Hot Brown Honey: The Remix — exhilarating, liberating
Hot Brown Honey: The Remix is one of the best political rallies you’ve ever going to attend — because it’s also a big, loud, slick party. The Honeys, as they call themselves, are an ever-changing feminist group from Australia that’s made up of Indigenous women and...
Animal: family entertainment in the truest sense
I didn’t get what I thought I was in for, but I did get a very good time. Cirque Alfonse is a humble Québecois company: the acrobats and musicians are all either members of the Carabinier Lépine family or their friends. And Animal is a humble show that riffs — in...
The Thursday Night Bridge Circle: Decline the invitation
I do not want to write this review. I know that it takes enormous effort to mount a show — even if it's a bad one. And I’m sure that everybody involved with the United Players production of The Thursday Night Bridge Circle has the best of intentions. But sometimes...
Peter Pan Goes Wrong — and so does this farce (sometimes)
Farces can be beautiful machines: marvels of comic timing and physical business so dazzlingly funny they leave you gasping for breath. But, of course, the thing about machines is that you want them to work all the time. This production of Peter Pan Goes Wrong hums...
VANCOUVER FRINGE 2022: Spooky & Gay Cabaret
I got goosebumps, I laughed (a lot), and I cried — all in one show. Of the performances I’ve seen at the Fringe so far this year, this is my favourite. Writer and performer Bruce Ryan Costella frames Spooky & Gay Cabaret with a scary story about an eleven-year-old...
VANCOUVER FRINGE 2022: Summer Teeth
Playwright Bill Marchant’s Summer Teeth is an odd assemblage. It starts with one of the most riveting monologues I’ve heard in ages. The givens are that we’re in a post-plague near-future somewhere along the Pitt River in what seems to be a rural community. At least...
VANCOUVER FRINGE 2022: The Disney Delusion
It starts off charmingly. In The Disney Delusion, which he describes as “an (unfortunately) true story”, playwright and solo performer Leif Oleson-Cormack describes a romantic misadventure from 2008. Although he had an MFA in playwriting by that time, he had never...
VANCOUVER FRINGE 2022: Ha Ha Da Vinci
My bet is that artists are more likely to get away with this kind of nonsense on the fringe circuit, where audiences are more predisposed to giving it a pass as “artsy”. But Ha Ha Da Vinci is just very badly made. Phina Pipia, who wrote and performs this piece, plays...
VANCOUVER FRINGE 2022: Every Good Story Ends With One
In Every Good Story Ends With One, well-loved Fringe performer Martin Dockery tells the story of a humiliatingly bad run he had at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, a run that was miraculously saved by an ardent — and anonymous — fan who sent a series of letters and small...
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