by Colin Thomas | Apr 9, 2022 | Review
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show that’s run so hot and cold. There are elements and passages in Alberta Theatre Projects’ In Wonderland that are transporting — and long stretches in which nothing fires. In this two-act adventure, playwright Anna Cummer offers a...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 8, 2020 | Review
The motto of Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company is “Destroy the audience!” and the Village Voice has crowned her “the queen of unease”. But Itsazoo’s production of Lee’s Straight White Men left me disappointingly untroubled and unimplicated. In Straight White Men, which...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 16, 2019 | Review
This play could have been more than it is. In Meghan Gardiner’s Gross Misconduct, Deke, who’s been in jail for a long time—and who, incredibly, seems to have had a two-bunk cell to himself for years—finds out that he’s got a cellmate all of a sudden: a young guy named...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 9, 2019 | Review
If only it had a middle. Yoga Play has an enticing beginning and a meaningful conclusion. But, in between, it gets lost in low-stakes plotting. In Yoga Play, American writer Dipika Guha takes aim at the commercialization of an ancient ascetic practice. Think...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 8, 2018 | Review
Adapter and director Peter Jorgensen gets a lot of things right in this musical version of It’s a Wonderful Life at the Gateway. The Arts Club has repeatedly trotted out Philip Grecian’s politically neutered stage adaptation of Frank Capra’s 1946 movie, but...
