The church scene in Much Ado About Nothing is one of the most notorious booby traps in Shakespeare, the point at which two major plot lines collide
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 01:00PMThe Matchmaker, at the Stratford Festival, is the richest and funniest production of a farce that I’ve ever seen in a Canadian theatre.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 04:45PMThe most wonderful thing about Antoni Cimolino’s production of Cymbeline, encompassing all the others, is that it takes the play as it comes.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 01:17PMIt may be hard to claim Ragtime as the great Canadian musical. It’s an adaptation of an American novel, with an American composer, lyricist and librettist
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 01:00PMThe program tells us that the 50-year delay in moving 42nd Street from screen to stage “isn’t so mysterious.” It isn’t mysterious at all; in 1980 people weren’t doing that kind of …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 05:47PMThere are three women, no men, on stage at the start of A Man and Some Women.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 04:30PMRobert Cushman: In High, Kathleen Turner commands the stage with square shoulders and a hoarse but powerful voice suggestive of a heavy cold
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:30AMCompetitive cheerleading is not the deepest of dramatic subjects, and Bring It On is not the deepest of shows.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 05:00PMI like The Real World? better than any other Michel Tremblay play I have seen. It dates back to 1988, and it concerns a playwright who has written a play about his own family
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 01:00PMAs dysfunctional families go, the one in You Can’t Take It with You is remarkably functional.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 05:42PMSometimes there can be truth in advertising. The Exquisite Hour does run for an hour, or something just over, and it is exquisite, or something just under. “Exquisite” is pitching it a b…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 10:45AMRobert Cushman: There’s an extraordinary scene in the second act of Oil and Water — extraordinary in a good way
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:30AMThe program for Prisoner of Tehran carries the subtitle A True Story. That phrase sums up the play’s claim to serious attention. The things it presents really happened. It also sums up wha…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:00PMThe first act of Clybourne Park takes place in an American suburban house of the 1950s, and it plays initially like a typical domestic comedy of that era. There’s Russ, the householder, de…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 05:17PMOf the seven surviving tragedies of Sophocles, two deal with the Trojan War: Ajax, one of his earliest plays, and Philoctetes, one of his last. Both are newly pertinent today.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 03:34PMOne of the cleverest bits in Live Wrong and Prosper, the latest Second City revue, depicts childbirth as a long-range spectator sport. There’s the father-about-to-be, tweeting each second …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:30AMTennessee Williams’ Vieux Carre is one of his late plays, worked on over many years and first staged in 1977. It harks back both to the New Orleans setting of A Streetcar Named Desire and …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 10:00AMAnosh Irani’s play is not in fact pretentious. Rather it’s unpretentious to a fault, or way beyond.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:43AMAs one of the few people in the world who never saw the movies, I am in no position to pronounce on how faithful Shrek the Musical is to its source. I have gathered that the first film was g…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:00AMThree shocks have hit the Canadian theatre recently. There was the closure of the Vancouver Playhouse; the announcement that the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize will be awarded for the last time;…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 06:00PMI haven’t been a great fan of Carole Fréchette’s plays; they’ve seemed to me like tiny surfaces, obsessively polished. Her latest is small too, at least physically — its very title …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 10:30AMOn Sunday it was announced that Antoni Cimolino will be the next artistic director of the Stratford Festival. This was not a surprise. What was surprising, or at least unexpected, is that hi…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 06:00PMRose Cullis’s play is called The Happy Woman, and taking into account the expected doses of irony, the decor is very appropriate. It’s also very stylish, which befits a script that’s a…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:30AMThe source play is a hot brew of physical and territorial lusts, the latter trenchantly summarized in the clinching line quoted up top. This version stirs in a new element.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:58PM"If you didn’t make allowances in this family, you’d go nuts.” Those words, spoken by James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, could probably apply in …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 05:00PMThe transforming moment in War Horse — transforming in every sense — comes about 20 minutes in. Joey, the title horse, changes before our eyes from foal to full-grown stallion.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 04:13PMThe documentary play Seeds centres on the 2004 patent infringement case of Monsanto vs. Schmeiser. Monsanto, the bio-tech company, claimed that Percy Schmeiser, a Saskatchewan farmer, had in…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:30AMThe high life enjoyed, if that’s the word, by the four characters of Lee MacDougall’s play is a chemical one.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 06:50PMThe performers and producers of Potted Potter claim their show can be understood without any knowledge of the source material, and I can proclaim, from the full depths of my ignorance, that …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:30AMTime to order a double-double. The show called The Double is based on a Dostoevski novella of the same title, concerning one Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. Or rather two Yakov Petrovich Golyadki…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 10:30AMIn the Heights won the 2008 Tony for best Broadway musical and, unlike some other recipients, it deserved to. It also introduced a newish musical sound to Broadway and, again unlike some oth…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AM
