by Colin Thomas | May 2, 2025 | Review
A strange thing is happening to what is, to me, recent gay history: it’s being made holy. I’m thinking of director Joe Mantello’s TV version of playwright Mart Crowley’s 1968 script, The Boys in the Band, for instance. Mantello’s interpretation is an endless parade of...
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...
