counterFACTUAL: Maybe FACTUAL would be better
What? Why? So much nothing happens in counterFACTUAL that I was genuinely confused when the lights came up. I couldn’t quite believe it was over. Wasn’t there going to be some kind of ending, some kind of resolution or at least an intriguing cliffhanger? But there was...
Transform Cabaret Festival Opening Night Bash: Revolutionary. Joy.
Last night's Opening Night Bash at the Transform Cabaret Festival was … transformative for me. Moreso than last year's. I don’t think that’s because this year’s edition was artistically “better”, whatever that means; I think it’s because the overwhelming awfulness of...
Incidental Moments of the Day: extraordinary ordinariness
Incidental Moments of the Day is complex, engaging, and so potentially inflammatory that I want to warn you before you watch it. Between 2010 and 2013, playwright Richard Nelson wrote four plays about the Apple family of Rhinebeck,...
Art Heist: nobody knows whodunnit
There’s a lot of foreplay in this show and no orgasm. In Art Heist, playwrights TJ Dawe and Ming Hudson offer an experience in which audiences of up to 10 people sleuth around Granville Island trying to figure out who pulled off a half-billion-dollar theft from...
A Hundred Words for Snow: but where’s the subtlety?
This is the first time I’ve attended a live performance since the beginning of the plague, so I’m going to start off by talking about that. Going in, I was mildly freaked out; I’m 68 and I’m taking immunosuppressant drugs. Because I’m vulnerable, I wore a mask and a...
Three Little Pieces — with big hearts
Who wants to be seduced? I’m not talking about hard-wired seduction, the kind that’s all about your junk. I’m talking about the kind that opens your heart to irrational possibilities — like love — the kind that sets you floating in the universe and leaves you feeling...
B bombs
I was so painfully bored after the first hour of B that I fled to my bed and watched the remaining 45 minutes the next morning. In those 45 minutes, Guillermo Calderón’s script gets a tiny bit better. A tiny bit. In Calderón’s play, which is set in Chile, three...
Good Things To Do is a good thing to do
Friends, do yourselves a favour and get tickets for the remaining online performances of Good Things To Do from Rumble Theatre. They’re only five bucks at Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rumble-presents-good-things-to-do-tickets-102448897410 There are three...
Tom Kerr, “a giant of a man”
Hi everybody, Glen Cairns, the longtime partner of theatre director and teacher Tom Kerr, wrote the tribute I'm sharing here. Stay well, Colin The fifth of eight children born to Commercial Traveler John Kerr and his wife, Rosina Montgomery Kerr, Tom was born in the...
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