The twist in Picture This reveals the source material's writer to be ahead of his time
Robert Cushman: The first act is tight, but the second, though still entertaining, feels as if the authors are making it up as they go along
Robert Cushman: The first act is tight, but the second, though still entertaining, feels as if the authors are making it up as they go along
Robert Cushman: Will these crazy experimentalist directors stop at nothing?
Robert Cushman: The show's ending returns, abruptly, to its beginning, but nobody's perfect
Robert Cushman: In Middletown, which has only two acts, the memento mori is emblazoned from the start
Robert Cushman: The production suffers, for me at least, from comparison to Laszlo Marton's superb Soulpepper staging
Robert Cushman: A play that without any directorial forcing proves astonishingly prescient of the present moment
The Shaw Festival's An Octoroon is the Canadian premiere of an off-Broadway sensation from 2014
The bear is, in all his charm and majesty and significance, a triumph for the author's ambition and imagination
Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford " There has been, in the last 60 years or so, a renaissance of Renaissance drama. The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors, long eclipse…
Summerworks Performance Festival runs until August 13
Robert Cushman: Euripides' play, by common consent his greatest, was also his last (or last but one). It premiered in old Athens in 406 BC, following the death of its aged, exiled author
Robert Cushman: Its story, though, runs out of steam, even at a playing length of just over an hour
Robert Cushman: But the play, by the author's own admission, makes no attempt to assess whether, as legend has it, Canadian identity was really forged at Vimy
The Virgin Trial is a sequel to The Last Wife, Hennig's play about Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's sixth and final queen
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical begins with King at Carnegie Hall in 1971, all set to give the live premiere of the songs from her album Tapestry
Robert Cushman: Down in the Distillery District, the company known as VideoCabaret have been reviving and revising their strip-cartoon national epic
Robert Cushman: Who wants to go up against Come from Away? Well, somebody has to and some things have, from the estimable Passing Strange to the deplorable Matilda
Robert Cushman: Antoni Cimolino's production is the only one I've seen to turn the theory into practice; to make the screen scene the great moment in English comedy that the books say it is
Robert Cushman: Stratford has fruitfully twinned its production of The School for Scandal with Timon of Athens, casting mostly the same actors in another lampoon of society
Robert Cushman: I will lay you odds that the superimposition of one time-frame upon another is one reason that this musical becomes what is known as timeless
Robert Cushman: At times, I thought the constant motion of all the characters actually helped the story; at others, I thought it got in the way
Robert Cushman: It's no secret that Romeo and Juliet ends in a tomb. In Stratford's new production, it begins there as well
Robert Cushman: The performance's execution lacks something in finesse, but the conception is an eye-opener
Robert Cushman: The music, mostly melodic rock, can be very expressive. The lyrics, though, can't. They're often difficult to hear
Robert Cushman: It was, I imagine, like being in church, but more so. They had come to the theatre, and it was speaking their language
Robert Cushman: It is the best thing to happen so far in Streetcar Crowsnest's new East End home. Imaginatively presented on a bare open stage, it draws us into a world
Robert Cushman: Those who know the film have testified that the reborn stage musical isn't strictly Strictly Ballroom at all
Robert Cushman: The truth is there's been a healthy component of irony in the best romantic comedies, at least since Shakespeare and probably before
Robert Cushman: Some things in this adaptation/production may be questionable, but everything feels thought and imagined
Robert Cushman: There's good and bad suspense; this play has both
Robert Cushman: He can be hilarious, in modes silky or self-deprecating. He can be frighteningly angry. He can be just as frighteningly lost
Robert Cushman: Whenever you think that her 90-minute hard-luck story has outstayed its welcome, Karen Hines draws you back in
Robert Cushman: It's a show that has its share of wry self-deprecation, but is more about living with and even overcoming obstacles
Robert Cushman: It's also the return to producing of Garth Drabinsky, who gave us such masterful shows as Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman
Robert Cushman: Tension keeps us interested through dialogue that is generally easy-flowing and sometimes amusing
Robert Cushman: Maybe we're not meant to take it seriously and Shields is attempting the impossible " being ironic about irony
Robert Cushman: This Toronto season has brought us John, Father Comes Home from the Wars, The Realistic Joneses and now this. American playwriting is back on a roll
Robert Cushman: There are five actors in Five Faces for Evelyn Frost " two male, three female " and they hardly ever make contact
Robert Cushman: The author, who is also the director, hasn't found a style that would carry us with him
Robert Cushman: In the American play, everything is laid out on the surface; in the British one, the important things are happening underneath
Robert Cushman: The best to be said for her new play How Black Mothers Say I Love You is that a television spin-off is an unlikely prospect
Robert Cushman: There are supporting performances that I'm tempted to call the best I've seen in the roles
Robert Cushman: This play, by the rising young American playwright Annie Baker, lasts more than three hours but has no dull moments
Robert Cushman: The author was 25 when she wrote the play and it has the pretentiousness of youth without the excitement
Robert Cushman: At its end, Passing Strange succumbs to the kind of portentousness seemingly unavoidable in rock musicals
Robert Cushman: The Wedding Party is a new play by Kristen Thomson, staged by Crow's indefatigable artistic director Chris Abraham
Robert Cushman: Sequence belongs to the growing genre of scientific-mathematical-philosophical plays that proceed through argument, usually spiced with melodrama
Robert Cushman: The words, sung and spoken, and the music are the joint work of Anika Johnson and Barbara Johnston; near-namesakes but not related
And of course there are current Broadway shows we will be itching to see
Robert Cushman: Jordan Tannahill's Botticelli was the best new Canadian play of the year; Sunday, its double-bill partner, wasn't but was still worthwhile