Robert Cushman: There is a particular kind of acting that I constantly find myself railing against but for which I have yet to find a satisfactory name. Maybe I should call it explanatory ac…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 09:00AMHere, alphabetically, are some of the shows that stood out for me in the year just departed. I couldn’t get it down to a Top 10 so here is my Divine Dozen (with others associated)
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 09:00AMThere are five musicals contained within The Musical of Musicals: The Musical!, and they all have the same plot
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMIt is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has one of the most perfectly balanced opening sentences in English literature. Its words aren’t spoken in t…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 09:00AMA device that may work in a novel can seem like a thin literary conceit when transferred to the stage
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMThere’s never a boring moment in God of Carnage, but there are few really arresting ones, either. As for Ross Petty's The Little Mermaid? It's visually beautiful and biting social satire
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 10:00AMThere’s a party going on when you enter the theatre to see Once, and it’s irresistible
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 01:05PMOne of Robert Lepage’s finest but least celebrated qualities is his humour. There are scenes in Needles and Opium that are the funniest in any Canadian play in ages
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMI’ve lost count of the number of adaptations I’ve seen in recent years of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. After Miss Julie, by the British playwright Patrick Marber, is the only one of…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:30PMThis Aladdin turns out to be the best ever stage version of a movie
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 03:52PMAmong other things The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble is a tale of two kitchens. Our visual clue as to which we are in at a given moment is the presence or absence of salt and pepper …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:00PMThe standout productions at Soulpepper this year have been the marathons: the two-part Angels in America and the three-part The Norman Conquests. Both, it’s announced to nobody’s surpris…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 03:45PMA young man and woman, probably early twenties but maybe late teens, confront one another in front of what looks like a garbage dump, though it sports a sign saying that no garbage is allowe…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 09:00AMThe Double returns in a needlessly expanded form, while Savage in Limbo is a well-orchestrated saloon drama
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 09:09AMPuppetry is an enviable skill. So is improvisational comedy. The performers of Puppet Up! Uncensored are adept at both, which puts them in a special league of accomplishment
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 09:02AMSarah Berthiaume’s Yukonstyle is a great improvement on her preceding play The Flood Thereafter, in which a supposed mythological overlay obscured a couple of good domestic scenes
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:00PMThe Norman Conquests, now being given a smashing production by Soulpepper, is an early block in the Alan Ayckbourn building, but in itself it typifies the whole enterprise, sharp in percepti…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMThe restaged version of Les Misérables that has arrived in Toronto has some individual merits, but the musical itself is as miserable as ever
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 03:10PMWho says our theatres don’t have consistent artistic policies?
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMPIG is a British play being given its world premiere at Buddies in Bad Times, apparently because it was deemed too hot to handle on its home turf
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:49PMIn his solo show, John Cleese offers an easygoing illustrated memoir, offhandedly and expertly delivered with the aid of a face-mic, a teleprompter, and a sense of timing that’s fast, dry …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 06:10PMThe Invisible Woman makes Dickens himself a none-too-visible man, or at least an opaque one. It’s reasonably enjoyable, but Ralph Fiennes, in his second outing as actor-director, brings to…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 04:56PMShakespeare in the Ruff made their debut last summer with a promising but uneven Two Gentlemen of Verona. This year, they really deliver
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMThis production is thoroughly compelling on its own terms; coming one night after Othello, that other racial Venetian play, it constitutes a grand slam that might be a landmark for Stratford
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMJudith Thompson’s The Thrill is a play that holds the attention while gradually forfeiting belief. It’s stronger on speeches that on scenes, and has a large structural flaw. It is extrem…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 12:29PMThe new Stratford Othello is red hot. That goes for the way it looks, sounds, feels and takes possession
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 01:00PMJohn Murrell’s Taking Shakespeare is a modest but charming play with some barbs to it. A young man named Murph, an undergraduate faced with flunking, is sent for special coaching
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:00PMSoulpepper’s new production lights up nearly every moment of the marathon while returning the company itself to the level of acting magnificence that distinguished its earliest days
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 01:45PMNow, at last, the Shawfest has brought us Arcadia, the play generally regarded as Stoppard’s masterpiece, and has given it, by way of further amends, a sparkling production.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMGreat Expectations is, by Dickensian standards, a medium-sized novel, and Soulpepper's dramatization doesn’t have to skimp very much in terms of plot
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMOrton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane was his first play and, when staged in London in the 1960s, made him an instant celebrity
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:00PM
