RACISM: Is it awkward yet?
To the woman who demanded to see a white doctor in Toronto, to the men who brandished Confederate flags in a Muslim neighbourhood in Edmonton, to the people who hurl N-bombs on the streets, the #MakeItAwkward campaign doesn’t want to hate you. They just want to talk. Meeting hate with hate isn’t getting us anywhere. […]
Shakespeare’s ‘problem’ play gets powerful reading
When Shakespeare penned The Merchant of Venice somewhere during the 1590s, there were few Jews in England – they had been thrown out by the King in the late 13th century. But the hatreds and prejudices that these unfortunate people faced were still fresh enough for the Bard to write what has been termed his […]
REVIEW: Shakespeare comedy goes disco
The Merry Wives of Windsor, one of two Shakespearian plays featured this summer by Edmonton’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival, was a commissioned work – by a patron no less than Queen Elizabeth I. Her Majesty loved the portly, sack-quaffing knight that Shakespeare created for his Henry IV, Part 1 and further developed in Henry 1V, Part […]
Jazz fest a beautiful, scattered affair
It’s a pain in the ass to wrangle a night at the TD Edmonton International Jazz Festival and have it feel like an actual festival. If you didn’t know there was a jazz festival going on, you might not even notice, what with all the other festivals. We’re in festival gridlock season. Until July 2, […]
Dated musical sparkles at Mayfield
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change is one of those small, Off-Broadway musicals that just keep coming back. They are inexpensive to produce and proven crowd pleasers. The show is the summer offering at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. It runs until July 30. With book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro (Memphis, Nice Work If […]
REVIEW: Ryan Adams the real deal
Ryan Adams may be too country for rock ‘n’ roll, too rock ‘n’ roll for country and a bit too much of both to properly fit into the dreaded “alt-country” genre, but you’ll rarely find a more genuine personality on the whatever-you-want-to-call-it scene today. For an enthusiastic, beered-up crowd at the Jubilee Auditorium Friday night, […]
Jana O’Connor comedy a Teatro triumph
I haven’t laughed so hard at the Varscona Theatre … well, since the last play by Teatro La Quindicina. The current production of the screwball comedy Going, Going, Gone! at the Varscona Theatre until July 1 launches the writing career of a radiant new comic talent. Jana O’Connor is a long time member of the […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Ruth B hits the A list
That’s quite the little song Ruth B came up with – by herself, in her bedroom in Edmonton, on her cheap Yahama electric piano. You may have heard her ode to Peter Pan on the radio: Lost Boy. Professional producers left the song mostly untouched from the her original homemade YouTube video she posted in […]
PLAYBILL: Shakespeare rocks
Some people say that maybe William Shakespeare wasn’t such a big deal after all, and therefore maybe his work shouldn’t be taught in schools at the expense of other worthy or more modern playwrights – or remounted again and again to promote 500-year-old sexual and racial morals in one Shakespeare festival after another. To those […]
Classic Carousel colossal challenge
When it debuted in 1945, Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel reset the bar for musical theatre. Up until then, most Broadway shows featured flimsy plots on which to hang great songs by Cole Porter or Rogers and Hart. R & H turned to Liliom, a serious 1909 play by the Hungarian Fernec Molnar. Molnar’s dark tale […]
