by Gail M. Burns In 1983 successful singer/songwriter Rupert Holmes concocted a plan to make a musical out of Charles Dickens’ unfinished final work The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He had the extraordinary opportunity to present this concept to Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public…
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, March 2009 My invitation to my companion at Seascape read as follows: “Would you like to come with me to Hubbard Hall on Friday night to see Doug Ryan play a giant lizard?” This is how you can tell your real friends from the phonies. The ones…
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, May 2008 “And the world will be better for thisThat one man, scorned and covered with scarsStill strove with his last ounce of courageTo reach the unreachable star” – Joe Darion Lord, how I loved the Original Broadway Cast album of Man of La Mancha. I…
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, November 2007 Say what you want about the overemphasis on outward appearance in today’s culture, as animals who walk upright and have forward facing eyes human beings naturally rely on sight as a primary means of identifying each other and communicating. When we see something…
