REVIEW: Big Stage Musical Offers Insight Into Serious Teen Struggles
Dear Evan Hansen arrives at the Jubilee Auditorium trailing a tsunami of audience love, a sheaf of great reviews and six Tony Awards – and it’s a musical that deals with mental health. It runs through Feb. 16. Totally contemporary, it’s the story of Evan (Stephen Christopher Anthony), an anti-social, awkward and painfully shy 17-year-old […]
Studio Theatre’s Dog Tale Shows Shakespeare’s Human Side
William Shakespeare used dogs as a metaphor over 200 hundred times in his plays – but there is only one role for an actual dog. It’s Crab, which makes a brief appearance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and is described by his clownish owner Launce as “the sourest-natured dog that lives.” So it was […]
Catalyst Playwright’s Artistic Vision Comes to Life in Stunning Spy Thriller
Edmonton’s edgy and adventurous Catalyst Theatre has been pushing toward its new production The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare since its earliest beginnings. Over the years it has excelled in award-winning forays into Gothic thrillers (like Frankenstein, Hunchback, and Nevermore) and with its last production here about the Black Donnellys (based on the 19th […]
REVIEW: The Farce is Strong With Manic Mayfield Comedy
Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy Noises Off premiered in 1982 and has gone on to become the ultimate classic farce and theatrical in-joke – displaying to hilarious effect how private passions can intrude on public performance. The comedy has been around for so long that anyone who spends much time in the theatre will have endured […]
John Ullyatt Soars in Life-Affirming Theatrical Experiment at the Citadel
Every Brilliant Thing is another effort by the Citadel to pry open our concept of what theatre is. Part of the “Highwire Series” of small experimental productions, it’s a one-person show featuring Edmonton actor John Ullyatt. It runs at the Citadel’s Rice Theatre through Feb. 23. The show was originally a big hit at the […]
Mile Zero Dance Goes Punk in SNFU Tribute Show
To mash together punk rock with modern dance seems like an insane idea. You know how punks “dance” – they mosh, crowd surf, stage dive, slam together, elbows akimbo, mohawks flailing, running madly in a circle (always counter-clockwise. Why? Short answer: The right foot goes a little further. Long answer in this highly scientific study). […]
REVIEW: Walterdale’s 1984 Doubleplus Good!
In the last two weeks Edmonton theatre has presented two remarkably prescient stories of how easily corruption, dehumanization and fear can overtake a society. Both were written in the past, and chart many misuses of power that are so sadly obvious today. MacEwan’s drama department is currently running an excellent version of Arthur Miller’s 1954 […]
THE CRUCIBLE: It’s the Greatest Witch Hunt in History!
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a partly-fictionalized allegory based on the 1692 witch trials in colonial Salem, Massachusetts. The subject of the play is the paranoia and persecution that came out of the so-called “Witch Hunts” undertaken by the American House of Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. They were trying to unearth Communists that […]
REVIEW: Evil Clowns Slaughter Shakespeare in Disturbing New Play
The audacious new production from Theatre Network will have you helpless with laughter – as long you don’t mind humour that is outrageous, dark and discomforting. It’s called The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Buffonius – and it’s a clown show. There are no red noses or seltzer bottles. It’s bloody, bawdy and grotesquely […]
Gender Wars Reach Fever Pitch in Hilarious Happy Birthday Baby J
Here’s a play for those of us who are endeavouring to come to grips with the increasing complexities of living in a gender-diverse society where sexuality is expressed in a very fluid and ever-changing manner. Even the lexicon of describing this rainbow-coloured world is full of traps for those who may have missed the subtleties […]
REVIEW: Emotional Impact of Disability Probed in Pulitzer-Winning Play
Cost of Living is about society’s marginalized people isolated by poverty or disability. It features four excellent performers who fashion fully-functioning characters out of subjects that are anything but functional. The play deeply probes the problems of living with disability, and the loss and the sacrifice that entails. It minutely examines the lives of people […]
REVIEW: Everybody Loves Robbie a Heartfelt Heartbreaking Musical Comedy
In the first moments of Northern Lights Theatre’s Everybody Loves Robbie, two young people are dancing up a frenzied give-her-all bubble gum roughhouse. The two are obviously lost in delirium – and each other. A few minutes later she pauses and asks plaintively, “Don’t you just love it when you’re making out and your partner […]
