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Find me another hotel

I seem to be the only person who dislikes The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. In my view, excellent actors, including Judi Dench do much better work than the script deserves. I mean really. A died-in-the-wool racist played by Maggie Smith suddenly sees the light and gets...

All the buzz on Hive: the New Bees 2

I went to see Hive: the New Bees 2 at Chapel Arts, the converted funeral home at Dunlevy and Cordova last night, and I highly recommend it. The original Hive started at Chapel Arts a number of years ago and featured alternative companies that already were or have...

Tips from an emerging playwright

Shelter from the Storm My interview with emerging playwright Peter Boychuk (pictured above) will appear in next week’s Georgia Straight (Thursday, May 31). Peter’s new show, Shelter from the Storm goes up the next day (June 1) at the Firehall, where it...

Commit to Conflict

Some novelists and screenwriters that I work with are shy about conflict. My sense is that’s partly because they don’t want to dumb their stories down with meaningless action or fall into the traps of popular culture, which features a lot of gratuitous—and...

Nice Box

  It’s so skillful. Carmen Aguirre’s autobiographical solo show, Blue Box, is not only exploding with hot content—Aguirre chronicles both her relationship with a wild Chicano lover who first appeared to her in a vision and her years in the Chilean...