Crazy for You makes old hat new again
You want an escape from the March blahs? Crazy for You, the joyous “New Gershwin Musical” playing at the Citadel Theatre until March 26, is just the medicine you need for melancholy. This two hours and 40 minutes of grace, wit and great music is part screwball, part vaudeville, part Busby Berkeley and all cheerfully […]
PLAYBILL: Sexual tourism takes a hit
Sex is good. Tourism is good. Now put the two together and what do we have? A bunch of creepy perverts going to Thailand or wherever to hire prostitutes that would be legally underage in North America. Off with their heads! The perverts … not the girls. So in case we’re not riled up enough […]
PLAYBILL: Chekhov gets pecked
As if Anton Chekhov weren’t weird enough that he needs modernizing, what with that creepy story about him turning into a cockroach … whoops, wrong depressing Eastern European and/or Russian author. Kafka was the bug. Chekhov is the cipher. The work set to the thumb screws here is Chekhov’s The Seagull, considered a masterpiece despite […]
PLAYBILL: Fashionable Cinderella
Let’s face it: Most Cinderella stories do a bad job when it comes to the clothes. It’s usually set in medieval times, first of all, when muddy rags were all the rage. And trained magic birds can only do so much: Sewing her frumpy, froofy, glittery, totally unsexy gown in story after story. The pretty […]
Dinner party implodes in powerful Disgraced
Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Disgraced is a worthy member of a theatrical sub-genre that might be described as the “imploding dinner party.” A group of people gather in a living room for an evening of civil conversation, there are already tensions in the air when the evening starts and everything goes south from there. […]
PLAYBILL: The end of the world as we know it
A group of scientists sequestered in a secure facility in the Far North are tasked build a device that will destroy the sun. Why? Who knows? But Star Killing Machine a musical comedy! How’s that for a twist? They can make anything into a musical comedy these days – and the world is better for […]
Fortune Falls more style than substance
Of Jonathan Christenson’s dark Catalyst Theatre off-Broadway production of Nevermore – The Imaginary Life & Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, one waggish New York reviewer observed, “Quoth the raven – Lighten up!” It looks as if Christenson took it seriously. His latest musical, Fortune Falls, which plays through Feb. 5 on the Citadel’s Maclab […]
PLAYBILL: Awkward encounters
A Muslim, a Jew, an African-American and a white person have a heated conversation over dinner in New York City. What could possibly go wrong? Didn’t you listen to your mother?! No sex, politics or religion at the dinner table! All the characters in Ayad Akhtar’s explosive drama break mom’s rules in a play that […]
PLAYBILL: Bang Stomp Bang
Shif-shif-shif-shif, ca-klap, baDOOM, a-boom, a-boom, a-boom, shif-shif, baDOOM! CLANG CLANG CLANG, baDOOM, ka-shif-shif-shif … ZZk ZZk ZZk ZZk, CLANG! baDOOM, crash, ow! Look out! Aieeeee! Been there, dented that – and still this Cirque du Percussionista show continues to merrily bang along. For those who haven’t seen the Robot Chicken sketch, Stomp! is 90-minutes of […]
PLAYBILL: Christmas wholesomeness
‘Twas the night before wombat and all through the snerse, not a weeful was starping, not even a cherse. The weppels were hung by the stabbage with hair, in the clam that snat eelix would carter the snare. And nox in her keppitch, and meal in my lap, was flopping and keeling like mice in […]
PLAYBILL: Burning Bluebeard: Too soon?
Why is OK to make light of the Titanic and not 9-11? What about a deadly fire in a crowded Chicago theatre that happened more than 120 years ago? Such questions are set aside for the new production of Burning Bluebeard, at The Roxy on Gateway Dec. 13-24. Jay Torrence’s 2011 play is based on […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Waxing Half Moon Run
One of the finest bands from the so-called “Montreal scene” is returning to Edmonton. Half Moon Run is the perfect group to take advantage of the subtle acoustics of the Winspear Centre on Wednesday, Dec. 14, being unconventional multi-instrumentalists with a special fondness for percussion. The “everybody gets a drum” rule is one of the […]
