Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, March 2007 I tried to explain American Soup to someone the other day and ended up saying, “Well, at the back of the stage Andy Warhol is in purgatory, on the front we watch 50 years in the lives of this Italian-American family who run a restaurant…
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 – a one-man show about a hopelessly harried reservations clerk at an impossibly chic Manhattan restaurant. Mode is credited…
“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…
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…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, January 2007 “You’re nothing without meWithout me you’re nothing at all”-David Zippel City of Angels The character who sings these lyrics is a writer, and he is singing them to his fictional creation. That the fictional creation sings back proves that this is the land…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December, 2006 People who know me will tell you that I am hardly Scrooge-like in my day-to-day life. But when it comes to the barrage of annual productions based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, I am inevitably the sour-faced person on the aisle muttering “Bah,…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December 2006 People often ask me: “Is it hard to review the same shows over and over again? What more is there to say about your twenty-third production of The Sound of Music?” The answer is simple: You never see the same show twice. I could…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December 2006 The great mystery of life can be summed up in the words Absence and Presence. I have been witness now to both birth and death, and I can tell you that the puzzler in both cases is where that life came from or went…
