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 […]
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 […]
Take a bow, Imelda Staunton. The national treasure is mesmerising as Mama Rose in this perfect West End revival of the 1959 classic, Gypsy. Having been lucky enough to see the production at the Chichester Festival Theatre prior to its West End run, I couldn’t wait to see it again at the Savoy and certainly […]
A storm was supposed to be coming. Said forecast moved Desiderata Theatre Co’s production of Lot and His God from the Citizenry Cafe patio to its limited indoor space for one night only. Citizenry is too nice to really pass for the dilapidated Sodom cafe described in the text but, trapped inside with too many […]
Steve Waters’ new play Temple is invigorating, and that is a surprise considering its subject matter. Temple reveals the trials of the administration of St. Paul’s Cathedral during the 2011 Occupy Movement. It is set on the day the building reopened following a two week closure. It also tells of the drama surrounding the […]
Life isn’t a movie script. Or a TV show, for that matter. But anyone who has spent time in the mind of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin knows stories can be well served through these media. We can have our cake and eat it too: a hurricane of human brilliance and drama can whirl around us, always […]