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"Performance Reviews"
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe’s new indoor space, is really as small as all the reviews say. I thought the critics were exaggerating, but no: it’s tiny, a mere 40 by 55 feet. To be fair, that makes it no smaller than many a blackbox theatre, so it may be a little surprising to […]
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I saw the original production of London Road at the Cottesloe in 2011, was blown away by it then, and wrote about the show in the early days of this blog. It remains one of my favourite pieces of musical theatre ever (although that, admittedly, is a very short list). When CanStage announced […]
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So, Mark Rylance.
It may be a bit contrary of me to say that Rylance is the single most remarkable — really, the only remarkable — thing about the current Broadway productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III. Both shows, and particularly the comedy, have after all been hailed by US critics as virtually unprecedented […]
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Three of the shows I saw in New York had something in common: all were remarkable and memorable although none of them took an especially interesting, inventive, innovative, least of all radical approach. Like Julie Taymor’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, all these productions refrained from adopting much of a discernible position vis-a-vis the text they were […]
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Visually, this is a stunning production. The Polonsky Shakespeare Center, opened this season, is a remarkable space — a broad and deep thrust four stories high, configurable with all sorts of trap doors and hydraulic elements, and Julie Taymor, unsurprisingly, makes highly effective and imaginative use of all these features. The central element in the […]
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A fairly hasty post, but if I don’t write it now, I won’t have time to write it at all, and I’d like to write it.
This morning, Michael Wheeler published an interesting piece on “Storytelling in the the Present” on spiderwebshow.ca, in which he reflects on a number of recent shows in […]
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First things first: Red One Theatre’s production of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie, directed by David Ferry, is pretty great. It’s gritty, intense theatre, unafraid and raw, and uncommonly willing to take risks. I don’t recall seeing a show in Toronto before quite so happy to just let its figures exist — let them move […]
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It begins with an empty, black stage. Well, almost empty. There’s a huge box fan stage left, backlit with a spot. A single figure in a shabby black suit appears, with a microphone. And then, the storm. The besuited actor whistles like a breeze, howls like the wind, roars like crashing waves. The fan starts […]
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.
