Theatre related writing
Her play delivers powerful poetry Leo is a marvellous yet occasionally uneven production from a young author whose potential – as demonstrated in her latest work – is absolutely amazing. Rosa Laborde’s play tells the story of Leo, a poet whose youth and growth parallels the Socialist revolution of Chile’s Salvador Allende. Leo (Salvatore Antonio)…
Yellow Rabbit’s Dream Machine nearly complete One Yellow Rabbit’s Ottawa debut comes in a flashing tangle of limbs, a ringing soundscape, and, above all, in sublime words. It is a stylish and extremely ambitious presentation, a homage to the literary Beat movement of mid-century America, centred on the legendary (and Canadian-inspired, incidentally) mechanical device that…
T.E. Lawrence and Robert Graves’ rebellion When you’ve been part in the unimaginable slaughter of WWI, what does one do in its aftermath? With the world reshaped through monumental sacrifice, do those men who once lay at the very burning core of events simply become the flotsam of history? Written by playwright Stephen Massicotte, The…
An XPress sit-down with NAC’s Peter Hinton The Wrong Son begins with a floor – a beautiful, black, lacquered floor that seems to reflect the world like a dark and gleaming pool. It anchors the production, pulls together the simple black and stainless steel accents of the set with an elegance that, in its featureless…
Vision Theatre begins its new season with the unofficial Canadian premiere of Christopher Durang’s Miss Witherspoon. It is an ambitious and tricky play because it has little action, with a sparsely elegant set and simple lighting, and focuses primarily on dialogue and comic delivery, relying entirely on the strength of the cast and the eponymous…
Opera Lyra’s latest offering The Barber of Seville delivers that kind of opera A joined ribbon of everyday thoughts streams through my mind. A cup of coffee sits dangerously close to my impatient foot. The middle-aged lady sitting next to the entrance won’t stop clicking her pen and there’s a blond stagehand behind me with…