George Elliott Clarke is a conductor of words. He commands, cajoles and coaxes them to make beautiful music. In his new play, Settling Africville, Clarke brings history to life and light with his trade-mark poetic, heightened language and witty word play. Settling Africville is not a verbatim history of the founding of the black community […]
Theatre
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Behold! Atlantic Fringe Festival’s 2014 program
Get your scrolling finger ready, the list is a doozy! Advance tickets are now available online at atlanticfringe.ca. All tickets are $10 or less. Catch a sampler show on August 28 at Neptune Studio Theatre, one minute from about every show. Whirlwind! The 24th Atlantic Fringe program is: The Adversary by Andrew Bailey. Drama • […]
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Celebrating 10 years with the Halifax Summer Opera Festival
It’s been a decade since Nina Scott-Stoddart and Tara Scott first came up with the idea to create an annual workshop for aspiring young opera singers. Since then, Halifax audiences have been entertained by 17 fully-staged operas. This year, more than 80 performers from Canada and the U.S. are taking part in three main stage […]
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Queer Acts Theatre Festival
I felt both weighted down and buoyed up as I left the Bus Stop Theatre late last night I’d seen five very different plays that are part of the sixth Queer Acts Theatre Festival. The plays are in various stages of development, from newly-hatched to fully-feathered. They all made me laugh a little. They all […]
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Queer Acts, now
Agokwe has been on Queer Acts Festival director Adam Reid’s radar since 2009. That’s the year that the Ojibwa playwright and performer Waawaate Fobister’s solo show took the Toronto theatre scene by storm, racking up six Dora awards. “I knew right away that Agokwe would be a great fit for Queer Acts,” recalls Reid. “It’s […]
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No Animal and The Prince of Pig Alley
Tim Lake Rena Kossatz, Jeffrey O’Hara and Maggie Hammel take a walk on the wild side Playwright Bethany Lake’s entertaining double bill delves into the dark corners of the criminal mind. No Animal is a short play that has a killer and a criminal psychologist squaring off across a table. The writing is taut, layering […]
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Spring Awakening
MJ Photographics A passionate performance by Neptune Theatre School’s Pre-Professional Training Program cast Spring Awakening is an old play (written in 1891) given a new twist by a pop rock score that allows the troubled teen characters to unleash their tortured inner monologues. It’s a work that’s both provocative and disturbing, not because of its […]
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Tiny Vaudevilles
Ben Stone tickles the ivories Zuppa Theatre’s Tiny Vaudevilles is deceptively simple and definitely delightful. It plays on the idea of “vaudeville” by incorporating two of Chekhov’s funny and astute one-act farces (called vaudevilles) into the vaudeville variety-show format . This gives the talented trio of Stewart Legere, Susan Leblanc-Crawford and Ben Stone ample opportunity […]
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Crazy Sexxxy Cool
It’d be easy to think phone sex, like encyclopedias and proper spelling, faded rapidly from existence with the advent of the internet. After all, why pay for something you can easily get for free? “I thought the same thing,” says Halifax playwright Lee-Anne Poole, “but it’s surprisingly popular.” Poole would know. Her play Talk Sexxxy: the not so sexy […]
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Gender Failure
The dynamic duo of Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote There’s something powerful and seductive about being told a story, especially if the storytellers are as generous, personable and talented as Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote. The dynamic duo wowed a packed-to-the-rafters crowd at the Bus Stop Theatre with their multi-media live show Gender Failure. Spoon […]
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An Evening of Ives
Talent on parade in “An Evening of Ives” Review eight plays in 150 words? Impossible! Briefly review one fabulous evening of theatre which just happened to be made up of eight plays? No problem! For the second year, Lions Den Theatre has produced a directors’ showcase comprised of short plays by wordsmith extraordinaire David Ives. […]
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Jumpin’ Jesus
It might have been a stroke of divine intervention that led to playwright and actor GaRRy Williams writing his latest work, Jesus Is A Faggot—or maybe just a writing workshop, but either way, it’s divine. Williams batted around the idea at the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre Colony in Sackville, NB, fleshed things out for a […]