Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2005 Now celebrating its 17th season, Park Playhouse presents one big musical every summer outdoors on a large stage erected at the Lake House in Washington Park in Albany. This year it is a cheerful production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pulitzer prize-winning 1949 show South…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2005 Songs for a New World is basically a semi-staged concert of songs by Jason Robert Brown, an up-and-coming young composer and lyricist. In the decade since its brief 28 performance premiere at the WPA theatre in New York, the show has had over 300…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2005 The Theater Barn is billing this evening of mysteries as containing only two plays, which, technically it does, but a total of four separate pieces are presented in the course of a brief ninety minutes (I’ve sat through many first acts that run…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2005 I really don’t understand why this is such a dismal production of Swingtime Canteen. This is the kind of small, funny revue that the Theater Barn usually does very well. Director Peggy Ayn Maas has a long history with this show – she is…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 2005 Now that I have sufficiently recovered from my rant about the poor design of the Main Stage Theatre in the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance in which the Williamstown Theatre Festival is presenting Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan I can turn my attentions to reviewing the…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2005 Seeing the well received and lively opening night performance of Bye Bye Broadway at North Pointe last night took me back a quarter century or so to the summers when I used to write and direct my own original musicals. There is nothing so exciting,…
Posted July 11, 2005 “We cannot read or hear if we are bored and hostile and confused.” – Mary Caroline Richards I am not sure that I can actually tell you that I saw Lady Windermere’s Fan at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. I was in the same room where the show was being…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2005 I had been looking forward to seeing this production of The Importance of Being Earnest for months, and so I was puzzled that I left the theatre feeling empty and unfulfilled. Certainly Barrington Stage has mounted a beautiful and professional production cast with attractive and…
