by Colin Thomas | Mar 14, 2025 | Review
A bunch of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band didn’t work for me, but I’m glad to see the Arts Club producing it. Yee’s script is a light-hearted and sentimental fantasy — with surfer rock songs — about the still-reverberating tremors of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 9, 2025 | Review
A Taste of Hong Kong engaged me — enough that I wanted it to engage me more. I was never bored. Written by Anonymous and performed by Derek Chan, this solo show starts off as a cooking class led by an energetic guy named Jackie. Teaching us about Hong Kong street...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 22, 2025 | Review
Primary Trust won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but it’s not that good. A character named Kenneth is both the narrator and protagonist of Eboni Booth’s script. Orphaned in particularly traumatic circumstances when he was ten, Kenneth has invented an imaginary...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 14, 2025 | Review
Style is a tricky thing. There’s a bunch of it in playwright Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade, but director Donna Spencer and her cast don’t always know what to do with it. In Women of the Fur Trade, it’s “eighteen hundred and something something” and we’re...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 8, 2025 | Review
It’s almost there in some ways and absolutely not there in others. In Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla., emerging playwright Abi Padilla interweaves three storylines. The core story is about Lola (Grandma) Basyang, who is succumbing to dementia. Her grandkids Nika and...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 8, 2025 | Review
Puppeteer Ronnie Burkett’s Wonderful Joe makes about as much sense as a painting by Marc Chagall — by which I mean it makes so much associative, intuitive, emotional sense. And it’s beautiful to look at as it swirls around its themes of loneliness and inclusion,...
