Seeing Through Hypocrisy
/Elfriede Jelinek’s Charges is a response to the European refugee crisis, but can fiction address reality by stripping it of all its details?
Read MoreBook Review: Hamlet Globe to Globe
/A terrific new book tells the story of what happens when a hardy company takes the world's most famous play to every country on Earth.
Read MoreShow Queens
/Two new books - a biography of one of Broadway's brightest stars and a memoir from one of its lesser lights - bring the world of American stage and screen vividly to life.
Read MoreTurning Points: Jane Avril in Paris
/For the woman who became dancer Jane Avril, life was transformed when she realized that what had been called mental illness she could claim for herself as art.
Read MoreBook Review: Shakespeare and the Countess
/The 1596 battle over Blackfriars Theatre was waged by a strong-willed Puritan woman who had a habit of picking fights, including with the Queen; a terrific new book tells the story at length for the first time
Read MoreBook Review: Theatre of the Unimpressed
/A wunderkind of the Canadian theater world writes an impassioned manifesto about everything that's wrong with the theater world - with better results than you'd expect
Read MoreProtean Things
/Hilary Mantel's best-selling Tudor novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have made their way to the stage on the expert handling of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Zach Rabiroff had front row center.
Read MoreRealism and Russia’s Fate
/The star translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (aided this time by Richard Nelson) translate Turgenev's A Month in the Country, with predictably disruptive results. Jack Hanson reviews.
Read More#NotAllNazis
/What would you do if your artistic survival suddenly depended on the whims of a brutal dictatorship? How far would you compromise? How much would you risk? A new book studies artists in the Third Reich.
Read MoreEternal Blazon
/Led on by a "shared obsession," a philosopher and a psycyhoanalyst have teamed up to offer their interpretation of Hamlet. With the ghosts of countless critics looming before them, how has this pair fared?
Read MoreBeing Jonathan Harker: recollections of The Dead English
/Not every actor gets the plum role of vampire hunter and romantic lead Jonathan Harker. Steve Brachmann reflects on his part in the Dracula-inspired rock musical The Dead English
Read MoreFate’s Engine
/Commissioned to translate Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Anthony Burgess decided on a few changes to the text. What were they, and what do they teach us about fate?
Read MoreAs Dark Locks In: Nightfall
/CBC's landmark scare series is available online at last. Where did such a strange series come from and where has it been all this time?
Read MoreThose Feet
/This summer's London Olympics take us back to 1981's Chariots of Fire, the 1924 Olympics, and the poetry of William Blake. The connection? All remind us of the fragility of glory and our endless wish to make the past present.
Read MoreBetween the Devil and Aunt Edna
/His own life was the great tragedy he was never quite able to write. Michael Adams assesses the career of playwright Terence Rattigan.
Read MorePros Take On the Cons
/A con man, an ambitious office boy, and two Mormons--it sounds like the set-up to a punch line. But is the joke on Broadway? Our theater critic examines the "why" of musicals, the limits of Harry Potter, and the perfidy of Canada.
Read MoreThe Greatness that was Downton
/Julian Fellowes' "Downton Abbey" was shot in a castle, but it may have a nearer relationship to "Mad Men" than "Brideshead Revisited." Joanna Scutts tracks the evolution of the British costume drama.
Read MoreThe Tao of Steve
/For their wit and challenge, Stephen Sondheim's lyrics have virtually come to symbolize our modern musical theater. A new collection gathers the lyrics to all those maddening, memorable songs, and adds to them with Sondheim's own comments.
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