The Wrong Bashir: The Right Stuff
This style is so hard to pull off. But this creative team is mostly doing it very well — sometimes astonishingly so. Zahida Rahemtulla’s The Wrong Bashir is a farce. An Ismaili farce. In the story, a nominating committee selects Bashir Ladha, a philosophy student who...
The Woman in Black: Entertainment with goosebumps!
The Woman in Black is a good ol’ yarn and I am for that. On one level, Stephen Mallatratt’s script, which he adapted from Dame Susan Hill’s novel, is a straight-up ghost story — and it scared the bejeezus out of me a couple of times. (Fellow critic Jo Ledingham, who...
Teenage Dick: Everything I try sounds like a double entendre, so you fill in this headline
Although it contains things to admire, this production of Teenage Dick feels too much like an afterschool special or not great theatre for young people. Teenage Dick is playwright Mike Lew’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s Richard III as a high school drama....
Starwalker: Less than starry
Corey Payette’s new musical Starwalker is going to be meaningful to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. And there’s significant talent on the stage. I don’t mean to deny any of that when I say that, from a craft perspective, especially the craft...
Clementine: A (True) Story – tenderness that could be better shaped
Watching a tender kids’ show is a very pleasant way to spend 45 minutes on a Sunday morning. Writer Anaïs Pellin started her process with Clementine: A (True) Story during a workshop in Belgium, where she’s from. (Pellin is now based in Vancouver.) The workshop was...
The Cull: revelatory design and direction
Not to take anything away from the actors or anybody else, the real stars of this premiere stage production of The Cull are director Mindy Parfitt and set designer Amir Ofek. Their treatment of Michelle Riml and Michael St. John Smith’s script elevates it...
An Undeveloped Sound: an overwritten script
Exquisitely directed and designed, and responsively acted, An Undeveloped Sound is, nonetheless, thematically repetitive and therefor dull. Jonathon Young has set his new script in a call centre located in a crumbling, repurposed commercial outlet near an ocean. In my...
The Three-Act Structure: one way to build better stories
THREE-ACT TEMPLATE ACT 1 Ordinary World We see hero’s (the protagonist’s) world as it exists before their adventure begins. The Ordinary World may contain an event called the Inciting Incident, which kicks the story into action. Call to Adventure In the Call to...
Forgiveness: Why isn’t it more moving?
Considering the emotional nature of the material — the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and the abuse of prisoners of war in Japanese prison camps — Forgiveness falls surprisingly flat. Playwright Hiro Kanagawa’s stage adaptation is drawn from Mark...
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