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...
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...
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