PLAYBILL: Women rule Edmonton theatre
The only thing that’s missing from the new interactive murder mystery at the Citadel Theatre is the murder. Spoiler: It’s not a real murder. Also missing is any notion that the improvisational crime thriller Undercover (A Spontaneous Theatre Creation) is going to be your usual audience-interactive murder mystery – because in the hands of the […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Geoff Berner stays on message
Rachel Notley is on the record for being a “huge” fan of Geoff Berner. “I love his sense of humour, his angles on issues, he’s very cutting, he’s very witty,” the Premier of Alberta told GigCity in 2016. And Geoff Berner – the klezmer-loving accordion-squeezing political folksinger from B.C. – is on the record for […]
PLAYBILL: A new kind of high school drama
If you consider the arts a bellwether for society’s cultural disruptions, it makes perfect sense we’re lately seeing more stories about transgendered people. It is not a coincidence. It’s not an epidemic. What was hidden is now being explored. Times are changing, acceptance is the way forward, and the best method to combat ignorance and […]
PLAYBILL: A real Cinderella story
There must be something compelling about the Cinderella story that it keeps being told again and again and in so many ways – more than 2,000 years after it was written. Following the first example of a tale of a slave girl who marries an Egyptian prince through a series of improbable events, Alberta Ballet […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: The Heat is on!
There was a seminal moment in the annals of rock ‘n’ roll, in some garage somewhere, where rockabilly musicians decided to play punk rock – or maybe it was the other way around. There may have been a fist fight. Hey, what if I used this upright bass to play Black Flag songs? How dare […]
PLAYBILL: Northern Light shines on Catholic sexual politics
The only girl in a Catholic family longs to be an “altar boy” in the latest offering from Northern Light Theatre – the second of three plays this season exploring the sexual identities of women set against Christian culture. The last one was heavy: The Testament of Mary, wherein long after the events that took […]
REVIEW: Santana parties like it’s 1969
It’s been 50 years, or close enough for rock ‘n’ roll, since Carlos Santana played Woodstock – and you get the feeling it’s just been one long glorious guitar solo ever since. This 70-year-old Latin-rock legend still likes to have fun. It sure looked like Santana and his stellar band were having a blast at […]
REVIEW: Bahamas pretty heavy for soft rock
There’s a keen musical mind lurking behind the dark wit of the man who calls himself Bahamas. Or maybe it’s the other way around. During his show at the Winspear Centre on Monday night, Bahamas picked out a couple in the front row who’d told him they just got engaged to his song Lost in […]
PLAYBILL: Children of God about redemption
Why the Canadian government thought it was a good idea to forcibly remove indigenous children from their families and place them into what turned out to be thoroughly horrible “residential schools” remains a mystery. Or anyway, “to assimilate them into Euro-Canadian culture” is just not a very good reason. In fact, the act was nothing […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Bahamas or Dwight Yoakam, tough choice
You concert promoters need to get it together. You give us weeks of nothing but sporadic metal and classic rock shows during a usually dead time of year – and then on the same otherwise unassuming first Monday night of March you book two must-see acts in two concert halls at opposite sides of town. […]
Jack Semple channels B.B. King
The late B.B. King revealed more personality in three notes than all of those wankers who made it to the cover of Look At Me I Play Guitar magazine. There was even a rumour going around that B.B. didn’t actually know how to play chords (like Thelonious Monk didn’t know how to play the piano). […]
PLAYBILL: La Traviata in Chez Pierre
The adventures of Edmonton’s “other” opera company – Mercury Opera – often feel like an old Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland movie. By golly, we’ve found a barn, you’ve got some singers, Joe has some lights – let’s put on a show! In the past, Mercury Opera has staged operas in LRT stations, at circus sideshows in […]
