and the Sings. And they both have a twelve-year old kid. The Oddis have a twelve-year-old girl named Jenny, and the Sings have a twelve-year-old boy named Daniel. And they’re both in Paris. And they’re […]
So, now that the show has worked out some of the kinks in its follow-up to the pilot, it has a chance to play around with some different ideas. Here, we find our characters in an episode that is even more steeped in mystery than the first two, and boasts some of the series’ first […]
I’ve never been particularly patient with serial or otherwise long-form storytelling. If I’m not grabbed from the start of something, there’s a good chance I won’t hang around for whatever the creator considers the point of the endeavour. After watching the pilot episode of Lost when it first aired, I was convinced that that television […]
It seemed like everyone reached their breaking points during Girls’ “Cubbies,” even Hannah’s dad. And just when it started to seem like things would be okay for some of them, of course things went terribly wrong. What else was I expecting? Reeling from job rejection after job rejection, Shoshanna went to talk to Ray, who […]
The new Soulpepper season opened last week with Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, directed by Ravi Jain, translated by Jon Laskin and Michael Aquilante, intensely modernized and adapted and localized by Jain and Paula Wing. The production stars Kawa Ada, a rapturously engaging and versatile performer born in Afghanistan and appearing on the […]
Clarity- of theme, of character, of purpose- is, to me, the greatest necessity in any Shakespeare production. Chances are the audience won’t follow every word of the script or even every beat of the story but if a production is thematically strong, has a solid sense of who each character is as a human being […]
For the past two years, I’ve been ranking every film I see- just the new releases, from January 1st to December 31st. The rankings are subjective, based entirely on how much I enjoyed and/or connected with or appreciated the film rather than on some sort of objective artistic criteria. Basically, this is a list of […]