Triangle Factory Fire Project a distressingly familiar tragedy
To launch its 60th season, Walterdale Theatre has chosen The Triangle Factory Fire Project, a highly dramatic retelling of the deadliest industrial disaster in New York’s history. Similar recent worldwide events have served to tear the Century-old disaster out of the dusty pages of newspapers and into a renewed currency. The play runs until Oct. […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Major crush on Major Love
Major Love is being touted as this city’s new supergroup – and there’s more than a little truth to that statement. Led by the extraordinary musical wizardry of Colleen Brown, who’s released some stellar solo material herself, when a chance meeting with the braintrust of Scenic Route To Alaska in England led to a group […]
PLAYBOT: Theatre season off to morbid start
Vern Thiessen is a busy man. His play about Shakespeare’s dead wife Shakespeare’s Will just finished its run – in a graveyard! – and now the esteemed local playwright will star in his own play Lenin’s Embalmers, a Studio Theatre production Oct. 11-20 at the Timms Centre for the Arts. He plays Lenin. Current state: […]
UP+DT REVIEW: Weird wonderful walkabout
By far the weirdest and most wonderful thing witnessed during a walkabout at the Up+Downtown indie rock festival on Friday night was Tanya Tagaq. She makes Yoko Ono look like Britney Spears. At the storied McDougall United Church, a lovely space with cavernous acoustics, the Polaris Prize-winning Inuk throat singer took several hundred people on […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: UP+DT takes a stand
A quick recap of the controversy leading up to this weekend’s Up + Downtown Music Festival: On Sept. 19, after organizers caught wind that former Misfits singer Michale Graves had allegedly shared and written some controversial things on social media, his appearance was cancelled. “Upon review,” a statement read, “his views expressed do not align […]
EIFF: Rabbit so good it needs to be proud to be Canadian
Films like Rabbit make it easy on reviewers. When the material and performances are as nearly flawless as they are here, the only thing that needs to be decided is how much to gush – so get ready. This film could easily be the best dramatic feature at this year’s Edmonton International Film Festival. It […]
Twenty One Pilots adds Edmonton to Banditø Tøur
From Stressed Out to world domination in just three short years, Twenty One Pilots is finally getting to headline Edmonton’s new hockey arena. The Ohio duo plays Rogers Place on May 15, 2019, one of several dates recently added to the second leg of a world tour behind their new album Trench, out Oct. 5. […]
EIFF: Bel Canto serves palatable pablum
Bel Canto, starring Julianne Moore and Christopher Lambert, is a historically revisionist melodrama so loosely based on the 1996 Peruvian Japanese Embassy Hostage Crisis that actual Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was renamed President Masuda in the film. That should tell you how close this one sticks to the facts. To be honest, it’s more directly […]
Paul McCartney rocks Edmonton with marathon concert
The trouble with setting the bar so high is that you might never get over yourself again. This is now known as the “Paul McCartney Rule.” The British Rock God’s epic and self-worshipping marathon of a rock concert at Rogers Place on Sunday night was Beatleseque nostalgia lovefest of the highest order – from one […]
REVIEW: It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad Lemoine world!
Skirts On Fire takes Stewart Lemoine’s usual volatile collection of eccentrics and cheery misfits, vigorously shakes them together and sets them to fizzing like an exotic cocktail. If you’re looking for an existential probe of humanity’s existence you’re searching the wrong planet. A remount playing at the Varscona Theatre through October 13, Lemoine’s 1950s New […]
REVIEW: Once, twice, three times we love you!
“Let me entertain you!” sings Baby Rose in Gypsy, giving voice to what might be called the mantra of the American musical. Once, the new musical currently gracing the Shoctor Stage of the Citadel Theatre, demonstrates with a cunning combination of simplicity, heart and charm that a great musical doesn’t have to pound you into […]
