Griff's Village

I recently saw a production of the world's longest-running play: Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap . Its twist ending (which I shall not spoil here) is a closely-guarded secret, to the point that Wikipedia has drawn criticism for spoiling it, and TV Tropes refuses to give it away at all. Though I am merely a casual theatre lover and a neophyte Christie reader, seeing  The Mousetrap  has been on my bucket list for years, so when I learned that Phoenix Players were staging a production at The Gladstone, I bought a ticket. The play is set at a newly-opened hotel called Monkswell Manor. The owners, Mollie and Giles Ralston (played here by Monica Maika and Austin Beaty) haven't had time to hire any employees, and are clearly still figuring out the hotel business. Nonetheless, the rooms quickly fill with guests--the most cantankerous being Mrs Boyle (played by Lorraine Hopkins, who really sells how miserable her character is). Other guests include the eccentric Christopher W...

Like a lot of people born in the 80s and earlier, I grew up watching LOONEY TUNES. THE BUGS BUNNY AND TWEETY SHOW, and similar compilation programs, aired regularly on TV, and decades-old cartoons were readily available on VHS tapes. Of course, as any animation affictionado knows, most of these cartoons weren't created for televsion: they were created for movie theatres. Animated shorts before features is a treat rather than an expectation these days, but if you want to see a classic cartoon in a cinema, you can still sometimes find them at festivals or revival houses. I recently attending a screening of various LOONEY TUNES shorts at the Bytowne Cinema in Ottawa. The lineup opened with Chuck Jones' RABBIT SEASONING, closed with Friz Freleng's BIRDS ANONYMOUS, and included a great variety of cartoons in the middle. The biggest surprise for me was the inclusion of a few computer-animated cartoons from the 2010s: the musical short I TAWT I TAW A PUDDY TAT (which is essentiall...