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 David Auburn’s Proof burst on the national consciousness nearly twenty years ago – winning Tonys and a Pulitzer and being made into a big budget, star-studded film – so the initial flurry of professional and amateur productions across the country has run its course and the…
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, 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, 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…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, June 2008 On Friday night and Saturday afternoon I saw two romantic comedies, written about 70 years apart. Guess which one is considered a classic. We open on an upper-middle class British couple, married a good dozen years, parents of two children. Enter another man:A)…
