Assembly Hall: Motion to Dissolve
Gosh. So many great things. Assembly Hall, the latest creation from choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathon Young, is so narratively eccentric it will resonant in different ways for every person who sees it. Let me tell you a bit about what it meant to me....
Peace Country: Go there
Peace Country is a huge accomplishment. I love its urgency, its complexity, its humour — and its weirdness. Its weirdness — well, its eccentricity — lies in the play’s structure. Pedro Chamale’s new script is set in an area also known as Peace River Country, an aspen...
Someone Like You: predigested
There are things I liked in Someone Like You, but so many more that I didn’t that it’s going to take a while to get there. Mostly what bugged me is that I felt like playwright Christine Quintana was cutting my meat for me. So much of her script is predetermined and...
The Empire of the Son: setting
The thrill is gone. When I first saw Tetsuro Shigematsu’s solo show Empire of the Son, when Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre produced its premiere seven years ago, I was so moved that, two weeks after seeing it, I still couldn’t talk about it without crying. But this...
Fairview: disorienting — and reorienting
What can I tell you about Fairview? Since Jackie Sibblies Drury’s script is about the distorting power of the white gaze and the nightmarish inescapability of white opinion — and since I’m a white guy — I’m going to opt for not telling you much. The play’s central...
The Last Wife: Dopey portrait of a smart woman
The script is so bad. There are some okay elements in this production, but … have I mentioned how bad the script is? In The Last Wife, playwright Kate Hennig imagines the relationship between Henry VIII and his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, the only spouse who outlived...
Little Shop of Horrors: what went wrong (according to me)
This is my fifth draft of this review. Previous drafts have started with “Free the bimbo!” and “This production could accurately be renamed Little Shop of Crippling Good Intentions.” Overall, I don’t think the production succeeds. But I’m out of snappy ledes, so let’s...
GENERIC MALE: JUST WHAT WE NEED, ANOTHER SHOW ABOUT MEN (Fringe review)
Some of the dance works well in Generic Male. Much of the other material doesn’t. The two-hander starts off weakly. There’s some audience involvement, only some of which makes sense, followed a bit later by an extended scripted section in which the two performers,...
LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR DEATH (Fringe review)
I was hoping for an audacious and insightful show about death. What I got was a glib and offensive show about death. In Let’s Talk About Your Death, writer/performer David Johnston plays two characters: Barry, who is the floor manager at the taping of a TV show about...
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