HamiltonSpectator – By Gary Smith
I know the Toronto critics dumped all over Hosanna. To a man they hated John van Burek’s Pleiades Theatre Company production with a passion. Well, I think they’re wrong.
This isn’t the best Hosanna I’ve ever seen, that’s true. But I want to tell you there is enough heart and spirit in this rather different staging of the play to remind us what a great play it really is.
When French Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay wrote Hosanna more than 30 years ago, AIDS was not an issue. Gay marriage was not in the cards. Homosexuals were not lovable characters on prime time TV. Plays about gays were mostly relegated to tortured stories of angst. Even when they seemed to cross cultural borders as they certainly did with The Boys In The Band, gay characters remained mostly tortured human beings.