Hedda Gabler: Makes you watch
Hedda Gabler rides the tension between realism and melodrama. This United Players production gets that combo right enough of the time to provide a consistently intriguing, often impressive evening. Playwright Henrik Ibsen is known as the father of theatrical realism...
Oz: Not so wonderful or wizardly
“Is it going to be over soon?” is not what you want to hear when you take a kid to the theatre, but that’s what my partner was getting from his eight-year-old grandson during this production of Oz. I don’t blame the boy. I was wondering the same thing. Patrick...
My Little Tomato: Tasty until it’s not
I really enjoyed My Little Tomato — until I started to get tired of it. It’s audacious, that’s for damn sure. In Rick Tae’s new script, Keaton Chu inherits his parents’ produce farm when they’re killed in a freak accident. Produce wholesaler Joe McKinley interrupts...
Sense and Sensibility: How about some respect?
There might be a satisfying production to be had based on Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility but I haven’t seen it yet. The script itself is problematic. In the story, when Henry Dashwood dies, the law says his estate, including his...
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...
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