by Colin Thomas | May 4, 2019 | Review
This script’s heart doesn’t start pumping until well in to Act 2. Until then, it’s on the artificial life support of a visually dynamic production. In The Great Leap, American playwright Lauren Yee tells the story of a Chinese-American kid named Manford. Although he’s...
by Colin Thomas | Apr 17, 2019 | Review
The title is a spoiler. The show is called Bed & Breakfast for Christ’s sake so, when gay couple Brett and Drew spend their first half hour onstage together dithering about whether or they’re going to open a B&B, I felt like screaming, “Haven’t you read the...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 28, 2019 | Review
There are good bits, but overall it’s a mess. And the primary faults are in the writing and direction. In The Orchard (After Chekhov), Sarena Parmar, who grew up in Kelowna, resets Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in the Okanagan in 1974. The central...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 23, 2019 | Review
Morris Panych’s The Shoplifters is so slight that it almost doesn’t exist—although it does contain the beginning of an idea. That idea is that raw capitalism is unjust. Dom, a zealous security guard who’s training in a Superstore kind of place, apprehends a savvy old...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 7, 2019 | Review
The animating argument of True Crime is that audience members are complicit in a moral transgression. I don’t buy it. So, philosophically, the show is boring to me. But True Crime does deliver beautifully worked surfaces. Torquil Campbell, who performs...
