Marjorie Prime is pretty prime
Playwright Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime provides a rewarding and unique theatrical experience. How often do I get to say that? In the first scene, we meet Marjorie and her husband Walter. She’s 85. He might be 30. She has significant memory loss. If he hears...
Don’t Pass Over this acting
In Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, an urban street corner is also a slave plantation and Egypt — because Moses and Kitch, the two Black friends who are hanging out there, can’t leave. Nwandu is taking inspiration from both the Bible’s Book of Exodus and Samuel...
Kinky Boots: Say yes to the heels!
Star power, baby! Stewart Adam McKensy, who plays Lola, the drag queen at the centre of the Arts Club’s mounting of Kinky Boots, has so much of it he’s like a constellation. And McKensy isn’t alone: there are many, many bright lights in director Barbara Tomasic’s...
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Don’t encourage them
Bard on the Beach in general and director Scott Bellis in particular have a bad habit of obscuring Shakespearean texts by slathering on coarse physical comedy. In Bellis’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there’s a lot of very enthusiastic slathering. Yes,...
Morag, You’re a Long Time Deid — much like this script
I’m rarely this bored in the theatre. During Act 1 of Morag, You’re a Long Time Deid, I reassured myself by mentally repeating, “You have free will. You can leave at intermission.” My companion didn’t want to leave. Act 2 was a bit better. My big problem with...
New Societies: fresh theatre
As I’m writing this, Re:Current Theatre’s New Societies is finishing up the last matinée of its run at Vancouver’s rEvolver Festival. The good news is that it’s going to be touring in Ontario this summer. I knew when I booked this show that its short Vancouver run was...
Vietgone: Wait for it
Stylistically, Vietgone is a huge mountain to climb. This production only gets part way up. But it’s an interesting evening — and provocative in productive ways. Off the top, an actor impersonating the play’s author Qui Nguyen tells us that this script is definitely...
Yellow Fever: oddly conceived, well performed
There’s some very nice work in the Firehall Art Centre’s production of Yellow Fever, but, under Donna Spencer’s direction, the production always feels slightly out of focus. Rick Shiomi’s film-noir style script is about Sam Shikaze, a classically hardboiled detective...
The Mountaintop: thrilling peaks (and some valleys)
For me, the doorway to this production didn’t open until about halfway through. At that point, it became transcendent — intermittently. By the end, I was moved. In Katori Hall’s 2009 script, she imagines Martin Luther King Jr. in his motel room on April 3, 1968, the...
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