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 […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Blitzen Trapper keeper
While tagged with a variety of labels, from alt-country to indie folk, Blitzen Trapper has been going strong since the turn of the millennium, and seem to get stronger with every album. The Portland quintet self-released its first three albums, including their opening salvo, an eponymous release in 2003. After their most recent effort, 2015’s […]
REVIEW: Tool plays it cool
Tool is one of those shows where you feel like you saw the music and heard the lights. In other words, it was an amazing psychedelic rock concert at Rogers Place on Tuesday night, even if it took time to get there. The concert felt underwhelming at first, and not much different than Tool’s last […]
PLAYBILL: No rewrites at Improvaganza
We’re all just making it up as we go along. Every moment of life is an act of spontaneous creativity, and every creative action starts with a decision made in the moment, which leads to another decision, and then an action and so on and so forth, until voila! Congratulations, you’ve written Les Miserables. Improv […]
