Spotlight

Original stage musical is perfectly cast

Boy meets girl, they fall in love, boy loses girl then wins her back, and boy and girl get married. All of us recognize the formula for a romantic comedy.

So you wanna be a rock star — sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and … big hair? Sorry, that ship has sailed.

Remember what a first date is like? Now imagine a couple of hundred other people tagging along to watch. Awkward? Oh, yeah. But also entertaining and unpredictable.

I’ve always loved the Charles Dickens’ story A Christmas Carol. I watch some version or other at least once every Christmas season, anything from the grim black-and-white 1951 classic to The Muppet Christmas Carol.

Period dramas and comedies have an appeal because they give us a glimpse of other times — strange costumes, mannerisms and language. But they stay with us only if they also tell us something important about ourselves.

Looking at the art of American expressionist painter Mark Rothko, some will perceive the whole range of human emotional experiences, from anxiety to tragedy, ecstasy to feelings of doom.

If there could be anything worse for a parent than the death of their child, it might be seeing that child in constant suffering, day after day.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Christmas season. I love the original story and its meaning, the family traditions, the heartwarming excitement of children, the way the holiday can break down barriers between strangers.

It would be hard to find a greater contrast than the one between the Sudbury Theatre Centre’s season opener, the flamboyant Rocky Horror Show, and their second production, the one-woman play Another Home Invasion, about the tribulations of senior cit