Choreographer Jose Navas is the clear winner of Innovation-Off 2013, the National Ballet of Canada’s 4-piece showcase of new work (actual title: just Innovation). Navas’s Benjamin Britten-scored ensemble piece Watershed is up first in the lineup and packs the biggest artistic punch. The 20-minute collaboration between creator and dancers is full of invention and beautiful […]
If you have ever taken public transportation, congratulations, you have shared a common life experience with a handful of complete strangers. For a brief moment, your lives collided in transit. Like a good New Yorker, I generally live in my own headphone-generated musical bubble on the subway, but, unlike most New Yorkers, I do not […]
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 […]
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 […]