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 […]
Alderney Landing Theatre
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Three cheers for Prismatic – provocative, soul-touching and just plain fun
I think it’s safe to say that Prismatic Arts Festival was a runaway success. The buzz built on social media over the four days of the event, and a diverse crowd came out to a wealth of events that included play readings, fully-staged works, concerts, workshops, art installations and more. On Saturday, I took in […]
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Body 13 and Broken English Karaoke get the Prismatic party started
Hey you! Yes, you. Have you heard about the Prismatic Arts Festival? Have you seen the posters? Picked up a brochure? Read an article or two about it? I’m thinking that maybe, for whatever reason, a lot of you are just hearing about this four-day extravaganza of culturally diverse entertainment offerings (the majority of them FREE) […]
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Fantastic Prismatic
Since its first season in 2008, the overriding vision of the Prismatic Arts Festival hasn’t changed. “We present different art forms and artists from different cultural traditions, and we look for opportunities for audiences and artists to engage,” explains Maggie Stewart, co-founder and managing director of Onelight Theatre, the company behind Prismatic. That vision is […]
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Beyond tolerance
It sounds like the makings of a Law & Order episode—18-year-old Aidan David Cromwell is walking home with his girlfriend late one winter night in Fairview when 25-year-old Marc Bernard Tremblay spots them and begins to follow and verbally harass them. From there you have conflicting accounts—either Cromwell charged Tremblay purposefully knife in hand or […]
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Power of music
Juanita Peters didn’t set out to write or direct a play. She’s a well-known filmmaker, after all, at home behind the camera. But she had the germ of an idea for a feature film about racial segregation set in a Nova Scotia sanatorium in the early 1940s. It was an idea she began to explore […]
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The Heist Before Christmas
The Alderney Landing Theatre has been transformed into a little slice of Sin City (complete with casino games for the pre-and-post-show entertainment) for this year’s dinner theatre offering The Heist Before Christmas. It’s the story of a couple of pairs of star-crossed lovers who reunite to do a holiday show in Las Vegas. It has […]
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Evoke evolves
In her first year running the Maritime Dance Performance Group, Rhonda Baker’s main focus has been making sure the group’s 19 dancers worked as a unit. Surprisingly, with six new dancers and the first new director since 1999, teamwork and trust sort of fell into place naturally. “They’ve become a cohesive group and it really […]
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Saints Alive! production of Into the Woods nearly there
If the evening had ended after the first act of the Saints Alive! production of Stephen Sondheim’s dark and twisty Into the Woods, I would declare it a triumph. The innovative youth theatre company manages to pull together talented performers, an interesting and creatively wrought set and lovely costumes. Act 1 weaves together the stories […]