One look at the cover and at the glowing advance reviews, and I knew I needed to read Pat Murphy’s latest book. The premise – that Sherlock Holmes is hired to investigate when the three children of George and Mary Darling vanish from their London home overnight – is just that irresistible.
When the high-powered rock musical numbers are the strongest elements of your show, you don’t usually have a problem…unless the show isn’t actually a musical.
The advance descriptions of Off the Rails stress three points: the author is Native American, the script loosely adapts Shakespeare’s often-criticized “problem” play, Measure for Measure, and the story’s major concern involves boarding schools that Native American children were forced to attend...
It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with this iteration of Beauty and the Beast…it’s simply that there isn’t enough right.
Even with a (first-rate) understudy playing Falstaff, this Henry IV Part I may be the single most purely watchable history play I’ve seen in Ashland. And that takes in a lot of territory.
The annual pilgrimage to Ashland began this year with an epic production (3 hours 20 minutes, just as promised in the playbill) of The Odyssey, adapted from the Robert Fitzgerald translation by director Mary Zimmerman. I can’t comment just now on...
Herewith a quick take on my two most recent summer-movie visits: Wonder Woman is very, very good — and manages to be so by mostly being a World War I movie rather than a superhero movie. I am, of course,...
Winter’s Tale has always been one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I look at its peculiar structure as a challenge rather than an obstacle, and when it’s well-executed, the finale involving Hermione’s “statue” strikes me as one of the most...
Ninety-nine percent of this year’s production of Twelfth Night at OSF is sheer genius. The set design for its nominal 1930s Hollywood transposition is clever in all the right ways, nearly all the performances are exceptional, and the comic swordfight...
If you are a Gilbert & Sullivan purist, you may want to steer clear of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s current incarnation of Yeomen of the Guard — it is, I’m advised by the G&S purists in our tour group, a...
