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Film noir fans, ya’ve heard of The Big Sleep, The Big Heat, Farewell My Lovely and Kiss Me Deadly. You’ve thrilled to the seedy shadowy cinematic depictions of “the last shred of humanity, the last ray of light, the last drag of a cigarette, the last wisecrack, the last breath”. (Who knew these could be […]

I can relate to “Crown Hill Cemetery”, a monologue by New York City’s Lisa Haas. I too come from a family where death is a hot topic. In, fact the first thing out of my father’s mouth on his recent visit from Toronto was “I’m not having a funeral. You kids just get together and […]

If you are checking out Fringe listings for something really cool to see this weekend, I recommend catching Cross-Sections playing at DANspace. This is a delight-filled program of films-on-dance about dance-on-film shorts, live dance pieces and one riveting outing of live flesh and blood dancer partnered and partnering two like-costumed dancers on screen. Dance of […]

The stage is generally piled high with corpses at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, but by the time the titular character of “Joe: the Perfect Man” gets through with “Macbeth” it looks more like scene of a particularly rowdy kid’s birthday party. You see, Joe (played by the effervescent Rachelle Elie looking like a […]

Well, I hate to weigh in too early, but I think I may actually have seen the 2008 Fringe Festival hit on opening night. Award-winning playwright Daniel MacIvor’s weird and wonderful “Wild Abandon” got a standing ovation from the good-sized crowd, and it was well deserved. This one-man show stars Kyle Gillis, an outstanding actor […]

For 50 years, Freda Josephine McDonald, born June 3 1906 in St. Louis Missouri, mother a washerwoman, father a vaudeville drummer, enthralled Parisians as the “Black Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, the “Creole Goddess” – the one, the only, Mademoiselle Josephine Baker. She danced with erotic sensuality. And clowned unabashedly. She sang. She starred in feature […]

“Opening Morning” is a short one-hander written by local playwright Stephen Pitman. It’s the story of a young writer teetering on the edge of success and is told in a series of phone conversations with his smothering mother and unsupportive girlfriend. It’s a difficult set-up to pull off, as it can be boring to watch […]

If you like the busker festival, you’ll love Trevor Poole’s entertaining magic act “Jest in Mind”. It’s like watching a talented busker who doesn’t fill the first three quarters of the act with hollow come-ons, and doesn’t constantly hassle you for money. The premise of the act is that Poole can pull thoughts from the […]

When the Atlantic Fringe Festival starts August 28th, we’ll post all the reviews by Kate Watson and Graham Pilsworth here.

Every Exit is an evening of theatre made up of two short plays and a monologue loosely connected by the exploration the life and/or legacy of William Shakespeare. The most successful piece is The Happiest Hour, a tale of unrequited love where a socially inept professor (Ken MacDonell) woos a Shakespearean scholar (Louise Daoust) with […]

Bag Spray—a product that can infuse one’s testicles with the alluring smell of Brie or cold hard cash. A smarmy stand-up comedian whose jokes are mostly lame, and who makes even the funny ones lame by explaining them after he’s told them. A giant, steroid-enraged baby nursing at his mother’s tit. A mucous-spewing fish French […]

The audience gasped with pleasure at the opening scene of To Capture Light—and that was a good indication of the general reaction to Luna/Sea’s beautifully rendered creation. The play tells the story of Canada’s first impressionist painter, Frances Jones Bannerman, artfully weaving the biographical facts of her life with imagined scenes of the painter interacting […]