BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: MY LIFE — UNIQUELY REWARDING
Talk about innovation. Talk about risk. Talk about reward. Talk about writer and director Niall McNeil’s Beauty and the Beast: My Life. Be patient with me. I want to get into the thematic content of this piece — because I find it so compelling — before I try to give...
BEHIND THE MOON: EXTRAORDINARILY WELL REALIZED
It’s been two years since Behind the Moon premiered in Toronto. Since then, it’s had only one production, in Victoria. That’s kind of nuts. This script should be getting produced across the country. So thanks to director Lois Anderson and the impeccable company of...
HOME DELIVERIES: BRINGIN’ IT HOME (MOSTLY)
Catherine Léger’s Home Deliveries is about sex as possession, which is how she frames monogamy. Based on the 1970s movie, Deux femmes en or, an erotic comedy, Home Deliveries follows Florence and Violet, heterosexually married women who live next to each other in an...
CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND: YES AND NO
A bunch of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band didn’t work for me, but I’m glad to see the Arts Club producing it. Yee’s script is a light-hearted and sentimental fantasy — with surfer rock songs — about the still-reverberating tremors of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of...
A TASTE OF HONG KONG: MORE WOULD BETTER
A Taste of Hong Kong engaged me — enough that I wanted it to engage me more. I was never bored. Written by Anonymous and performed by Derek Chan, this solo show starts off as a cooking class led by an energetic guy named Jackie. Teaching us about Hong Kong street...
PRIMARY TRUST: LESS THAN PRIME
Primary Trust won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but it’s not that good. A character named Kenneth is both the narrator and protagonist of Eboni Booth’s script. Orphaned in particularly traumatic circumstances when he was ten, Kenneth has invented an imaginary...
WOMEN OF THE FUR TRADE: The Script Is Better Than the Production
Style is a tricky thing. There’s a bunch of it in playwright Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade, but director Donna Spencer and her cast don’t always know what to do with it. In Women of the Fur Trade, it’s “eighteen hundred and something something” and we’re...
GRANDMA. GANGSTA. GUERRILLA.: AN UNEASY COMBINATION
It’s almost there in some ways and absolutely not there in others. In Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla., emerging playwright Abi Padilla interweaves three storylines. The core story is about Lola (Grandma) Basyang, who is succumbing to dementia. Her grandkids Nika and...
WONDERFUL JOE IS WONDERFUL
Puppeteer Ronnie Burkett’s Wonderful Joe makes about as much sense as a painting by Marc Chagall — by which I mean it makes so much associative, intuitive, emotional sense. And it’s beautiful to look at as it swirls around its themes of loneliness and inclusion,...
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