by Colin Thomas | Sep 19, 2019 | Review
Act 1 is so boring that friends who left at intermission expressed their condolences when I told them I was staying. In Ursula Rani Sarma’s script, which is based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel, a young Afghani woman named Laila finds herself trapped in a nightmare...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 14, 2019 | Review
With Mother of the Maid, Pacific Theatre offers a pedestrian interpretation of a superficial script. It’s not terrible, but it’s not rewarding. Playwright Jane Anderson focuses on Joan of Arc’s mother, a character she calls Isabelle Arc, although she was more...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2019 | Review
Canadian playwright Trina Davies’s The Trophy Hunt feels like an overly deliberate writing exercise in which she plays three variations on the theme of African big-game hunting. (Why Africa? Why not the Canadian North, which would bring things closer to home?)...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2019 | Review
BikeFace is clean, simple, and it does its job, kind of like a glass of water — or a good bike. In her solo show, writer/performer Natalie Frijia tells us about her cross-Canada cycling trip. The travelogue includes elements you’d probably anticipate: mishaps (like...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2019 | Review
About an hour into this 90-minute show, I checked my watch and my companion leaned over to whisper, “Time has slowed.” As in Amélie the movie, sweet nothing happens in Amélie the musical — well, nothing interesting. Amélie is a shy young Parisienne and, for a lot of...
