The Here and This and Now: Is that all there is?
Skip to the epilogue: the last five minutes of this production are by far the best. There are two earlier sections. Each unit is distinct. In Part 1, we witness a training session in which a sales manager named Niall coaches three pharmaceutical reps on how to make a...
Someone Like You: Cyrano de Bergerac but more on the nose
Politically, Christine Quintana’s new audio play Someone Like You is busy: it takes on fat phobia, racism, misogyny, and the capitalist commodification of human longing. That’s a worthy line-up of targets. Too worthy, as it turns out. Thematically, Someone Like You...
yellow objects: an adventure
There’s a lot going on here — and a good deal of it is engaging. Playwright Derek Chan’s yellow objects is about Hong Kong’s democracy movement, which was crushed in 2020 — although its spirit lives on. Artistically, yellow objects is adventuresome. Ten audience...
The Boy in the Moon: gazing at him
Theatre for grown-ups. I’m grateful. This version of The Boy in the Moon is playwright Emil Sher’s adaptation of Ian Brown’s memoir about raising Walker, his severely disabled son, with his wife Johanna Schneller. It’s tough. Describing Walker at birth, the character...
Post-Democracy: argument instead of discovery
Strong acting. Taut dialogue. Handsome set. But there’s no thematic revelation. In Hannah Moscovitch’s Post-Democracy — which is receiving its world premiere at Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange — a Chief Operating Officer named Lee is trying to convince his boss,...
Alice in Wonderland: Alice unchained
All alone in my office, I was laughing out loud and clapping my hands. Bad Hat Theatre’s Alice in Wonderland is streaming online, but it does what theatre does best: it activates the concrete imagination. Without resorting to illusion, it uses sounds, bodies, and...
Silent Sky: a good night under the stars
Writing this review of United Players' production of Silent Sky isn’t as challenging as, say, astrophysics, but it’s still tricky, okay? I enjoyed the show a lot. Playwright Lauren Gunderson’s script about the turn-of-the-twentieth-century career of pioneering...
Night Passing: You can give it a pass
Well-intentioned and over two-hours long, the audio play Night Passing is, unfortunately, boring. Set in Ottawa in 1958, playwright Scott Button’s script explores the entrapment of gay men and lesbians by the RCMP. Fueled by anti-communist hysteria south of the...
Imagine Van Gogh: Take the leap
Go. But take earplugs. *** I was happy for hours after seeing Imagine Van Gogh. To experience the piece, you enter a huge room — in Vancouver, it’s at the Convention Centre — in which the towering walls and, somehow it seems, the floor, are rear-projection surfaces....
Subscribe Free!
Sign up for the FRESH SHEET newsletter and get curated local, national, and international arts coverage — all sorts of arts — every week.
Contact
Drop a line to colinthomas@telus.net.
Support
FRESH SHEET, the reviews and FRESH SHEET, the newsletter are available free. But writing them is a full-time job and arts criticism is in peril. Please support FRESH SHEET by sending an e-transfer to colinthomas@telus.net or by becoming a patron on Patreon.
Website by Mighty Sparrow Design.