by Colin Thomas | Feb 21, 2020 | Review
It’s a tribute to the power of God’s Lake that, after the applause had died down, the audience sat quietly in the theatre for so long that stage manager Jethelo Espaldon Cabilete felt compelled to tell us that the show was over. We knew that God’s Lake was over, of...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 20, 2020 | Review
Why is it so hard to develop a decent script? Show after show goes up in which the script is a mess. That’s certainly the case with Talking Sex on Sunday. Sara-Jeanne Hosie wrote the book and lyrics for this musical and Shawn Macdonald acted as dramaturg. They start...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 15, 2020 | Review
I ran into a pal at intermission who floated a genius idea: cast Steel Magnolias with drag queens. Playwright Robert Harling is gay after all and the characters in Steel Magnolias feel very much like women as imagined by a gay man. In the play, we’re in small-town...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 15, 2020 | Review
There’s nothing wrong with Beep. Designed by Australia’s Windmill Theatre for kids who are two to seven years old, it’s a simple story — told with puppets — about an outsider who is welcomed into village life. A furry little guy named Mort, who looks a lot like a...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 13, 2020 | Review
A cipher can be a code. It can also be a zero. Cipher is a play about a code — and a play that adds up to very little. In Cipher, playwrights Ellen Close and Braden Griffiths invent a 63-year-old cold case. In that fictional mystery, a man’s body is found on the beach...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 8, 2020 | Review
The motto of Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company is “Destroy the audience!” and the Village Voice has crowned her “the queen of unease”. But Itsazoo’s production of Lee’s Straight White Men left me disappointingly untroubled and unimplicated. In Straight White Men, which...
