Gardens Speak: Listen
A handful of times during Tanya El Khoury’s sound installation Gardens Speak, I had to slow myself down, to stop, to let the gravity of the information I was receiving land, and to honestly consider my response to it. That means that Gardens Speak was doing its job. ...
Noises Off: Right On
There’s something sublime about farce when it’s well done and this Arts Club production of Noises Off is very well done. In Michael Frayn’s 1982 farce, a hapless company of English actors rehearses and then performs … a farce. In Nothing On, the...
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story – hilarious, devastating, political
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story is equal parts outraged and outrageous, compassionate and hilarious — klezmer concert and play. It’s a fictionalized account of the marriage of playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s great grandparents, Chaim and Chaya, who met in Halifax in...
Unikkaaqtuat: a gift from the North
Unikkaaqtuat, which is billed as a circus, is a sincere and generous gift from the rich traditions of several northern peoples. From my southern settler perspective, some of the show is gorgeous and some of it is boring. In its framing device, Levy, a young Indigenous...
House and Home: a recommended short-term rental
It’s kind of a shapeless bag of jewels, but it’s still a bag of jewels. In House and Home, playwright Jenn Griffin has created a fantastically dark and funny absurdist world. It’s set in Vancouver — about a week and a half from now. Housing is bruisingly expensive....
Gramma: this 75 minutes could age you
Playwright and solo performer Maki Yi means well with Gramma and it starts off promisingly, but it quickly becomes very boring. Gramma is based on the relationship that Korean-Canadian Yi had with her first Canadian landlady, a demanding 90-year-old woman who allowed...
Infinity: actually 90 (very mixed) minutes
Two of the three characters in Infinity claim that they can hear time. I listened very closely, but I couldn’t hear the play’s heartbeat. Hannah Moscovitch’s script is emotionally alienating and its ambitious themes are underdeveloped. But I enjoyed it — because the...
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: a production of many (excellent) colours
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is a supremely dumb musical but, if you get its exuberance right, you have something — and director Barbara Tomasic’s production gets the exuberance right. Joseph started out as a 15-minute pop cantata that Tim Rice and...
Holiday at the Elbow Room Café: Not a vacation you want to go on
Where’s the script? It feels like playwright Dave Deveau has forgotten to write one. Act 1 of Holiday at the Elbow Room Café is just a set-up that doesn’t make sense: a small group of characters gets trapped inside the once iconic, now shuttered Vancouver eatery....
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