428 stories by "Robert Cushman"
Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil is a novel with, effectively, two characters
Two plays have now opened in Toronto in rapid succession in which a character's stubbing a toe turns out to be a defining moment
Erin Shields' Soliciting Temptation is full of surprises. It unfolds in a series of narrative and character reversals. That makes it compelling. It doesn't make it believable
If you suspect the title Cock of having anatomical significance, your suspicions are justified. It also has metaphorical significance
Irishmen are possessed by an overwhelming passion to sing like their idols. So, at least, Irish drama would have us believe
Chekhov's The Seagull famously flopped at its first production, and though there seem to have been purely local and technical reasons for this, the fundamental cause was that neither actors …
Musically, this is the strongest Second City show I remember, running to a duet for a hit-man (the straight-arrow Thompson) and his neglected wife, sung through Andrew Lloyd Webber style, lu…
Lungs, a 2012 British play by Duncan Macmillan, is a terrific evening
It's all duologues at the Tarragon. In the Extra Space, there's the all-talking Lungs; on the main stage the all-singing, and sometimes-dancing, Marry Me a Little, which is a sort of Stephen…
The grandiose title The Two Worlds of Charlie F. conceals a fairly simple production. It's a drama-documentary that grew from a rehab-come-therapy project in the U.K. for veteran soldiers
Anita Majumdar's new piece Same Same But Different consists of two thematically linked one-act plays, which may be a sly reason for that perplexing title. It also makes for a long evening
The plays are Twelfth Night and Richard III, and the productions have been imported from Shakespeare's Globe in London.
Albert Schultz, director of Idiot's Delight, has described this 1936 American play as The Time of Your Life meets You Can't Take It with You. To me it feels more like the meeting of The Time…
Inherently and inescapably, theatre is artificial, and never more so than when it tries its hardest to be real. These paradoxes are exhibited, explored and exalted in London Road, a fascinat…
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…
Here, 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)
There are five musicals contained within The Musical of Musicals: The Musical!, and they all have the same plot
It 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 the a…
A device that may work in a novel can seem like a thin literary conceit when transferred to the stage
There'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
There's a party going on when you enter the theatre to see Once, and it's irresistible
One 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
I'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 them …
This Aladdin turns out to be the best ever stage version of a movie
Among 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 …
