The Comedy Company balances hilarity with horror
Neil Grahn is a very funny fellow. We first realized that when, with three other jovial people calling themselves Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, Grahn helped solidify the Fringe in its very earliest days. Grahn has been around making us laugh in various ways ever since. (Full disclosure: We worked on a number of […]
Ready to tour again, Ariana Grande plays Edmonton
Sometimes it takes a while for the biggest music stars to come to town – and when they do, they start at the top. Ariana Grande is making her first appearance in Edmonton next spring, playing Rogers Place on Thursday, April 25. It’s just one date on her “Sweetener World Tour” behind her new album […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Renewed Stone Temple Pilots to rock Howler
The Bear’s Annual Halloween Howler celebrates its 26th anniversary on at the Shaw Conference Centre on Friday night with surviving stalwarts of the alternative rock genre – Stone Temple Pilots. The band soared to the peak of their genre in the 1990s with hit after hit after hit, from Plush to Vasoline to Big Bang […]
PLAYBOT: Comedy Company, ten-HUT!
Long before trolls ruined the Internet for everyone, Edmonton hosted some Trolls of its own. These were good Trolls. Playwright and actor Neil Grahn is well known to us – a comic conspirator in the so-called Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, a legendary sketch comedy troupe that was Edmonton’s answer to Kids in the […]
Foo Fighters keep rock ‘n’ roll ALIVE in Edmonton
Dave Grohl is more than the leader of one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll acts on the circuit today. He’s a soldier who’s gone to great lengths to demonstrate that the swagger and fury that goes into breastbone-palpitating four-chord anthems isn’t going away anytime soon. As he and his loyal crew of ear-bleeders best […]
Young the Giant brings Mirror Master to Edmonton
It’s a real trick to score radio hits and tour large halls in major cities and still be called “indie.” Enter Young the Giant, which will play the Jubilee Auditorium on Friday, March 1, 2019. The Southern California quintet is touring behind their fourth studio album, Mirror Master. Tickets start at $27.50 and go on […]
John Cleese, not quitting after all, returns to Edmonton
John Cleese is just about the coolest old guy we know. Aside from his abundant post-Python fame playing hilariously unpleasant dad characters in sitcoms like Speechless, he’s proven himself a potent liberal voice on social media – tearing apart stupidity and cruelty with his keen yet subtle wit. Just one example: On the current trend […]
Blood: a Scientific Romance marred by gothic melodrama
The Maggie Tree is a small feisty local company that dedicates itself to theatrical projects initiated by women. Under that rubric they have given us a series of well-produced plays that have spoken to a wide audience of theatre-goers. Perhaps the best known was Nancy McAlear’s disquieting mounting of Belinda Cornish’s anti-animal testing Category E […]
REVIEW: Scottish comic does his people proud
Craig Ferguson did a remarkable show at the Winspear Centre on Thursday night – considering that he appears to have no appreciable career plans since his talk show ended in 2014, beyond doing stand-up dates. On what calls the “Hobo Fabulous” tour, Ferguson is a dyed-in-the-tartan Scot, for sure, and left absolutely nothing on table […]
Arkells, now an arena act, plays Edmonton in 2019
After years of “bubbling under” in the turbulent world of indie rock, Arkells is the latest Canadian rock band to ascend to the mainstream. The final confirmation is today’s announcement of their first cross-country arena tour. In the wake of today’s release of their new album Rally Cry, the band will play Thursday, Feb. 7, […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: They Might Be Giants stomp into Edmonton
The Gods of indie rock have smiled on Edmonton once again – They Might Be Giants is coming to town. At the Starlite Friday night, this unusual band has spanned genres and decades with the sort of introspective, esoteric, insufferably quirky and intelligent pop music that’s so hard to pin down it comes unravelled in […]
Edmonton lights up with legal marijuana
So, like every media outlet in Edmonton, I go to cover the first day of cannabis being legal in Canada – and literally the first guy I run into is Ibrahim Shurie, a youth worker with the Somali Canadian Cultural Society of Edmonton. He wants to know why there’s such a big line-up in a […]