Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, June 2009 Every year I concoct a marathon Saturday of theatre in Lenox. This enables me to see the two halves of Shakespeare & Company’s free offering on the tented Rose Footprint stage, the one-woman show across the street at Ventfort Hall, and something else…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2008 I confess that I don’t quite understand the current kiddy mania for all things piratical. But be that as it may, right now everyone loves pirates and so Shakespeare and Company is cashing in on the craze with their first-ever original free family…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, June 2008 The morning after I saw Tina Packer’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well, I was sorting through my press kit and complaining to my younger son. The show was too long, my rear end fell asleep, the script is lousy, Packer had inserted…
Reviewed by Deborah E. Burns, October 2007 Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Phileas Fogg and his servant Passepartout; various kings and their fools: literature abounds with odd couples. Their oppositeness clarifies their differences, often in broad comic strokes, defining the visionary, head-in-the-clouds aristocrat against the loyal, practical, feet-on-the-ground servant. In…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August 2007 “War is a scienceWith rules to be appliedWhich good soldiers appreciateRecall and recapitulateBefore they go to decimateThe other side.”– Stephen Schwartz Last summer as I was driving around to many theatres, I listened to tapes of a BCC radio adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, June, 2007 “I never knew before how rotten a fellow could be outside his regular business…Every man is a foolishness when he’s out of his right place.” – Edgar Smith Writers, even great writers, have styles and forms at which they excel and others in…
by Gail M. Burns, AUGUST, 2005. “John, John, bad King John,Shamed the throne that he sat on…” Thus begins a poem by Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon that was my childhood introduction to this monarch. The illustration that accompanied it showed John, knees akimbo, posed as if ready to flee the…
