Infinity is the perfect amount of time
Posted on April 20, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

Playwright Hannah Moscovitch doesn’t dodge the big issues. Moscovitch has written with distinction and considerable heart about the Holocaust, Nazi war criminals and gender politics in modern academia. Her plays (The Russian Play/East of Berlin – and others) have been produced all over the country (including Edmonton) and she has been dubbed “the hottest young […]
Mayfield production leaves reviewer All Shook Up
Posted on April 14, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

All Shook Up is a hunka, hunka burnin’ love set to the music of Elvis Presley. All air-brushed, gussied up and de-sexed, the music that once drove parents to lock up their children (metaphorically, I hope) has been transmuted into a bright, easy-listening, Broadway-style pop entertainment that is a light year away from The King’s […]
Going To St. Ives a powerful conversation
Posted on April 8, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

Lee Blessing is an American playwright who specializes in minimalist works with small casts that encompass such universal problems as guilt, moral responsibility, personal ethics and political attitudes. If you remember his Citadel hit from a few years ago, A Walk in the Woods, he does so in a fluid, thoughtful way that renders the […]
SLUT: Let’s talk about sex
Posted on April 7, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt announced his 2017-2018 season as three plays that explore women’s identities with regards to sexuality, religion and the Christian morality of the societies in which they had been raised. “The Virgin, the Whore and Something in Between,” was his tongue-in-cheek subtitle. The Virgin was the ultimate unspotted female, […]
Undercover best game of Clue ever
Posted on April 6, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

The detective story is one of the most durable of genres. The first one was Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. Since then Sherlock survives, Agatha Christie has become a cottage industry and the world-weary Sam Spade continues to stalk the modern shamus. The latest to (metaphorically) don Bogart’s old […]
The School for Scandal shockingly relevant today
Posted on March 30, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

The School for Scandal was written by Richard Brindsley Sheridan in 1777. As a piece of satire about Georgian-era social intrigues, it has proven to have remarkable durability and has spoken to successive generations of theatregoers about their own times. It not only probes some of society’s more outrageous and viperous self-aggrandizers, it does so […]
City of Angels a cynical work for young MacEwan cast
Posted on March 22, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

City of Angels is one of those Broadway shows that bubbles along just below the surface of the great ones. Sure, it’s no Sound of Music but it is a solid, ingenious and entertaining evening. First produced in 1989, the book by Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H*, Tootsie) is a witty satire on Hollywood, a spoof with […]
New Cat Walsh play full of dead ends and detours
Posted on March 16, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

Edmonton Playwright Cat Walsh writes in a Ray Bradbury-ish style of sci-fi: horror, creatures and the end of the world. She’s no horrormeister looking for a cheap scare, but fills her unsettling works in an ever growing suspense-filled environment acted upon by threatening exterior forces. She is more Hitchcock then George A. Romero. You may […]
Outside Mullingar charming Irish blarney
Posted on March 10, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, entertainment, Front Slider, Theatre

John Patrick Shanley is an American playwright equally at home in whimsy – the Oscar-winning Moonstruck – or serious drama – the Tony-winning Doubt. In his new play Outside Mullingar, currently in production from Edmonton’s Shadow Theatre at the Varscona Theatre until March 25, he descends deep into Martin McDonagh’s patented Irish territory to attempt […]
Children of God an intensely powerful experience
Posted on March 9, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, news, Theatre

The Citadel Theatre’s production of Corey Payette’s new work, Children of God, is the most unusual musical you’ve ever seen. It is a noble and surprisingly successful, an effort at marrying two of theatre’s most widely divergent aspects – the musical and a social drama so raw that it has traumatized an entire country. It […]
Mamma Mia! How can I resist you?
Posted on February 23, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, news, Theatre

It would appear that we can’t get enough of Mamma Mia! Large theatrical productions of the show have played the Jube at least three times now. For a while, before Beauty and the Beast and The Greatest Showman came along, the movie was the biggest grossing musical film of all time. And, bets the Citadel […]
Laugh, cringe and think: Metis Mutt a triumph over racism
Posted on February 17, 2018 By Colin MacLean Entertainment, Front Slider, news, Theatre

“My name is Sheldon Elter and I’ll be your native comedian for the night” – and thus the Edmonton-based actor-musician-comic (and a whole pile of other talents) launches into Metis Mutt, his semi-autobiographical one-man show at Theatre Network until March 4. Be prepared to be immediately outraged. We live in an age where various ethnic […]