by Colin Thomas | Feb 14, 2025 | Review
Style is a tricky thing. There’s a bunch of it in playwright Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade, but director Donna Spencer and her cast don’t always know what to do with it. In Women of the Fur Trade, it’s “eighteen hundred and something something” and we’re...
by Colin Thomas | Oct 27, 2024 | Review
This is an odd compliment I know, but, watching Ridge, I kept thinking, “This show is like a block of wood.” It’s so solid and complete: so dense in its ethics and intelligence, so wholly and naturally itself. Written by Brendan McLeod, brought to fruition with the...
by Colin Thomas | Apr 19, 2024 | Review
I wasn’t very engaged — I checked my watch a couple of times — and then tears were streaming down my face. For me this production of Keith Barker’s This Is How We Got Here took a sharp U-turn at about the 60-minute mark of its 80-minute playing time. It takes a while...
by Colin Thomas | Oct 15, 2023 | Review
Peace Country is a huge accomplishment. I love its urgency, its complexity, its humour — and its weirdness. Its weirdness — well, its eccentricity — lies in the play’s structure. Pedro Chamale’s new script is set in an area also known as Peace River Country, an aspen...
by Colin Thomas | May 28, 2023 | Review
I won’t give away the confession in Derek Chan’s Happy Valley, but it’s the best part of the script. In this interdisciplinary solo, Chan sings and recites poetry — often in Cantonese with English surtitles. We also get Cantonese surtitles. Chan grew up in Hong Kong...
