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...
BITCHES WITH BAGGAGE (VANCOUVER FRINGE)
The Fringe provides a place for emerging artists to show their work, so good for young actors Samantha Kerr and Hikari Terasawa for writing their own script and performing it at the Fringe. To be blunt, Bitches with Baggage wasn’t rich enough to sustain my interest,...
40-YEAR-OLD PUBERTY (VANCOUVER FRINGE)
Ti Malik Coleman’s opening performance at the Vancouver Fringe was a love fest, and I’m one hundred percent certain that’s going to continue for the rest of the run. That’s partly because, from the opening seconds of this stand-up/storytelling routine, you can tell...
2 QUEENS. 2 BARS. 55 YEARS. (VANCOUVER FRINGE)
It’s good to be reminded of what else the Fringe can be. In the early days of the Vancouver Fringe, which launched 40 years ago, there was a whole lot more thematically challenging material on offer and much more solid dramatic writing. Since then, the Fringe has...
BRUNCH: A COMEDY SHOW (VANCOUVER FRINGE)
I wasn’t having nearly as much fun as many of the folks around me seemed to be having. The premise of this offering from the duo called Brunch is that they’re performing sketch comedy — in 1424 — so most of the jokes are anachronisms and some of them are pretty good....
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