by Colin Thomas | Mar 4, 2023 | Review
This style is so hard to pull off. But this creative team is mostly doing it very well — sometimes astonishingly so. Zahida Rahemtulla’s The Wrong Bashir is a farce. An Ismaili farce. In the story, a nominating committee selects Bashir Ladha, a philosophy student who...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 25, 2023 | Review
The Woman in Black is a good ol’ yarn and I am for that. On one level, Stephen Mallatratt’s script, which he adapted from Dame Susan Hill’s novel, is a straight-up ghost story — and it scared the bejeezus out of me a couple of times. (Fellow critic Jo Ledingham, who...
by Colin Thomas | Feb 19, 2023 | Review
Although it contains things to admire, this production of Teenage Dick feels too much like an afterschool special or not great theatre for young people. Teenage Dick is playwright Mike Lew’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s Richard III as a high school drama....
by Colin Thomas | Feb 18, 2023 | Review
Corey Payette’s new musical Starwalker is going to be meaningful to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. And there’s significant talent on the stage. I don’t mean to deny any of that when I say that, from a craft perspective, especially the craft...
by Colin Thomas | Jan 8, 2023 | Review
On one level, I was seduced by the understatement of this production and the fine acting it contains. But, about halfway through watching Flowers of the Rarest, I wrote in my notebook, “I’m ready for some plot development” and, a bit later: “Besides plot, what is...