by Colin Thomas | Apr 12, 2024 | Review
Before we get into this, let me say off the top that, to accommodate my schedule, the company allowed me to attend Baskerville’s first and only preview performance. I’m very grateful for that. Things may tighten up as the run progresses. Okay, here we go. What the...
by Colin Thomas | Apr 6, 2024 | Review
A better play is trying to emerge here, but you’ll only know that if you stick around for Act 2. In Canadian-Iranian playwright Aki Yaghoubi’s debut script Parifam, the eponymous central character is an architect who’s building Iranian museums in major cities around...
by Colin Thomas | Apr 5, 2024 | Review
Director Ron Reed’s production of The Trip To Bountiful is consistently tender and nuanced. It’s a thing of beauty. I encourage you to see it. In Horton Foote’s script, which premiered in 1953, Mrs. Carrie Watts engineers an escape from the cramped apartment in...
by Colin Thomas | Apr 1, 2024 | Review
Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet is primarily concerned with two things: anti-Black racism and acting styles in the nineteenth century, when the play is set. These things overlap. Ira Aldridge, the hero of Chakrabarti’s story, is a historical figure, a Black...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 25, 2024 | Review
There is so much to love in this production — and it left me strangely unmoved. The 1998 musical Parade is based on the real-life story of Leo Frank, the Jewish supervisor of a pencil-making factory in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1913, he was accused of murdering Mary...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 23, 2024 | Review
Young playwrights often need — and deserve — more help than they get. In playwright Lee Nisar’s Dil Ka, a 26-year-old Pakistani-Canadian woman named Zahra is preparing biryani for a proposal meeting, which means that she’s about to feed a potential groom and his...
