THE TEMPEST: Shakespeare all shook up at the Citadel
Citadel Artistic Director Daryl Cloran promised us a “Reimagine Season” this year – and has largely validated that mandate. He is closing his year with an elemental, uncompromising, inventive staging of Shakespeare’s last great play, The Tempest – performed by hearing and deaf actors in both English and American Sign Language. It certainly demonstrates how […]
The Empress and the Prime Minister a gripping gay docu-drama
Darrin Hagen refuses to be catalogued. The actor, playwright, sound designer, composer and director has energized our theatre scene since his first play The Edmonton Queen premiered at the 1996 Fringe. Although he may be associated with gay theatre, his subject matters have ranged through a bewildering number of topics – and along the way […]
Sister Act fills Mayfield pews with wimple-ful whopper of soul and comedy
The musical Sister Act is no Come From Away – but it is the kind of durable example of song and dance entertainment that Broadway is famous for. The musical is taken from the smash 1992 Whoopi Goldberg movie with songs added by Alan Menken (Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, etc.), lyrics by […]
FUN HOME A DARK HOME: Local cast shines in Varscona musical
“You can’t go home again,” said author Thomas Wolfe. Perhaps you can physically go back – but the old Regent Theatre where you first saw Casablanca and Robin Hood is now a strip mall. You can’t build forts any more in Brown’s Fields out back – they don’t exist. And memories of Mom and Dad […]
REVIEW: Mad Mad Mad Mad World at the Citadel!
“We are all walk-ons in other people’s lives,” British playwright Alan Ayckbourn once said. It sounds really wacky – the Citadel is presenting a theatrical concept that boggles the mind. It’s two interconnected full-length plays that add up to one comedy. The two run at the same time in two different theatres with different audiences, […]
Slight of Mind takes flight of fancy at the Citadel – just not in a theatre
A couple of years back when current Artistic Director Daryl Cloran first arrived at the Citadel, he kept getting lost. Joe Shoctor’s big brick playhouse had empty rooms, long hallways and all sorts of dark nooks and crannies. Never one to let a theatrical idea go to waste, Cloran searched for a vehicle that would […]
REVIEW: 19 Weeks tackles real life abortion dilemma in devastating detail
In 2016, Australian playwright Emily Steel wrote a raw, highly emotional, intensely personal play that she felt would end her career. At one time, she thought that women who had “late” abortions weren’t very smart or responsible – yet here she was, pregnant for 19 weeks, putting on a hospital gown and having an IV […]
REVIEW: Surreal Middletown sees characters askew in search of a plot
Will Eno is an American playwright whose works have gained some notoriety in the past decade or so – winning awards, attracting and often dumbfounding audiences. He takes ordinary situations and runs them through his cracked view of life. As a small American town in Middletown, currently in production from the U of A’s Studio […]
Lungs filled with doom in dark comedy
The Shadow Theatre production of Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs was supposed to open on March 13. But then the production blew up, losing its Montreal-based director and two local stars. When we finally got to see the show on Friday March 22, the directing credit was split between the assistant director Emma Houghton and Shadow Artistic […]
MacEwan cast aces Broadway classic
So, there’s this Damon Runyon guy, an ink-stained sports scribe crankin’ it in the Big Apple of the 1930s. When he’s not covering the likes of Babe Ruth or Jack Dempsey, six’ll get ya’ five, his battered Smith Corona is churning out tales of Nathan Detroit, Harry the Horse, Nicely Nicely Johnson, Good Time Charlie […]
REVIEW: Anxieties speak louder than words in Small Mouth Sounds
Six distressed souls find their way to a silent spiritual retreat in upstate New York. They hope to find relief from their troubled lives – casting off the mental and emotional baggage they have picked up along the way. There, amongst the mosquitoes (and what sounds like a pack of ravening wolves and one pissed […]
COME FROM AWAY: Dazzling new musical shows heart of Newfoundland on 9-11
In 2012, the visionary Toronto show business lawyer Michael Rubinoff and his two Canadian book-lyricist-composers Irene Sankoff and David Hein mounted a 45 minute workshop production that combined the horrors of 9-11 with the quite incredible warmth of the people of Gander, Newfoundland. The amiable Newfoundlanders had opened their hearts and homes to some 7,000 […]
