428 stories by "Robert Cushman"
Last weekend I caught the final performance of the Shaw Festival's When the Rain Stops Falling, directed by Peter Hinton, and enjoyed it even more than I had on the first night. This Austral…
It isn't really accurate to say that The Tale of a Town happens at Theatre Passe Muraille. Taking its name literally, and perhaps reverting to its roots, TPM is here the embarkation point fo…
Soulpepper's production of Arthur Miller's The Price received a standing ovation on its first night. These days that isn't such a rarity, anywhere you go. But the cheers and claps on this oc…
Once upon a time there were two brothers and their washed-up father. Or, in the corpus of Arthur Miller's plays, once upon several times. The Price, first staged in New York in 1968 and now …
The year is 2039, and in Alice Springs, Australia, a dead fish falls from the sky. This is even odder than it might seem, because the man at whose feet it falls, whose name is Gabriel York, …
Judith Thompson's White Biting Dog begins with a depressed and divorced 31-year-old lawyer, who goes by the name of Cape Race, preparing to kill himself by jumping off the Bloor Street Viadu…
Frank Sinatra never sang the words “come fly away.” He did of course sing the words “come fly with me,” at the beginning of the song of that name, closely followed by…
When Trey Anthony's 'da Kink in My Hair was seen at the Princess of Wales Theatre six years ago it had a few musical numbers, and I wished that there might be more. I should have been more c…
Eugène Ionesco's Exit the King is a play that seems, provokingly, to have set out to be a masterpiece. Even more provokingly, it succeeds. Ionesco, the supposed maestro of the Theatre of th…
In 1958 the British theatre critic Irving Wardle, later to become the revered reviewer for The Times, wrote an essay entitled “Comedy of Menace,” in which he identified a group o…
Hannah Moscovitch's Little One (Summerworks, Theatre Passe Muraille) is about growing up with a sociopath. There's Claire, who as a sexually damaged four-year-old was rescued by an Ottawa co…
The two characters in Topdog/Underdog, a prizewinning American play by Suzan-Lori Parks, are brothers, black, whose father named them Lincoln and Booth. This, according to Lincoln, was daddy…
Maria Severa Onofriana sang the blues, in Portuguese. More exactly, she was an early exponent " some say the inventor " of the guitar-based form known as fado. She was born in Lisbon in 1820…
Tickets to shows at Toronto's Summerworks Festival, previously $10 apiece, will this year cost $15. That doesn't sound like much, but if you want to take full advantage of a festival contain…
The Canopy Theatre Company's Lysistrata " The Sex Strike (their subtitle) is the most satisfying production of an Aristophanes play I have ever seen. That isn't quite the sweeping statement …
The musical Next to Normal goes irretrievably down the tubes at the moment, early in Act One, when one of its characters, already a driving force in the action, is revealed to have been dead…
This is Ted Dykstra's time. He is the director of all three of the plays in Soulpepper's current repertoire: the superb Glass Menagerie, the perennially successful Billy Bishop Goes to War, …
Back in the 1960s, there was a gently rocking musical based on Twelfth Night entitled Your Own Thing, which is a pretty fair translation of the original play's subtitle What You Will. More r…
There are 24 named characters in the standard texts of Titus Andronicus, and by the end of the play 14 of them are either dead or under sentence of same. Two of the deceased have, while aliv…
"I like to quote fictional characters," says Carrie Fisher, after citing Sherlock Holmes on the amount of information it's possible for one person to hold in his head "because I'm something …
John Mighton's The Little Years may well be the best new play ever presented at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. If, that is, it truly counts as new, as it's actually a revised version of…
The two newest productions at the Shaw Festival are both of British plays about failed social experiments. In George Bernard Shaw's On the Rocks, a prime minister tries to ram through what h…
The central character of George Bernard Shaw's On the Rocks (1933) is Sir Arthur Chavender, the Liberal head of a British coalition government. Outside 10 Downing Street " and, we gather, th…
Ontario theatre is throwing Tennessee Williams a great 100th birthday party. On the heels of the Shaw Festival's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, wonderful for its sustained firepower, Soulpepper give…
The man has warmth, charm and bags of talent. But there's still something very forced and insubstantial about Hugh Jackman in Concert. It starts " well, actually it starts with the audience …
