Londonstani delivers manipulating ‘devices’ It was with some narrowing of the brows that I picked up Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani. The North American dust jacket is a piece of delicious eye candy, but absolutely littered with glowing words like “electric,” “ball-grabbing” and “brilliant.” One British review of the book even gave the silliest praise modern society…
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…
I love idea books, and so my delight at seeing these two Canadian works land on an XPress desk was palpable. Idea books follow a particular thread from inception to conclusion, and try to trace the ripples it creates. I love to wade through rivers of detailed, delightful prose and think, Wow, so the Roman Empire actually crumbled because of poor celery harvests!