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....
Girlfriend: Dump her
If this show was a date, every person in the audience would have blue balls — and I’m including the people with ovaries. Girlfriend is an endless tease. We’re in small-town Nebraska sometime in the 90s. Gay, geeky Will has just graduated from high school and he’s...
Cariboo Magi: an eccentric (and, in many ways, welcome) Christmas gift
Sometimes old friends turn up at Christmas and you’re not sure at first what to do with them. Although I remembered it fondly, it’s been years since I’ve seen Lucia Frangione’s Cariboo Magi and it took me a while to renegotiate the terms of our relationship. The play,...
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