Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, October 2005 The Smell of the Kill by Michele Lowe is a weird, funny, disturbing little play of which I am inordinately fond. It is also a tricky one to write about since it is so short and since surprise is a key element in an…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, October 2005 Usually, I am fairly well in tune with the collective unconscious, but I fail to understand why for millennia humankind has seen the need to call up images of death and terror at the same time of year that the days are getting…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, October 2005 I spent a great deal of time the past week grumbling about murder mystery plays. I am not much of a mystery fan, and I will never understand the American value system that categorizes murder as “wholesome entertainment”, but I find mysteries in…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, September 2005 Shirley Valentine Bradshaw, age 46, is a chatty soul. She talks to walls and rocks and mostly to you, the audience member, who happen to be privy to her innermost thoughts in this one-woman play by Willy Russell. In the course of two…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, September 2005 Despite everyone’s best efforts and intentions (and no one except Bialystock and Bloom get up one morning determined to stage a stinker) some shows work and some shows don’t. Back in September of 1999 the Theater Barn gave us an absolutely perfect and…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, September 2005 After closing their 2004-2005 season with a blockbuster musical directed and choreographed by Tralen Doler, and so it seemed a sensible thing to open the 2005-2006 season with the same. I predict that this one will be as big a hit as the…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, September 2005 “The springboard for my work is an image — a theatrical image — that can give birth to an entire play. For Tongue of a Bird, the image was of a woman in a 1920’s flight suit — leather jacket, helmet, goggles — hanging…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August 2005 When the six bathrobe-clad leading men of the Theater Barn’s production of The Full Monty came out to take their curtain call, the audience as a body leapt to their feet cheering. Not this business where one or two people stand and then a couple…
