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...
LARRY (Fringe review)
A lucky mistake: I booked tickets to Larry, Candice Roberts’s solo clown show, thinking, for no good reason, that it was going to be a different Larry than I’d seen her do four years ago, even though it has the same title. Okay, okay, I’m a dope. It’s the same show,...
CRYING IN PUBLIC (Fringe review)
For about the first third of Crying in Public, which is a uniquely humble, autobiographical stand-up routine, I was so into it. Writer/performer Gina Harms’s stage persona is a self-effacing, small-town nerd girl. Harms confesses that, growing up, she wasn’t really...
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