Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, October 2006 Ragtime is an amazing musical. You may never have heard of it or may have glanced at the title and dismissed it as one more revue-sical of historic music, but trust me, it is one of the great musicals of the 20th century and…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, May 2005 Wowie-wow-wow! Whadda show! All singing, all dancing. Everyone and everything in the Cohoes Music Hall production of Anything Goes looks and sounds just great. This current retooling of the 1934 Cole Porter opus, which I am assuming is the 1987 Broadway version with a revised…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August, 2003 Like millions of young girls, Frances Hodgson Burnett was one of my favorite authors when I was growing up. I confess that I vastly preferred the plucky Sara Crewe of A Little Princess (1905) to the sour Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden (1911) but in my adult years…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 2003 The Mac-Haydn is offering up a cheerful, likeable, and oddly uneven production of Hello Dolly! Basically, the leading ladies are great and the leading men are miscast. Since this is a show about a woman, told very much from a woman’s point of view, things…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, May, 2003 My fourteen-year-old son Brandon was my date last Thursday for the opening of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Mac-Haydn. He is not under the same restrictions I am to keep professionally quiet and reserved throughout the show, and his comments were as…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August, 2002 A young woman is living alone with her aunt on a farm in the Oklahoma territory just before it achieved statehood in 1907. She is being sexually harassed and threatened by their farm hand, and the guilt and shame she feels because of…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 2002 I am about to launch in to a scintillating dissertation of the creative history of Crazy For You, so if you want to cut to the chase and find out whether or not the production currently running at the Mac-Haydn is any good, let…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 2002 The Spirit of ’76 is alive and well at the Mac-Haydn this week in this lively, well-staged production of the Tony award-winning musical play 1776 brimming with talent and excitement. Towards the end of the second act I actually found myself biting my nails and…
