WINNIPEG -- Tennessee Williams' classic play The Glass Menagerie was the thing that drew a packed opening-night crowd to Prairie Theatre Exchange Thursday. But it was the sumptuous cast that held the audience in thrall to the finish.

Local playwright and veteran actor Brian Drader (The Importance of Being Earnest, The Gathering) set the stage as a seething Tom Wingfield, the narrator who rails against his mother's genteel tyranny and who dreams of abandoning her and his sister as his father did years ago. Nicola Lipman (Cabaret) brings humour and dignity to her faded southern belle Amanda, who suffocates her children in her own desperate ambitions, while Glynis Ranney embodies the bewildered Laura. Crippled by shyness and an exaggerated awareness of a slight disability, Laura is Tom's albatross, a dreamer destined for an impoverished old maid's existence who finds solace in her collection of tiny glass animals.
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