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Written by Catherine Kustanczy
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 20:58 |
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Stratford Review - Bartholomew Fair
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Bartholomew Fair is a sprawling work with a multitude of characters, situations, and scenes that defy accurate description. Firmly tied to its London roots, this 1614 play by Ben Jonson isn’t the strongest display of the power of community, nor does it hold the appeal of Jonson’s more widely-produced work Volpone. So why did the Stratford Shakespeare Festival decide to stage it? In the words of its director (and Festival co-director) Antoni Cimolino, the work is “a very warm and deliciously funny argument for tolerance.” But it plays much more like an extended Jacobean sitcom, with multiple plots, a myriad of characters, and the kind of bawdy, puerile humour that relies on fat suits and fart jokes for laughs.
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Written by Catherine Kustanczy
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 18:32 |
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Stratford Review - The Trespassers
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It’s late August, and the signs are everywhere: peach pie, peach cobbler, peach chutney, peach salsa. Peaches are at their luscious, sweet, seasonal best right now. Perhaps it’s fitting then that the Stratford Shakespeare festival has recently opened a work in which the favoured fruit figures so prominently. Morris Panych’s The Trespassers features a litany of peaches scattered across its mental and emotional territory. Though it’s a challenging piece of work, it’s also easily the best show on at the Stratford Festival this year.
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Written by John Gould
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 18:24 |
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Stratford Festival - West Side Story
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Playing to capacity audiences, Broadway’s now classic 1957 musical is proving to be a hit for the 2009 season at Stratford’s Festival Theatre. The production staff has ably navigated through the minefield that a project like West Side Story presents: complicated dance sequences, memorable and sophisticated musical numbers that create audience expectations as to how they should sound; a dark plot based on the Shakespearean tragedy Romeo and Juliet transported to New York City in the mid-1950s; the temptation to morph the Jets into a version of “The Fonz” in television’s Happy Days; and the use of a stage which is configured differently from the one for which the play was originally written.
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Written by Catherine Kustanczy
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 18:08 |
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Stratford Review - Julius Caesar
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The imperious head of Julius Caesar looks out over the audience of the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, as they assemble to watch Shakespeare’s play named after him. It isn’t the real Caesar’s head, of course, but a bust of it –a likeness representing the man –but the same metaphor could be said of James MacDonald’s curiously bloodless tale of a bloody deed: the murder of the commander-in-chief for the ostensible greater good.
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Written by John Gould
Tuesday, 15 September 2009 15:56 |
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Shaw Review - In Good King Charles’ Golden Days
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Shaw’s 1938 talky parlour drama is based on the what-if possibility that King Charles II (a loose liver who uses his proclivities to mask his political quest to do the right thing), Isaac Newton (philosopher scientist), George Fox (the rather mad founder of the Society of Friends), The Duke of York (the military man who later became James II), Godfrey Kneller (Royal painter) and Charles’ assorted mistresses discussed the issues of their day in religion, science, power and politics.
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