REVIEW: Shakespeare’s R&J gives new life to classic romance
Shakespeare’s R&J, from Edmonton’s adventurous indie-theatre Kill Your Television, is a remount of their successful original, which won a Sterling Award for Outstanding Independent Production. The play is billed as a “re-imagining” of the original by director Kevin Sutley, and has been retooled several times by the playwright Joe Calarco – who is credited in […]
Sweet seedy dreams in Slumberland Motel
C.M. Zuby’s set design for the world premiere of Shadow Theatre’s comedy-drama Slumberland Motel drops us down in every seedy motel room you’ve ever seen – shabby tiles on the floor, plastic lampshades, chintzy clown posters on the wall. You can practically smell the sour stench of cheap beer in the air. Into this bereft […]
Russian opera hacked in superb Onegin
Back in February of 2014, two gleeful Vancouver musical buffs, Veda Hille and Amiel Gladstone, presented A Craigslist Cantata in The Club at the Citadel. It was a sprightly song-and-dance look at some of the weird items presented for sale on the internet bazaar. It was a hit here, as it was elsewhere across the […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: K.Flay cuts deep
Kristine Flaherty isn’t the only artist to reference self-harming in a song. From Alessia Cara’s Scars to Your Beautiful to Linkin Park’s Breaking the Habit, to Johnny Cash singing about hurting himself with Nine Inch Nails, it’s a thing. Blood in the Cut is just the latest self-harming hit to strike a nerve. Playing the […]
PLAYBILL: Onegin, twogin, threegin
It’s nice to imagine that the great classical composers could jump into a time machine to see their work made into “rock operas” hundreds of years later – and that they’d like it. Hey, if there’d been rock ‘n’ roll back then, they would’ve rocked – or so rockers like to think. Moot point, as […]
Corb Lund and Ian Tyson: The Last cowboys
There was an edge of sadness to Saturday night’s Corb Lund-Ian Tyson collaboration at the Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton – a sense of that the cowboy lifestyle they sing so passionately about is going away forever. “Our good times are all gone” goes the line in Four Strong Winds – which ended the concert (as […]
REVIEW: The Humans a chilling family affair
American playwright Stephen Karam wanted to write a horror story. Given the unsettling atmosphere of the run-down New York tenement where he sets his new play, The Humans, at the Citadel Theatre until Jan. 27 for the Canadian premiere, and the sudden unexplained noise that rocks the apartment, the lights that suddenly go out and […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Corb Lund meets Ian Tyson
Saturday night two Alberta heroes take over the Jubilee Auditorium for a show of epic proportions. Corb Lund is of course an Albertan legend, with more nominations and awards than most other artists have hits. One Juno, an insane ELEVEN CCMAs, and a whole lot of others that are too numerous to mention. And all […]
PLAYBILL: The Humans hits a nerve
Oy, vey – we’ve only just recovered from another awfully awkward holiday family dinner – and now Citadel Theatre hits us with a nightmare scenario of yet another awfully awkward holiday family dinner for its first play of 2018. Fresh from New York, The Humans is a black comedy that takes place entirely in a […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Big Boi kicks off concert season
Does this count as a blast from the past? Coming to town this weekend is one of the members of a group that made such a joyous splash in 2003 with a song called Hey Ya – the happiest, go-ahead-and-say “funnest” song of the year. From OutKast, the rapper Big Boi performs the Union Hall […]
