Maybe, possibly, ought-to-be, this outing of inspired lunacy is a bona fide Fringe hit. Smart, achingly funny (the audience last night spent the better part of their time in the theatre convulsed with laughter) and damned clever. There are four characters in Daniel MacIvor’s play: a Voice Over playwright fretting about theatre’s Big Questions such […]
Theatre
Posted inArts + Music
A Bar Scene
Allison Amirault’s Fringe offering, A Bar Scene, plays like an extended SNL sketch during which two men and two women (late-twenties/early thirty somethings) over drinks in a “meat market” play kickball with the hoary, age-old question: What is love? We scarcely know at A Bar Scene’s conclusion. Why? This swift comedy of Eros sallies forth […]
Posted inArts + Music
Director’s Cut: 6 in Under 60
“6 in Under 60” is the kind of thing that one dreams of seeing at the Atlantic Fringe Festival; it’s excellent theatre, put together on a shoestring. Everything about the production is professional, from the performances themselves to the bridges connecting the six plays. The plays run the gamut from weird (“Rex”) to amusing (“Playwriting […]
Posted inArts + Music
Your Exits are Here and Here – Seven Short Plays About “Love”
Here’s a tip for Bill MacGillivray, the playwright responsible for “Your Exits are Here and Here”: if you have the choice between saying something in 20 words or in 5 words, do it in 5. Please. The play, which contains charming and (almost) believable performances by a young couple who fall in and out of […]
Posted inArts + Music
Magick
The young people of The King’s Players deserve an ‘A’ for effort, but a ‘D’ for delivery for their production of Garnet Hirst’s “Magick”. It contains some pretty complex magic tricks that need to be executed flawlessly to be believable. They aren’t. The set is attractive and well thought out, but the need to move […]
Posted inArts + Music
The brilliance dance
It’s less than a week to opening night of the Atlantic Fringe Festival show Billie’s Blues Revisited, and its creator Taryn Della is going over some details with fellow performer El Jones. They are working out the transitions between the different components of the one-hour show, which includes music, stand-up, drama and spoken word. As […]
Posted inArts + Music
Dan’s House
Daniel MacIvor has come home. Well, not home-home—as in his hometown of Sydney, Cape Breton—but home to Nova Scotia. Purcell’s Cove, to be exact. It marks the first time since his days as a theatre student at Dalhousie that the award-winning playwright and actor can refer to himself as a Haligonian. “I might as well […]
Posted inArts + Music
Ballad power
Playwright Ross Desprez has come full circle in the creation of his work The Ballad of Jim Pane. The play had its early roots as the story of a fictional 1960s folk singer, but morphed into The Ballad of Phil Ochs after Desprez discovered an album by Ochs and was moved by songs such as […]
Posted inArts + Music
Sole survivors
Lotus shoes are exquisitely small—measuring about eight centimetres each, they might snuggle into the palm of your hand. Delicately hand-embroidered in silk, it’s shocking that for more than 1,000 years since the 10th century—they were banned in 1911—millions of Chinese women had their feet broken and bound to fit into these teardrop-shaped icons of feminine […]
Posted inArts + Music
Rose-coloured glasses
There’s a scene in Thom Fitzgerald’s 2003 film, The Event, where a 30-something man (Don McKellar) tells his mother (Olympia Dukakis) that he’s gay. “I know,” she says. “I’ve known for a long time…The last girl you brought back was a prom date, and you did her makeup.” In these few lines of dialogue, Dukakis […]
Posted inArts + Music
Stage might
Alderney Landing Theatre was packed Monday night with members and supporters of the Nova Scotian theatre scene. The Merritt Awards—named for Dalhousie theatre professor Robert Merritt—celebrate excellence in acting, directing, playwrighting, design and production.Hosted by Marty Burt, the evening was punctuated by slide shows, videos, song and light-hearted banter, often aimed at Atlantic Theatre Festival’s […]
