Inheritance: a pick-the-path experience. The event is more rewarding than the script.
Inheritance: a pick-the-path experience is more successful as a political and educational tool than it is as art — and it’s worth seeing. The writing team of Daniel Arnold, Darrell Dennis, and Medina Hahn has created an insanely ambitious format. In the set-up for...
The Wedding Party: Say “I don’t”
It’s enough to put you off going to the theatre. There’s some good acting in The Wedding Party, but the script is so stupid. In The Wedding Party, playwright Kristen Thomson imagines a wedding reception going wrong. Sherry Boychuk, who comes from a humble family, is...
The House at Pooh Corner: a cosy address in the Hundred Acre Wood
My date for The House at Pooh Corner was a four-year-old whose primary language is Turkish. Just before I picked Eren up, along with his dad, he’d had a meltdown. And, despite these challenges he liked the show, which makes my review more or less irrelevant, but I...
Best of Enemies: worth befriending
Best of Enemies is a familiar and predictable story of a white man’s redemption, but it still matters — a great deal. And it’s true. In 1971, in Durham, North Carolina, Ann Atwater was a black housing activist and C.P. Ellis was the Exalted Cyclops of a Durham klavern...
Pot Kettle Black: not as disturbing as it wants to be
There’s about half of a very good play here and 100% of an excellent cast. In Pot Kettle Black, playwright Bill Marchant exploits the old characters-get-drunk-and-confessional/confrontational cliché. This approach has always struck me as a shortcut that gives...
God’s Lake: Go there
It’s a tribute to the power of God’s Lake that, after the applause had died down, the audience sat quietly in the theatre for so long that stage manager Jethelo Espaldon Cabilete felt compelled to tell us that the show was over. We knew that God’s Lake was over, of...
Talking Sex on Sunday: doesn’t hit the G-Spot
Why is it so hard to develop a decent script? Show after show goes up in which the script is a mess. That’s certainly the case with Talking Sex on Sunday. Sara-Jeanne Hosie wrote the book and lyrics for this musical and Shawn Macdonald acted as dramaturg. They start...
Steel Magnolias: Better when it’s breathing
I ran into a pal at intermission who floated a genius idea: cast Steel Magnolias with drag queens. Playwright Robert Harling is gay after all and the characters in Steel Magnolias feel very much like women as imagined by a gay man. In the play, we’re in small-town...
BEEP: Incoming
There’s nothing wrong with Beep. Designed by Australia’s Windmill Theatre for kids who are two to seven years old, it’s a simple story — told with puppets — about an outsider who is welcomed into village life. A furry little guy named Mort, who looks a lot like a...
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