Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, March 2008 “Hear the beat of dancing feet…” – Al Dubin The joint is literally jumping in Cohoes as Tralen Doler filled has once again filled the Music Hall with a big, exuberant dance extravaganza, this time a tap-happy staging of 42nd Street. I could literally…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, March 2008 [The British public] just stared [at Anton Chekhov’s plays] and said, ‘How Russian!’ They did not strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen’s intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, March 2008 Back in 2003, I opened my review of the one-man show Fully Committed at the Theater Barn with the following paragraph: Watching an actor perform a one-person show is like watching an athlete, let’s say Lance Armstrong competing in the Tour de France. Can he…
by Gail M. Burns, February 2008 When Julianne Boyd announced in December that Barrington Stage would be presenting Trumbo in February, I had a “wait, wait, don’t tell me” moment. “What’s a Trumbo?” my date for the evening whispered. Dalton Trumbo. I knew that name, but why? “He was a writer…I think.”…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, February 2008 A one-woman musical about the “joys” of pregnancy written by two men?? This I had to see. And I’m rather glad I did. For two people who have never been and will never be pregnant Carl Ritchie (book and lyrics) and Stephen Woodjetts…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, February 2008 Come, thick night,And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hellThat my keen knife see not the wound it makesNor heaven peep through the blanket of the darkTo cry, ‘Hold, hold!’– Lady Macbeth, Act I, scene v That blanket of dark enveloped Elizabeth…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, January 2008 This is the best production of La Cage Aux Folles in the world. Well, okay, somewhere on this planet there is probably a production with snazzier sets. But there is not a better over-all production anywhere anyhow because only the production at the Cohoes Music…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, January 2008 “All the reviews are reactionary and more or less hostile.”– Victor-Marie Hugo, speaking of the critical reaction to his novel Les Misérables For a variety of reasons professional critics generally do not review youth theatre productions, possibly following Hugo’s thinking that critics are basically…
