Theatre

I think it’s a wonderful thing that, in this day and age when maggot-riddled corpses are considered run-of-the-mill television images, audiences can still be shocked and disturbed by Peter Shaffer’s 37-year-old masterpiece Equus. The penultimate scene where the naked and frenzied teenager (played with remarkable magnetism by Jackson Byrne) blinds six horses is played out […]

There were a lot of empty seats at the Saint Patrick’s Day opening of Daniel MacIvor’s The Soldier Dreams, but with any luck, people will sober up enough over the next couple of days to take in this beautiful little play. MacIvor is a master at writing about complicated relationships, and what could be more […]

It’s been just over a year since the young women’s choir Xara burst onto Halifax’s music scene, but in that short time, devotees have come to expect the unexpected. Yes, there is always haunting choral music, but there has also been a startling variety of choreography and visuals to go with it. Xara’s March 20th […]

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the terrific trio of Andrew Chandler, Garry Williams and Amy Reitsma have reworked and remounted So…What About Love? the smash hit of last year’s Fringe. You may remember that they created this heartfelt and hilarious song cycle in less than a week, yet managed to compose lyrics, music and monologues that felt as if they’d been slaved over for years. This new version is still a work in progress, with brand new songs, monologues and over-arching premise added. It attempts to fill out the back-stories of three specific characters, and to make their romantic

Beware the ear worms! Can you think of another show that has as many insidious tunes as Man of La Mancha? (I ended up humming “Dream the Impossible Dulcinea in a Cinnamon Tree.”) However, the inventive staging of this play-within-a-play makes it worth enduring the tunefully torturous car ride home. The creative team on this […]

Faith Healer by Irish playwright Brian Friel is not what you might expect from the title. While the “Fantastic Francis Hardy” (Lewis Wynne-Jones) supposedly has an on-again-off-again healing touch, the audience never actually sees him in action. Instead, the story of life in Frank’s (AKA Francis) itinerant show is told in monologues by three terrific […]