by Colin Thomas | Dec 12, 2019 | Review
If this show was a date, every person in the audience would have blue balls — and I’m including the people with ovaries. Girlfriend is an endless tease. We’re in small-town Nebraska sometime in the 90s. Gay, geeky Will has just graduated from high school and he’s...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 6, 2019 | Review
Sometimes old friends turn up at Christmas and you’re not sure at first what to do with them. Although I remembered it fondly, it’s been years since I’ve seen Lucia Frangione’s Cariboo Magi and it took me a while to renegotiate the terms of our relationship. The play,...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 1, 2019 | Review
Peter Pan is not the most progressive story in the world. Even in this adaptation, which has excised Tiger Lily along with all of the other Indians, reactionary gender norms haunt the tale like the ghosts of every frickin’ Christmas past. Through Wendy, girls are...
by Colin Thomas | Nov 28, 2019 | Review
One thing about seeing a show like It’s a Wonderful Christmas-ish Holiday Miracle: it will leave you with plenty of cognitive space to think about other things the next day. Right off the top of Marcus Youssef’s script, Esther introduces herself. She had...
by Colin Thomas | Nov 24, 2019 | Review
Fado: The Saddest Music in the World is an odd title for a play that evokes so little feeling. The problem is the script. In playwright Elaine Ávila’s story, a young Portuguese Canadian woman named Luisa travels to Lisbon with her widowed mom, Rosida. Luisa,...
by Colin Thomas | Nov 23, 2019 | Review
If Pinocchio was my first East Van Panto, I’d be writing a different review. But I’ve seen all seven and some — especially Little Red Riding Hood (2016) and The Wizard of Oz (last year) — have been so much better that, although Pinocchio is a good show in some ways,...
