“You go to the theater night after night, hoping that something magical will happen,” my guest said to me as we were leaving Geva Theatre on Saturday, “and tonight it did.” Everybody knows what a tough business it is to try to produce new theater, especially a new musical show. But I don’t think I’m […]
Herbert M. Simpson
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Christopher Plummer’s controlled despair
Distinguished alumni continue to return to the Stratford Festival to make its 50th anniversary season stellar indeed. Alumnus Brent Carver, a Tony Award-winner for Kiss of the Spider Woman, returns to Stratford in the world premiere of Timothy Findley’s play, Shadows. Findley, an actor in the first 1953 company at Stratford, later became a […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Rewards and surprises at Shaw
The final three productions of the Shaw Festival’s 2002 season are impressive indeed. The world premiere of Simon Bradbury’s Chaplin, though, looks more like a brilliant work in progress than the final solution to the problem of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp having to deal with Hitler. Christopher Newton’s choice for his final directing stint before […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Comic chameleons
One of the most eye-opening, hilarious shows you’re likely to see for some time is playing at Shipping Dock Theatre through the end of this month (and ought to be extended past then). In The Kathy and Mo Show: Parallel Lives, Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy created a series of connected sketches exploring feminist […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Summer treat
Unfortunately, InterPlay, Shipping Dock Theatre’s annual festival of new plays, can schedule only three performances each during two summer weekends, so you have only this coming weekend to see the two plays that opened last week. I suspect, though, that Craig Pospisil’s delectable Months on End will show up again. In 1995, InterPlay introduced […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Summer camp in scenic Naples
It’s a beautiful drive down to Bristol Valley Theatre, where the light summer fare seems a throwback to earlier theatrical values. In the middle of its 10th anniversary season, BVT is performing one of those silly pieces of claptrap that used to be called “straw hat theater” entertainment. Gerald Moon’s Corpse! is listed as a […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Fanfare, firsts, and a fabulous Richard III
On July 13, 1952, Alec Guinness stepped onto the stage of a large tent to play Richard III in the first performance of Canada’s Stratford Festival. Exactly 50 years later, Shakespeare’s Richard III opened at the multi-million dollar Avon Theatre July 13, after the entrance of the Governor General of Canada and after a very […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Powerful women shine at Shaw Fest
The Shaw Festival’s three accomplished July openings all center on powerful women who rule the roost, though the third could use a stronger rooster.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Big man, small treatment
Geva Theatre continues its adventurous programming into the summer with a work of historical interest in the intimate Nextstage. Even before Indiana Repertory Theatre’s world premiere last fall of James Still’s Looking over the President’s Shoulder, Geva had arranged to give its original production this second presentation anywhere. It now has other productions planned nationwide. […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Nothing but love
It’s obviously Barbara Biddy’s enormous affection for Jonathan Harvey’s sweetly quirky play Beautiful Thing that energized Shipping Dock’s exceptional production. Not an easy assignment, the play about awkward first love between two working-class teenage boys in southeast London carries the added burden of comparison with a film version that has become internationally beloved. Well, Biddy […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Stay outta that hole
As you can see in Edward Albee’s The Goat, a great new play about a man who betrays his wife by screwing a goat, there’s no accounting for taste. I loved that play, but I’ve got to admit that, though I truly admire Blackfriars’ latest production and respect the show it’s doing, I really don’t […]
