by Colin Thomas | Sep 28, 2024 | Review
Great. I get to be the white guy who says he didn’t much care for Indigenous artist Cliff Cardinal’s solo show As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement. I went into the evening hoping for challenge and provocation, but I didn’t get either. My expectation and...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 22, 2024 | Review
Artistic adventure is rare in Vancouver theatre these days. Want some? I’ve got a show for you. On so many levels, Sticks and Stones Theatre’s production of Middletown is such a surprising pleasure. Like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which clearly inspired it,...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 12, 2024 | Review
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...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 10, 2024 | Review
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...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2024 | Review
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...
