by Gail M. Burns Oldcastle Producing Artistic Director Eric Peterson has written a play about the ongoing local PFOA crisis. In case you don’t live locally, plants in North Bennington VT, Hoosick Falls, NY, and various other local towns used chemicals that leached PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic acid) into the soil and…
by Gail M. Burns The minute that Sarah Corey makes her entrance as Neil Simon’s indomitable matriarch, Kate Jerome, Oldcastle Theatre Company‘s production of Brighton Beach Memoirs you know who’s in charge here. This is Corey’s second Oldcastle turn as Kate, having played an older iteration in Broadway Bound in…
by Gail M. Burns “What do you see?” is both the opening line and the penultimate one in John Logan’s play, Red, now on the boards at Oldcastle Theatre. The difference between the fine arts – painting and sculpture – and the performing arts – theatre and dance – is…
Playwright John Logan’s Tony Award winning Best Play, “Red“, opens the season with master abstract expressionist Mark Rothko having just launched the biggest commission in the history of modern art, a series of murals for New York’s famed Four Seasons Restaurant. Rothko works feverishly with his young assistant,…
by Gail M. Burns Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, first published in serial form from 1854-1855, is Herman Melville’s only historical novel, based on the 1824 pamphlet The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter by Henry Trumbull which Melville had acquired in the 1840’s. Melville disliked his…
What do history, silliness, Cole Porter, mathematical genius, comedy, George Washington, new works, Herman Melville, a Nobel Prize, mystery, a Pulitzer Prize, music, Ethan Allen, America’s greatest drama, the Civil War, Ben Franklin and the Tony Award for Best Play, all have in common? Each will be found in Oldcastle…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August 2008 We’ve all been there. You’ve planned a lovely dinner and, five minutes before your guests are to arrive, the soufflé falls and the roast burns. It’s too late to call things off, what are you going to do? Its time for Tuna Surprise!…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2008 Alan Ayckbourn is a very popular playwright. Oldcastle has an excellent track record of producing his works. Their 1997 production of his 1975 Bedroom Farce was the most successful production in the company’s 37 year history. Four of the original eight actors are back in…
