by Colin Thomas | Apr 15, 2021 | Review
All alone in my office, I was laughing out loud and clapping my hands. Bad Hat Theatre’s Alice in Wonderland is streaming online, but it does what theatre does best: it activates the concrete imagination. Without resorting to illusion, it uses sounds, bodies, and...
by Colin Thomas | Apr 7, 2021 | Review
Writing this review of United Players’ production of Silent Sky isn’t as challenging as, say, astrophysics, but it’s still tricky, okay? I enjoyed the show a lot. Playwright Lauren Gunderson’s script about the turn-of-the-twentieth-century career of...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 24, 2021 | Review
Well-intentioned and over two-hours long, the audio play Night Passing is, unfortunately, boring. Set in Ottawa in 1958, playwright Scott Button’s script explores the entrapment of gay men and lesbians by the RCMP. Fueled by anti-communist hysteria south of the...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 21, 2021 | Review
Go. But take earplugs. *** I was happy for hours after seeing Imagine Van Gogh. To experience the piece, you enter a huge room — in Vancouver, it’s at the Convention Centre — in which the towering walls and, somehow it seems, the floor, are rear-projection surfaces....
by Colin Thomas | Mar 19, 2021 | Review
Oh sweet, sweet sexiness! There’s darkness in this pandemic-themed, pandemic-era production from the circus collective Les 7 Doigts (The 7 Fingers) but, for me, the overriding experience is about the spectacular joys of embodiment and connection. Through The Cultch,...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 15, 2021 | Review
I got to talk to a charming actor from Paris. Considering we were complete strangers when we started, our conversation was surprisingly easy and intimate. And, at the end of it, Johanna White performed a poem for me based on her assessment of my needs. The experience...
