Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August, 1999 Five minutes into the performance of “Lives of the Saints” I was holding my head in my hands. I knew that, even if the rest of the show was much, much better (and it wasn’t), nothing was going to erase the memory of…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August, 1999 This summer is just deja vue all over again. First the parallels between “Glimmer Brothers” (WTF-Nikos) and “Shoot the Piano Player” (BTF-Unicorn); and now the parallels between “November” (Oldcastle) and “The Batting Cage” (BTF-MainStage). In the case of the latter two shows both playwrights started with the premise of…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 1999 Here you have playwright Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane”) adapting Herman Melville (“Moby Dick”) for the stage by way of William Shakespeare (“King Lear”). The results are everything you would expect – intense, brilliant, filled with human angst. The one thing “Moby Dick –…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 1999 It is a dangerous proposition when the author, the director and the producer of a play are one and the same person. Richard Corley, who wears all those hats in the BTF Unicorn production of “Shoot The Piano Player” undoubtedly really loves the…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, June, 1999 This sounds like a really good idea. Get seven award-winning modern playwrights to each write a play based on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and stage them all in one evening. Shakespeare is the man of the hour, and how can you go wrong…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, June, 1999 You have got to go and see the set for this show, and that means that you have got to go and see the show because the set itself, just sitting there, is nothing. You have got to go and see it in…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August, 1998 This is the funniest tragedy I have ever seen. I laughed till I cried, and never harder than when the main character fell head first into his chateau briand, dead as a doornail. The BTF press kit calls “An Empty Plate at the…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, August, 1998 Charles Ludlam (1943-1987) was one of the leading players of the off-off- Broadway avant-garde theatre scene in New York City for over twenty years. Between the time he founded his Ridiculous Theatre Company in 1967 until his death due to complications from AIDS…
