Forget About Tomorrow: Get to the point
When I was returning to my seat after intermission, I had virtually no interest in what was going to happen next. That’s not a good sign. In Forget About Tomorrow, playwright Jill Daum tells the story of Jane, whose husband Tom develops early-onset Alzheimer’s. The...
The After After Party is a banger of a night out
The day after seeing The After After Party, I’m still laughing as I describe it to friends. The laughter is uncontrollable. Like I’m being tickled. By unseen hands. That belong to somebody that I like but can’t identify. If you’re up for an audacious good time, The...
An Almost Holy Picture should come with trigger warnings about bad parenting
In An Almost Holy Picture, Samuel Gentle delivers a monologue about his relationship with his daughter Ariel. Samuel is such a bad parent that I wanted to stab him. To make matters worse, he is a bad parent in a very obvious way. The moral of the story and the action...
Pss Pss: Why so old-fashioned?
It’s fine. It’s okay. It’s kind of charming. But that’s not enough. In Pss Pss, Swiss artists Camilla Pessi and Simone Fassari play mute clown characters who meet, struggle for possession of an apple, and, through increasingly challenging acrobatics, end up on a...
Fun Home: talent galore—and lesbians centre stage
It’s subtle, which is great. It’s queer, which is welcome. It’s also narratively unsurprising. But it’s still the best show in town. The musical Fun Home is based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In both, Bechdel, who is lesbian,...
Next to Normal: more interesting for the local talent than the prize-winning material
The cast is talented and the production is musically precise, but Next to Normal is not a well-built musical—despite having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010. Act 1 is mostly boring because the protagonist, a housewife named Diana who has bipolar disorder with...
No Foreigners delivers less than it appears to offer
No Foreigners is extremely stylish. Unfortunately, that style is rarely theatrical. No Foreigners is a kind of fairytale, digitally told. In it, a young Chinese-Canadian man finds out that he can inherit his grandfather’s wealth, but only if he can tell the executor...
The Skin of Our Teeth: Maybe not this time
It’s easy to see why Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth was hailed as a great work when it premiered in 1942. And it’s easy to see why director Sarah Rodgers would choose to stage it in 2018. But that doesn’t mean it’s worth watching for two and a half hours. The...
Ruined: Don’t look away
War is fought on women’s bodies. That truth is at the heart of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined. Nottage sets Ruined during the war in Congo, which was officially over in 2002 but continues to rage. The action unfolds in Mama Nadi’s roadside canteen and brothel. Government and...
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