Tag: Gary Smith

Show Review: The Real Sherlock Holmes is an elegant first-rate production that will make you laugh

Posted on August 30, 2022

Allan Cooke, Jeff Dingle and David Rosser in The Real Sherlock Holmes | Director: David Nairn, Set: William Chesney, Lighting: Wendy Lundgren, Costumes: Claudine Parker,

This show review by Gary Smith was originally published in The Hamilton Spectator on August 27th, 2022.

So, just who is “The Real Sherlock Holmes”?

Fans of the legendary fast-talking sleuth, know he sprang from the fertile imagination of feisty Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Or did he?

Did the deerstalker detective have a different provenance? Did someone influence Conan Doyle’s penning of all those dark-hearted Sherlock mysteries? Did “The Hound of the Baskervilles” and “Sherlock’s Last Case” really spring from Conan Doyle’s fertile brain without assistance?

If you don’t know you need to go to the Lighthouse Festival Theatre in Port Dover. That’s where lean and lanky actor Jeff Dingle spills the beans, as he trots across the Dover stage in search of adventure and romance.

Dingle, a terrific Conan Doyle, has exactly the right sense of style and pace to make this spirited Peter Colley comedy work.

He knows the perfect way to send up the drama, give the comedy a sly twist and create comic moments of perfect silliness. Dingle is aided and abetted by a smooth and smug Professor Bell from actor David Rosser.

Together this agreeable partnership gives this lunatic adventure story a sense of tremendous fun and wide-eyed innocence.

Add to the mix, wonderful Hamilton actress Susan JohnstonCollins who gives haughty and imperious Lady Louisa a perfect twist of sour lemon. JohnstonCollins is capable of controlling a scene when she’s simply standing around, artfully dabbing her nose with her always handy lace hankie. Or even better, lifting those incredibly arched eyebrows in mortal disdain.

These three actors, light up the Dover stage, dominating Colley’s play with intentionally elevated acting that makes their performances linger in the imagination long after the baddies are carted off to jail and Conan Doyle, not yet a Sir, kisses sweet little Jenny, (Blythe Hanes) who gives his crank an American twist.

A terrific set from William Chesney is evocative and imaginative

with its several levels and hidden pop-out surprises, it is a perfect landscape for the play’s nefarious goings-on.

Then too, Claudine Parker’s lived-in costumes have just the right touch of cheesiness about them to suggest old-time melodrama.

Add Wendy Lundgren’s mood-drenched lighting and you have a sense of mystery.

Mark McGrinder and Allan Cooke, playing an assortment of outrageous characters, from a fiendish bagpipe player to a One-Eyed Old Salt of the Sea, tend to veer somewhere over the top, but my goodness they do make you laugh.

To read the full review please click this link to visit The Hamilton Spectator w ebsite

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Show Review: ‘Halfway There’ is Norm Foster at his most beguiling

Posted on July 8, 2022

This show review by Gary Smith was originally published in The Hamilton Spectator on July 8th.

Want to laugh until your sides ache? Want to cry until your heart breaks?

Want to see Canada’s most prolific playwright at the very top of his game? Want to see a cast committed to theatre as a place of moving and insightful entertainment?

OK, so enough with the questions.

Go grab your favourite device and book seats for “Halfway There.” This wonderful Norm Foster comedy, with its sly comic invention and generous dollop of truth, is one of the best things I’ve seen all year. That includes Broadway, London’s West End and the Stratford Festival.

It’s in Port Dover at The Lighthouse Festival Theatre, the home of Canadian theatre comedies. But oh my, it’s so much more than you might think.

Some years back Foster wrote a play about male bonding called “The Foursome.” Well, now he’s done something even more winning.

With “Halfway There,” he’s written a rueful, first-rate love story about women. I don’t think anyone’s done this sort of thing better.

It’s “Steel Magnolias,” “Morning’s At Seven” and “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” all rolled into one. Except for one thing special. It’s uniquely Foster in every possible way.

Laughs, and believe me there are dozens and dozens of them, punctuate some of the warmest and loving moments I can remember on a stage.

Yet, these whoppers that make you laugh until you can’t take it anymore never encroach on the humanity and the truth of the play. Foster’s characters grow naturally out of a series of crises and challenges that face Rita (the wonderful Susan Henley), Vi (the irrepressible Debra Hale) and Mary Ellen (Melodee Finlay, one time Queen of Port Dover Lighthouse comedies, who is happily back with a vengeance).

These three lovable women are a triumvirate to reckon with. Their performances bristle with a kind of exquisite energy and truth that radiates from the stage like a warm hug and a great big kiss. These three friends face the losses in their lives with a will to shrug off sorrow and the strength to hold on tight to what makes them strong. They are so real you want to join their group hugs on stage, grab their hands and take them all out for a drink and a fish fry at Dover’s vintage Erie Beach Hotel.

They aren’t the centre of the story here, but they are the steamrolling heart of Foster’s wonderful play. They are what gives it its joy, laughter and tender moments of female bonding, moments that transcend life’s sometimes awkward and painful annoyances.

We are in a little diner in Stewiacke, Nova Scotia. That’s the place that is halfway to the North Pole. Now you get the play’s title, right? But that’s only a small part of what it really means. More about that later.

Into this evocative spot — where waitress Janine Babineau, played smartly by Kristen Da Silva, dreams about finding real love and a hold on life — walks handsome Sean Merritt, who’s terrific as a visiting doctor in town for a month or two, working at the local hospital. And isn’t he just about perfect in a quiet, no-nonsense way.

Just maybe, he’s what Janine is looking for, someone to give her life meaning.

To read the full review please click this link to visit The Hamilton Spectator website

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Finding love on the side of Sugar Road

Posted on May 27, 2022

This show review by Gary Smith was originally published in The Hamilton Spectator on May 24th.

There is a wonderful moment early in the second act of Kristen Da Silva’s comedy “Sugar Road.”

A country and western singer has just sung a sweet song to the woman he knows he loves more than the screaming fans who crowd the edge of his stage.

Suddenly, a string of stars twinkles in the evening sky and a full and luminous moon winks down on the oh so romantic scene. And that’s it, the precise moment when all the hilarious nonsense going on in Da Silva’s seductive comedy gives way to what we suspected all along.

Handsome Jesse Emberly, the sort of guy who writes romantic hurtin’ songs, has fallen for Hannah Taylor, the Sugar Road Amusement Park owner who remains tethered to a tragic love affair that haunts her past.

Not her own past, you understand. It’s the past of her mother, who, like Hannah, fell for a restless cowboy singer, not unlike poetic Jesse and was burned by the sting of regret.

This is the aha moment, the nanosecond when we know for sure, what we’ve suspected all along. Hannah and Jesse ought to belong to one another. And so, here we are rooting for these frightened, star-crossed lovers, who are frightened to find a path of compromise and trust that will allow them to walk together into a touching golden sunset at the end of Da Silva’s delightful comedy.

Certainly, Hannah and Jesse, as imagined by playwright Da Silva are warm and vulnerable human beings. More importantly perhaps, they’re played with sensitivity and charm by Elana Post and Jeffrey Wetsch that radiates across the multihued amusement park setting of designer William Chesney. Each of these actors helps to create an oasis of sanity in a comedy that often explodes quite frenetically, shaking the rafters of The Lighthouse Festival Theatre with laughter.

To read the full review please visit The Hamilton Spectator website