by Roseann Cane Written as a soul soother for his beloved England, which was recovering from The Blitz and devastated by the continuing casualties of World War II, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit was a rip-roaring success. From its first performance on London’s West End in 1941 (where it ran for a record-breaking 1,997 performances), through…
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, March 2009 The nicest part [of being in hiding] is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings, otherwise I’d absolutely suffocate.– Anne Frank, March 16, 1944 There is no other word but beautiful for NYSTI’s production of Yours, Anne, under the direction of Michael…
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, November 2008 The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ menGang aft agley,An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,For promis’d joy! – Robert Burns When Of Mice and Men was first published in 1937, it was termed a “novella” – a little novel – and it was,…
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, April 2008 Believe it or not, when I was a very little girl, I wanted to be a princess. Upon learning that Americans couldn’t be princesses (Shhhh! Don’t tell Walt Disney or Grace Kelly!) I switched to wanting to be a paleontologist and then a…
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…
