by Colin Thomas | Sep 19, 2019 | Review
Act 1 is so boring that friends who left at intermission expressed their condolences when I told them I was staying. In Ursula Rani Sarma’s script, which is based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel, a young Afghani woman named Laila finds herself trapped in a nightmare...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 14, 2019 | Review
With Mother of the Maid, Pacific Theatre offers a pedestrian interpretation of a superficial script. It’s not terrible, but it’s not rewarding. Playwright Jane Anderson focuses on Joan of Arc’s mother, a character she calls Isabelle Arc, although she was more...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2019 | Review
Canadian playwright Trina Davies’s The Trophy Hunt feels like an overly deliberate writing exercise in which she plays three variations on the theme of African big-game hunting. (Why Africa? Why not the Canadian North, which would bring things closer to home?)...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2019 | Review
BikeFace is clean, simple, and it does its job, kind of like a glass of water — or a good bike. In her solo show, writer/performer Natalie Frijia tells us about her cross-Canada cycling trip. The travelogue includes elements you’d probably anticipate: mishaps (like...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2019 | Review
About an hour into this 90-minute show, I checked my watch and my companion leaned over to whisper, “Time has slowed.” As in Amélie the movie, sweet nothing happens in Amélie the musical — well, nothing interesting. Amélie is a shy young Parisienne and, for a lot of...
by Colin Thomas | Sep 9, 2019 | Review
Oddly, I found The Legend of White Woman Creek both hypnotic and boring. Katie Hartman, who wrote the piece with partner Nick Ryan, who’s running the lights, performs solo. Starting out as an academic who specializes in the paranormal, she summons the ghost of...
