Timon of Athens gives you too much time to look at the shoes
As a script, Timon of Athens has problems. Director Meg Roe’s production for Bard on the Beach doesn’t help it out. There are good reasons why Timon doesn’t enjoy a lot of productions. The play, which Shakespeare probably co-wrote with Thomas Middleton, features a...
Pearle Harbour’s Chautauqua: a haven in troubling times
Pearle Harbour’s Chautauquais like a revival meeting for liberals—and a lot of us could use reviving these days. Chautauquas were a kind of tent meeting popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that offered a combination of entertainment and...
Once: not twice
Once is more than enough. Yes, Once won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical in 2012, along with six other Tonys. And it has hauled in a bunch of other prizes, too, but man it’s boring! Here’s the plot: boy meets girl; they dither endlessly. To be...
As You Like It: you’ll love it
It could have been a stupid gimmick. Instead, it’s transcendent In this Bard on the Beach production of As You Like It, director Daryl Cloran has excised about half of Shakespeare’s text and replaced it with Beatles songs. Cloran sets his production in British...
Macbeth: bloody loud
Macbeth! All shouting! All the time! Okay, they’re not shouting all the time, but there is a heck of a lot of hollering in director Chris Abraham’s take on the Scottish play and all of that volume keeps us on the surface of the text. Moya O’Connell’s Lady Macbeth is a...
Slime: beautifully designed, tangentially told
She never steps onto the stage, but Shizuka Kai is the star of Slime. Kai designed the set, props, and puppets and her vision is one of the major forces that holds this production together. In Slime, playwright Bryony Lavery imagines the third international conference...
Victim Impact: an alienating take on a devastating crime
I could see a couple of doors that promised access to Victim Impact, but I couldn’t open either of them. This new documentary piece from Theatre Conspiracy explores the biggest Ponzi scheme in British Columbia history. Between 2003 and 2012, Rashida Samji, who is a...
Anne Frank: a far better telling of the story
I thought I didn’t need to see another production of The Diary of Anne Frank. I was wrong. This production from Fighting Chance deepened and revitalized the story for me and introduced me to exciting new talent. Wendy Kesselman’s 1997 adaption, which is being used...
For fun, visit Nell Gwynn
If you’re not having a good time onstage, you shouldn’t be there. Everybody in this cast of Nell Gwynn deserves to be onstage: they are having a fucking laugh riot. And their pleasure is infectious: the evening is infused with joy. Playwright Jessica Swale shows us...
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