Robert Cushman: He can be hilarious, in modes silky or self-deprecating. He can be frighteningly angry. He can be just as frighteningly lost
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 07:02PMRobert Cushman: Whenever you think that her 90-minute hard-luck story has outstayed its welcome, Karen Hines draws you back in
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 04:32PMRobert Cushman: It’s a show that has its share of wry self-deprecation, but is more about living with and even overcoming obstacles
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 07:24PMRobert 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
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 07:24PMRobert Cushman: Tension keeps us interested through dialogue that is generally easy-flowing and sometimes amusing
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 03:48PMRobert Cushman: Maybe we’re not meant to take it seriously and Shields is attempting the impossible — being ironic about irony
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 06:48PMRobert 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
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 03:06PMRobert Cushman: There are five actors in Five Faces for Evelyn Frost – two male, three female – and they hardly ever make contact
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 06:32PMRobert Cushman: The author, who is also the director, hasn’t found a style that would carry us with him
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 06:32PMRobert Cushman: In the American play, everything is laid out on the surface; in the British one, the important things are happening underneath
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 04:42PMRobert 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
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 07:54PMRobert Cushman: There are supporting performances that I’m tempted to call the best I’ve seen in the roles
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 05:24PMRobert Cushman: This play, by the rising young American playwright Annie Baker, lasts more than three hours but has no dull moments
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 05:24PMRobert Cushman: The author was 25 when she wrote the play and it has the pretentiousness of youth without the excitement
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 08:36PMRobert Cushman: At its end, Passing Strange succumbs to the kind of portentousness seemingly unavoidable in rock musicals
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 08:36PMRobert Cushman: The Wedding Party is a new play by Kristen Thomson, staged by Crow’s indefatigable artistic director Chris Abraham
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 06:12PMRobert Cushman: Sequence belongs to the growing genre of scientific-mathematical-philosophical plays that proceed through argument, usually spiced with melodrama
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 04:04PMRobert Cushman: The words, sung and spoken, and the music are the joint work of Anika Johnson and Barbara Johnston; near-namesakes but not related
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 07:54PMAnd of course there are current Broadway shows we will be itching to see
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 04:54PMRobert 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
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 07:48PMRobert Cushman: In the concluding stages you forget the trappings and get caught up in the story, which I guess is the intention
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 05:33PMRobert Cushman: This Sleeping Beauty, recognizably a Ross Petty production even without Petty on stage, has many things going for it
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 02:04PMRobert Cushman: Three narrative streams flow through the play, feeding into one another
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 04:54PMRobert Cushman: All these characters, plus the subsidiary ones that all the actors take on, add to a mosaic of people coming together and recoiling from differences
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 01:42PMRobert Cushman: I have been visiting New York for 50 years, and have never fallen out of love with it. Right now, I love it more than ever
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 07:18PMRobert Cushman: This isn’t one of those American plays in which family members yell at one another while pulling skeletons out of cupboards
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 05:18PMRobert Cushman: As the plot proceeds and conflicts get underway, the dancing takes on real dramatic power
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 08:36PMRobert Cushman: The accomplished actor and playwright presents Acquiesce, the opening production in Factory Theatre’s season of plays by authors of colour
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 05:48PMRobert Cushman: They execute their maneuvers with charmingly casual grace, and some of the feats are breathtaking. They put the audience in a pleasurable trance
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 05:48PMRobert Cushman: It closely resembles Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, which moved steadily back in time to explain, or at least illuminate, its initial situation
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 04:06PMRobert Cushman: Tomson Highway returns with a more modest work, a show whose principal revelation is that he is a first-rate piano player
SOURCE: news.nationalpost.com at 06:04PM
