by Colin Thomas | Jul 15, 2025 | Review
The play is slight. Director Dean Paul Gibson’s production is inconsistent. And young actor Jacob Leonard is a star. If The Two Gentlemen of Verona hadn’t been written by Shakespeare, I can’t imagine it would still be getting produced today. In the simple and...
by Colin Thomas | Jul 15, 2025 | Review
Playwright Jessica B. Hill’s The Dark Lady kept me listening for the most part, but I was never fully or consistently engaged. The Dark Lady imagines a relationship between William Shakespeare and Emilia Bassano, the first woman in England to claim the status of...
by Colin Thomas | Jul 8, 2025 | Review
This Bard on the Beach production of Much Ado About Nothing explains ideas that don’t need explaining and misses ideas that should be obvious. The script is about the cruelty of patriarchal gender dynamics. In the central story, Beatrice and Benedick, who are...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 10, 2024 | Review
I returned to Bard on the Beach’s Hamlet to see Chirag Naik in the title role. (In a scheduled change, he has taken over from Nadeem Phillip Umar Khitab.) The news isn’t good. Naik overacts, and that exacerbates an underlying problem with director Stephen Drover’s...
by Colin Thomas | Aug 10, 2024 | Review
This production is so much better than it was when I saw it on its second night way back in June — and that’s a triumph for the actors. I returned to this show primarily because I wanted to see Camille Legg’s Viola. Just before Twelfth Night opened at Bard on the...
