Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, April 2009 “Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around wondering about yourself.”– Katharine Hepburn “If you’re given a choice…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, February 2009 Surplus children (the words make me shudder). They have always been a fact of life. In the animal kingdom “surplus” young are produced each year – the ones who will be taken by predators or disease or accident – in order to ensure…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, October 2008 It is late afternoon on a swelteringly hot summer day in 1957. Twelve jurors – four women and eight men – file in to the Jury Room of a New York City court house to decide the fate of a young man accused…
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, December 2007 “Is this what Christmas has degenerated into, Doctor? It’s pure commercialism. Is there no true Christmas spirit left in the world?” Maybe I am turning into a real Grinch in my old age, but the NYSTI production of Miracle on 34th Street left me absolutely…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, October 2007 Alas, poor Mortimer Brewster (Jason Marr). A recalcitrant theatre critic for a major New York newspaper, on the very night he has to go and review “Murder Will Out” he “outs” several murderers in his own extended family. Of course, as Mortimer says,…
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…
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…
