by Colin Thomas | Aug 7, 2022 | Review
It was like a holiday. A friend and I drove out to Langley to see Dooja Ghar, Paneet Singh and Andy Kalirai’s modern retelling of a...
by Colin Thomas | Jul 9, 2022 | Review
We Will Rock You is dripping with so much old-fart attitude you can almost smell it. A jukebox musical built to cash in on the songs of Queen, We Will Rock You is relentlessly nostalgic and condescending. The thesis of Ben Elton’s book can be boiled down to: “The...
by Colin Thomas | Jul 8, 2022 | Review
Much to my surprise, Something Rotten! is very entertaining. I went in wary. I’d never heard of the show and all I knew about the plot was that somebody in Elizabethan England invents musical theatre. Okay, I thought, we’ll see … But then I got there, and I fell into...
by Colin Thomas | Jun 25, 2022 | Review
Something is out of focus here. Maybe it’s me. Djanet Sears’s 1997 script Harlem Duet riffs on Othello — and it takes on a lot. The action of Sears’s play unfolds in three time periods. In the core narrative, we’re in Harlem in 1997. In the event that triggers the...
by Colin Thomas | Jun 24, 2022 | Review
Playwright Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime provides a rewarding and unique theatrical experience. How often do I get to say that? In the first scene, we meet Marjorie and her husband Walter. She’s 85. He might be 30. She has significant memory loss. If he hears...
by Colin Thomas | Jun 19, 2022 | Review
In Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, an urban street corner is also a slave plantation and Egypt — because Moses and Kitch, the two Black friends who are hanging out there, can’t leave. Nwandu is taking inspiration from both the Bible’s Book of Exodus and Samuel...
