CounterFACTUAL takes place in a (more) dystopian version of Canada.
What? Why?
So much nothing happens in counterFACTUAL that I was genuinely confused when the lights came up. I couldn’t quite believe it was over. Wasn’t there going to be some kind of ending, some kind of resolution or at least an intriguing cliffhanger? But there was a curtain call. People started leaving. It really was the end. [Read more…]
Drag artist Le Gateau Chocolat sent a performance from London Thursday night.
Last night’s Opening Night Bash at the Transform Cabaret Festival was … transformative for me. Moreso than last year’s.
I don’t think that’s because this year’s edition was artistically “better”, whatever that means; I think it’s because the overwhelming awfulness of our global crises allowed me to appreciate more fully the power of celebration as resistance. [Read more…]
Members of the Apple family enjoy an online dance performance.
Incidental Moments of the Day is complex, engaging, and so potentially inflammatory that I want to warn you before you watch it. [Read more…]
In Art Heist, the art is missing and so is the resolution.
There’s a lot of foreplay in this show and no orgasm.
In Art Heist, playwrights TJ Dawe and Ming Hudson offer an experience in which audiences of up to 10 people sleuth around Granville Island trying to figure out who pulled off a half-billion-dollar theft from Boston’s Isabella Gardner Museum in 1990. There are 13 clues in the form of QR codes (which you hunt like Easter eggs) and there are five folks to interview. Time and space are flexible: a couple of the interviewees are dead; some exist in the present and some in the past. [Read more…]
Hana Joi does her best with clumsy material in A Hundred Words for Snow. (Photo by Doug Williams)
This is the first time I’ve attended a live performance since the beginning of the plague, so I’m going to start off by talking about that.
Going in, I was mildly freaked out; I’m 68 and I’m taking immunosuppressant drugs. Because I’m vulnerable, I wore a mask and a face shield. But I ditched the shield after about eight minutes because it made me feel like I was in another room. Besides, I was aware that United Players, the producing company, was taking good care of me. [Read more…]
David Lennon and Stephanie George try for love at first click in the age of COVID.
Who wants to be seduced? I’m not talking about hard-wired seduction, the kind that’s all about your junk. I’m talking about the kind that opens your heart to irrational possibilities — like love — the kind that sets you floating in the universe and leaves you feeling a little drunk around the edges. [Read more…]
In B, a bomb comes disguised as a birthday present. (Photo by Tim Matheson)
I was so painfully bored after the first hour of B that I fled to my bed and watched the remaining 45 minutes the next morning. In those 45 minutes, Guillermo Calderón’s script gets a tiny bit better. A tiny bit. [Read more…]
Tom Kerr was a major force in Canadian theatre and has left an enormous legacy.
Hi everybody,
Glen Cairns, the longtime partner of theatre director and teacher Tom Kerr, wrote the tribute I’m sharing here.
Stay well,
Colin [Read more…]
A treasure map: not the best choice. (Photo of Medina Hahn and Daniel Arnold by David Cooper)
Inheritance: a pick-the-path experience is more successful as a political and educational tool than it is as art — and it’s worth seeing. [Read more…]
