Director John Murphy’s Much Ado About Nothing is stylish—but there’s more to the script than that.
Let’s be clear: Much Ado About Nothing is about something. Director John Murphy’s production accesses the play’s depths, but only intermittently. Too often, it gets distracted by its own inventive surfaces. [Read more…]
The Arts Club is living off the avails of puppet sex. In the best scene in Hand to God, which is currently playing at the BMO Theatre Centre, two puppets go at it like they’ve just discovered Sesame Street’scopy of the Kama Sutra. And Avenue Q, which the Arts Club first produced in 2013 and then remounted—so to speak—in 2014—also featured some wild, albeit genital-free, intercourse.
For the record: I am all for puppet sex. I support puppets’ rights to self-expression. And I like Hand to God, although I’m not nearly as blown away by it as others seem to be.
Playwright Robert Askins grew up in a well-off, religiously conservative town in Texas, where his mother led an after-school puppet ministry in the basement of a local church. (In terms of source material, some playwrights get all the breaks.) [Read more…]
