Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, May 2009 What is love, tis not hereafter, Present mirth, hath present laughter: What’s to come, is still unsure. In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me sweet and twenty: Youth’s a stuff will not endure – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act ii, scene…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, November 2008 Once I went to a ridiculously trendy restaurant and saw on the menu an exotic dish made with all the foods I like best in the world. I ordered it and discovered that when you put all the foods I like best in…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August 2008 Let me state right up front that I know NOTHING about opera. While they have the same roots and opera is very theatrical, it is not theatre. There are big differences between what we now call opera and what Variety calls “Legit” theatre.…
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, August 2007 What a difference a director makes! Last summer Shakespeare & Company produced this same modern adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th century comedy The Servant of Two Masters by Jeffrey Hatcher and Paolo Emilio Landi under Dan McCleary’s direction and I hailed it as the funniest…
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,…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, November, 2003 Director Derek Campbell has taken a positively Wodehouseian approach to Oscar Wilde’s last play, and it works very well. Campbell has preserved the formality and stiffness of late Victorian Britain that Wilde so deftly lampoons, while moving the wordy dialogue along at a…
