by Colin Thomas | Jan 19, 2020 | Review
Playwright and solo performer Maki Yi means well with Gramma and it starts off promisingly, but it quickly becomes very boring. Gramma is based on the relationship that Korean-Canadian Yi had with her first Canadian landlady, a demanding 90-year-old woman who allowed...
by Colin Thomas | Jan 9, 2020 | Review
Two of the three characters in Infinity claim that they can hear time. I listened very closely, but I couldn’t hear the play’s heartbeat. Hannah Moscovitch’s script is emotionally alienating and its ambitious themes are underdeveloped. But I enjoyed it — because the...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 20, 2019 | Review
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is a supremely dumb musical but, if you get its exuberance right, you have something — and director Barbara Tomasic’s production gets the exuberance right. Joseph started out as a 15-minute pop cantata that Tim Rice and...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 13, 2019 | Review
Where’s the script? It feels like playwright Dave Deveau has forgotten to write one. Act 1 of Holiday at the Elbow Room Café is just a set-up that doesn’t make sense: a small group of characters gets trapped inside the once iconic, now shuttered Vancouver eatery....
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,...
