Category: Our Critics

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of the quintessential American novels, a story of love and the passage of time that transforms it into nostalgia or obsession, a story of self-made men and socialite heirs, steeped in richesse though its author-protagonist will have none of it, in any sense.

Director Mel Brooks once said that sex is like pizza; even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for sex comedies. It takes a deft touch to balance the humorous with the taboo. Come on too strong and things can get juvenile, but shy away and the jokes suddenly lose their teeth.

As a certain hardly recognizable, high-octane account of Pearl Harbour testifies, “based on actual events” is not a common or comfortable modus operandi for director Michael Bay, whose latest chaotic romp across the silver screen opened Friday.

Bear & Co.’s production of The Taming of the Shrew opens the way you’d expect a modern staging of a Shakespearean play to. Actors in tights, capes and frilly shirts bounce pithy lines off one another while giving the audience the necessary exposition.