by Colin Thomas | Oct 13, 2024 | Review
I haven’t seen the film or read the book, but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the musical comes into its own when it’s at its nastiest. There are upsides and downsides to this. (I’m mostly going to deal with the downsides first, but hang in with this review if you...
by Colin Thomas | Oct 11, 2024 | Review
Playwright Mohammad Yaghoubi’s Earworm is such an intriguing combination of elements. They didn’t all work for me, but they sure as hell kept me engaged. The central relationship is between an Iranian-Canadian podcaster named Homa and her adult son Pendar, who lives...
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...
