by Colin Thomas | Apr 4, 2025 | Review
It’s not terrible. That’s the best I can muster. Playwright and director Mieko Ouchi’s Burning Mom, which is based on her own mom’s experience, is about a 63-year-old Calgary woman named Dorothy, who heads off to Burning Man with her adult son Kevin and his pal...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 14, 2025 | Review
A bunch of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band didn’t work for me, but I’m glad to see the Arts Club producing it. Yee’s script is a light-hearted and sentimental fantasy — with surfer rock songs — about the still-reverberating tremors of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 22, 2025 | Review
Primary Trust won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but it’s not that good. A character named Kenneth is both the narrator and protagonist of Eboni Booth’s script. Orphaned in particularly traumatic circumstances when he was ten, Kenneth has invented an imaginary...
by Colin Thomas | Jan 24, 2025 | Review
Well, swash my buckles. That was a good time I didn’t see coming. The Three Musketeers, I thought. Yay. Swordfighting, glamourized murder, general yo-ho butchness: not my things. I feared this production would be superficial and boring. But, as it turns out it’s...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 1, 2024 | Review
Perhaps the kindest way to start is to say that, artistically, Miracle on 34th Street is a tough sell in 2024. (And the realistic way to start is to say that this Arts Club production fails to sell it.) Miracle on 34th Street is thin, sentimental, and painfully...
