REVIEW: “Jekyll and Hyde” at C-R Productions

Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, March 2007 C-R Productions has mounted another rip-snorting musical at the Cohoes Music Hall, this time Frank Wildhorn’s Jekyll and Hyde, a huge hunk of faux-Victorian balderdash if there ever was one, but in this fast-paced and engaging presentation directed by Jim Charles the foolishness is overshadowed…

REVIEW: “Tintypes” at the Ghent Playhouse

Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, March 2007 Tintypes is a pleasant little revue of music from the turn of the 20th century. If you have only a passing knowledge of those fascinating decades of American history between the Civil War and World War I, this show will strike you as a…

REVIEW: The Theatre Company at Hubbard Hall Presents “The Miser”

Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, March 2007 Director Kevin McGuire writes in his Director’s Notes that he found working on this production of Molière’s 1668 comedy The Miser to be the “perfect antidote to winter.” Indeed, in this hibernal season, which has made up for in ferocity what it lacked in timing,…

REVIEW: “Baby with the Bathwater” at Mill City Productions

Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, March 2007 Something has gone horribly wrong with the Mill City Productions staging of Christopher Durang’s 1983 dark comedy Baby With The Bathwater. It’s not funny, and when a show this dark fails to provoke laughter it instead provokes gasps of horror, because there technically is nothing…

REVIEW: “Fully Committed” at Barrington Stage Company

by Gail M. Burns, February 2007 Barrington Stage is serving up the perfect theatrical diversion for these cold and dreary February days – an hilarious and well-done staging of Becky Mode’s Fully Committed â€“ a one-man show about a hopelessly harried reservations clerk at an impossibly chic Manhattan restaurant. Mode is credited…

REVIEW: “Chicago” at C-R Productions

“Ah, fame, fame, thou glittering bauble…” – Sir James M. Barrie When I last reviewed a production of Chicago at the Theater Barn in 2003, America had Chicago fever. The 1996 Broadway revival was running (it still is!) and the Academy Award-winning film was about to be released on DVD. But the fever has…

REVIEW: “Ordeal by Innocence” at the New York State Theatre Institute

Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, February 2007 “Nothing is ever settled until it is settled right.” – Rudyard Kipling The New York State Theatre Institute kicks off 2007 by giving Agatha Christie fans exactly what they have been longing for – the world premiere of a literate new stage adaptation…