Tom McCamus (1/99 It's All True)
Excerpt from Eye Weekly 1/7/99: Tom McCamus
PREVIEW
BY KEVIN CONNOLLY
IT'S ALL TRUE
Featuring Tamara Bernier, Richard Binsley, Victor Ertmanis, Melody Johnson, Martin Julien, Steve Smith and Tom McCamus. Written by Jason Sherman. Directed by Richard Rose. To Feb. 7. $21-$26. Tarragon Mainspace, 30 Bridgman. 531-1827.
Set in 1937 among New York's theatre elite, It's All True -- which opened Jan. 6 at the Tarragon -- follows the efforts of a young Orson Welles, legendary producer John Houseman and actor Howard da Silva (among others) to mount playwright Marc Blitzstein's controversial workers' musical The Cradle Will Rock after the government locked them out of their own theatre and the actors and musicians' unions boycotted the production.
© Eye Weekly
Excerpt from BackStage 2/5/99: Tom McCamus
REGIONAL ROUNDUP: Passion vs. Prejudice - Honoring Black History Month in Ohio and actors' history in Toronto.
Jon Kaplan Friday, February 5 1999
Art and life, reality and illusion, collide with a wonderfully dramatic bang in Jason Sherman's It's All True, in which a piece of theatrical history plays tag with itself in a house of mirrors reminiscent of that created by Orson Welles in the film The Lady From Shanghai.
....
It takes a while to sort out the blur of characters, but the generally fine ensemble--anchored by Victor Ertmanis' bedeviled, egotistic Welles (pre-Hollywood and Citizen Kane glory) and Tom McCamus' quicksilver, passionate Blitzstein--carries viewers along.
...
Over the course of the show Blitzstein argues for politics to be the marching song for theatre, while Welles instead champions theatre's ability to create magic. Sherman blends the two, but in It's All True, magic finally wins out.
© Back Stage