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....
Out of Order: That’s what I call Covid relief!
Oh sweet, sweet sexiness! There’s darkness in this pandemic-themed, pandemic-era production from the circus collective Les 7 Doigts (The 7 Fingers) but, for me, the overriding experience is about the spectacular joys of embodiment and connection. Through The Cultch,...
Poetic Consultations: easy communion
I got to talk to a charming actor from Paris. Considering we were complete strangers when we started, our conversation was surprisingly easy and intimate. And, at the end of it, Johanna White performed a poem for me based on her assessment of my needs. The experience...
An Acorn: abstraction over action
Early on, the speakers in An Acorn say, “It could be that we dreamed this/It could be that we desired this/It could be that we have no idea who we are.” It doesn’t take long to figure out that they’re talking about environmental collapse: “I want to get used to the...
Moby Dick in the Dark: leviathan redux
Why? Moby Dick in the Dark, the latest production from Theatre in the Dark, is an audio adaptation of Herman Melville’s enormous novel, Moby-Dick: or, the White Whale. Listening to the audiobook takes 24 hours. This audio play lasts a mere hour and 40 minutes,...
K Body and Mind: An excellent puzzle — to start with
I liked it best when I was the most confused. The three-episode video series K Body and Mind, which was written and directed by Conor Wylie, has a fantastic set-up and an extraordinarily stylish mode of delivery. The story takes place sometime in the twenty-first...
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