Archives for April 2021

Post-Democracy: argument instead of discovery

publicity photo for Post-Democracy

Actors Kristian Jordan and Alicia Johnston on Brian Perchaluk’s set. (Photo by Leif Norman)

Strong acting. Taut dialogue. Handsome set. But there’s no thematic revelation.

In Hannah Moscovitch’s Post-Democracy — which is receiving its world premiere at Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange — a Chief Operating Officer named Lee is trying to convince his boss, Bill, to purchase a company in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country. But Bill’s daughter Justine, who is his Chief Financial Officer, can’t stand Lee and the sleazy male-dominated culture of harassment he embodies. [Read more…]

Alice in Wonderland: Alice unchained

publicity photo for Alice in Wonderland

Tess Benger plays a modern Alice in Wonderland. (Photo by John Holosko and Robert Metcalfe)

All alone in my office, I was laughing out loud and clapping my hands.

Bad Hat Theatre’s Alice in Wonderland is streaming online, but it does what theatre does best: it activates the concrete imagination. Without resorting to illusion, it uses sounds, bodies, and materials — clearly in a theatre, clearly in an artificial space — to create three-dimensional creatures and fully-fleshed worlds. It’s about pretending. That’s what I’ve been missing. [Read more…]

Silent Sky: a good night under the stars

publicity photo for Silent Sky

Henrietta (Jenna Hill) and Peter (Karthik Kadam) pretend to talk about the cosmos. (Photo by Doug Williams)

 

Writing this review of United Players’ production of Silent Sky isn’t as challenging as, say, astrophysics, but it’s still tricky, okay?

I enjoyed the show a lot. Playwright Lauren Gunderson’s script about the turn-of-the-twentieth-century career of pioneering astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt is witty and moving.

Leavitt’s task as a “computer” at the Harvard College Observatory was to record information from photographic plates about the brightness of stars. As a clerk — and, crucially, as a woman — she wasn’t allowed to look through the telescope. But, working from her observations of the brightness and pulsations of certain stars, Leavitt became the first to understand how to measure the distance to faraway galaxies. It was a watershed achievement. [Read more…]

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