by Colin Thomas | Dec 20, 2019 | Review
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is a supremely dumb musical but, if you get its exuberance right, you have something — and director Barbara Tomasic’s production gets the exuberance right. Joseph started out as a 15-minute pop cantata that Tim Rice and...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 13, 2019 | Review
Where’s the script? It feels like playwright Dave Deveau has forgotten to write one. Act 1 of Holiday at the Elbow Room Café is just a set-up that doesn’t make sense: a small group of characters gets trapped inside the once iconic, now shuttered Vancouver eatery....
by Colin Thomas | Dec 12, 2019 | Review
If this show was a date, every person in the audience would have blue balls — and I’m including the people with ovaries. Girlfriend is an endless tease. We’re in small-town Nebraska sometime in the 90s. Gay, geeky Will has just graduated from high school and he’s...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 6, 2019 | Review
Sometimes old friends turn up at Christmas and you’re not sure at first what to do with them. Although I remembered it fondly, it’s been years since I’ve seen Lucia Frangione’s Cariboo Magi and it took me a while to renegotiate the terms of our relationship. The play,...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 1, 2019 | Review
Peter Pan is not the most progressive story in the world. Even in this adaptation, which has excised Tiger Lily along with all of the other Indians, reactionary gender norms haunt the tale like the ghosts of every frickin’ Christmas past. Through Wendy, girls are...
