The “Day of the Doctor” has finally arrived. As a standalone episode, it was fantastic. As a celebration of the past 50 years of the show? …it could have done better. The 50th anniversary special was one of the best episodes the show has had in a long time. The pacing was great; it featured […]
Two very different productions of two of Shakespeare’s most popular plays are currently gracing Toronto stages. One, a clever inside-baseball exploration of Twelfth Night, best suited to the sort of audience who has already seen the melancholy comedy too many times. The other a faithful bare-bones rendering of the bard’s most enduring tragedy, Romeo & […]
It may be widely known that I don’t like original shows. I feel they’re often underrehearsed, poorly cast, and underrealized. That includes a script for which the playwright needs a few more rewrites. However, I was blown away by the Boston Playwright Theatre’s production of “Burning” by Ginger Lazarus. I can’t quite understand why everything […]
The secret to successful entertainment in any form is conceptually simple: know your audience. I suspect that the producers of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall at 59E59 Theatre had an audience in mind when they chose to produce the show. I am also confident that I am not that audience. In a single word, I […]
It’s difficult to determine if there is simply an ingredient missing or if something is wrong with the entire recipe. In Charlie Countryman, originally titled The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, Shia LaBeouf (Transformers, Lawless) plays a traveling nomad who falls deeply in love with a foreign cellist player, portrayed by Evan Rachel Wood (The […]
There are a large number of suspicious deaths occurring at the Walter Kerr Theatre, and, strangely enough, all of the victims bear striking resemblances to one another – and to Jefferson Mays, the gifted actor who portrays every doomed D’Ysquith family member in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Gentleman’s Guide is an artistically […]
The Empty Room’s current production of RC Sherriff’s World War I drama Journey’s End is so much better than it seems on first reflection. When broken down for parts, 98% of it is in fine, working order. Some of that 98% I would even call excellent (Joshua Stodart’s steel-nerved scamp of a Mason, for example, not […]
Simple Machine’s production of The Turn of the Screw, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from the ghostly tale by Henry James and directed by M. Bevin O’Gara, is very well-acted and very well-executed. The perk of a play like Screw is that everything hinges on only two actors. The dreadful risk of such a play is […]