A Critical Lens on Canadian Arts.
About Galen Simmons
2025
Here For Now Theatre review: Ruby and the Reindeer is a fun, heartfelt and local holiday story
Antoni Cimolino looks ahead to his final season as artistic director of the Stratford Festival
Stratford Festival review: The Winter’s Tale mixes comedy and tragedy to perfection
Stratford Festival review: Annie wows with talented kids and a cast to back them up
Stratford Festival review: Anne of Green Gables brings the fandom on stage in hilarious production
Stratford Festival review: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels offers plenty of dirty rotten fun
2024
Stratford Festival review: Director-choreographer Donna Feore does it again with Something Rotten!
Stratford Festival review: Wendy and Peter Pan offers emotional alternative to a classic
Stratford Festival review: The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? challenges an audience’s tolerance
Stratford Festival review: Get That Hope offers a familiar family story with new context
Stratford Festival review: London Assurance serves up cartoonish hilarity
Stratford Festival review: Romeo and Juliet delivers teen angst and rash decision making
Stratford Festival review: ‘60s counterculture gives new context in McKenna’s Twelfth Night
Stratford Festival Review: Rarely produced Cymbeline brought to life on Tom Patterson Theatre stage
Stratford Festival review: The Diviners weaves past and present into a story about storytelling
Category: Stratford Festival
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By Galen Simmons What more could one ask for in a musical than a group of talented kids, a stellar cast to back them up and a very well-trained dog? (He’s a good boy! Yes, he is!) With all these elements and so much more, director-choreographer Donna Feore has everything she needs for yet another…
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By Galen Simmons Though many of the issues William Shakespeare wrote about in his time can be connected to issues we are facing as a society today, it can still be difficult to reimagine a Shakespearean classic and present it in a way a modern audience can relate to. Like many, I struggle to relate…
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By Galen Simmons Having now seen every play in the Stratford Festival’s 2024 season, I can confidently declare Salesman in China is my favourite. This world premiere and potentially sleeper hit by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy – the latter of whom also directs – is based on the true story of Death of a…
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By Galen Simmons Over-the-top performances, ridiculously gaudy costumes and impressively impeccable comedic timing makes the Stratford Festivals’ production of London Assurance a downright fun performance to watch. Despite some opening-night jitters, the cast of this production should be commended for bouncing back from the slightest of missteps quickly and landing those all-important reaction, slapstick and…
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By Galen Simmons The stories we tell ourselves and those around us are influenced by our own experiences and the stories told to us as children and throughout our lives. In the Stratford Festival’s production of The Diviners, author Morag Gunn (Irene Poole) is under pressure from her publisher to write her next, great novel.…
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By Galen Simmons A single-room play lives or dies on its character development. Without strong characters with rich backgrounds and motivations the audience can understand and relate to, the story itself never moves beyond the four walls it is being told within. Inspired by the Stratford Festival’s 2018 production of playwright Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s…
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By Galen Simmons Playwright Edward Albee’s play, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?,was written and first staged in 2002 in part to challenge what an audience and we as a society will tolerate. Albee accomplished this by centring his story on a world-renowned architect, Martin (Rick Roberts), who has fallen in love and engaged in…
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By Galen Simmons When it comes to staging an adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, there are a few things any production team must get right. Neverland and it denizens need to be mysterious and fantastical, the crocodile must be terrifying, the fight choreography needs to be on point, and the actors playing the children…
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By Galen Simmons How is it every musical I see at the Stratford Festival directed and choreographed by Donna Feore is somehow my new favourite? I don’t know how she does it, but she’s certainly done it again with this season’s production of Something Rotten! Tragically, I was unable to see Something Rotten! on opening…
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By Galen Simmons Sometimes I forget the story of Romeo and Juliet is about two teenagers who, upon meeting each other briefly for the first time, fall madly in love and then make increasingly bad decisions until both of them die. That may be a little oversimplified and perhaps does not do justice to the…
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