CHARLIE AND THE (DARK) CHOCOLATE FACTORY
I haven’t seen the film or read the book, but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the musical comes into its own when it’s at its nastiest. There are upsides and downsides to this. (I’m mostly going to deal with the downsides first, but hang in with this review if you...
EARWORM: WORKS ITS WAY IN
Playwright Mohammad Yaghoubi’s Earworm is such an intriguing combination of elements. They didn’t all work for me, but they sure as hell kept me engaged. The central relationship is between an Iranian-Canadian podcaster named Homa and her adult son Pendar, who lives...
AS YOU LIKE IT OR THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: DIDN’T LIKE IT
Great. I get to be the white guy who says he didn’t much care for Indigenous artist Cliff Cardinal’s solo show As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement. I went into the evening hoping for challenge and provocation, but I didn’t get either. My expectation and...
MIDDLETOWN: SURPRISING PLEASURES
Artistic adventure is rare in Vancouver theatre these days. Want some? I’ve got a show for you. On so many levels, Sticks and Stones Theatre’s production of Middletown is such a surprising pleasure. Like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which clearly inspired it,...
JERSEY BOYS: ENTRANCING
There is a particular kind of pleasure that comes from just giving yourself to a show because it’s so seamlessly assured and stimulating. It’s what folks are talking about when they say they were spellbound by a performance. For almost all its running time, that’s the...
OUTER ELSINORE: A SECOND VISIT TO BARD’S HAMLET
I returned to Bard on the Beach’s Hamlet to see Chirag Naik in the title role. (In a scheduled change, he has taken over from Nadeem Phillip Umar Khitab.) The news isn’t good. Naik overacts, and that exacerbates an underlying problem with director Stephen Drover’s...
MUTTNIK (Vancouver Fringe)
Bruce Ryan Costella, who wrote and is performing Muttnik, is a gifted writer and actor: those things are givens. In Muttnik, he tells a story inspired by Laika, the stray dog who, for the sake of research, was rocketed into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 with just...
HAPPY GO LUCKY (VANCOUVER FRINGE)
Tokyo puppeteer Yanomi Shoshinz is a charmingly openhearted performer, but I was only engaged by about half of her material. Happy Go Lucky consists of four puppet routines and Shoshinz starts with the weakest. In it, a Janus-faced female puppet engages in a series of...
HOW TO CATCH A KAREN (VANCOUVER FRINGE)
In her solo bouffon show, Sabrina Wenske looks fantastic. Playing Baba Yaga, the witch of Slavic folklore, she wears an enormous straw headdress, and her painted-on moles are ghoulish blue. Her abundant energy is wicked and promises danger. “You are so cute with your...
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