Naked truths

To call David Harrower’s Blackbird a bare bones play is nearly an understatement. It’s stripped down in almost every way that comprises a work of drama: two actors, a man (Ray) and a woman (Una), interact in sentences that more resembles a hail of verbal bullets than human thoughts – they stop and start, they fragment and halt. When you read it on a page, it’s almost ambiguous; it could be either be genius or drivel. What makes it sing is that it doesn’t merely stay on the page. READ MORE

Curtain call

Watching the movement of the different poles of the Ottawa theatre community is an interesting thing. On the one side there are the National Arts Centre theatre programs, newly remastered to take up a place of national importance. On the other there are those local theatre companies trying to fill their seats and pay their bills in a city that is often criminally neglectful of theatre. READ MORE

Personal Review: Barnacle Love

Anthony De Sa’s first book aptly illustrates a lot of the things I find frustrating about Canadian literature. When you think about Canlit in broad strokes, you find that a huge swath of it is coloured with the same themes, the same tropes. There is something about the popular fiction in this country which recoils from variety. READ MORE

Odyssey returns home

After a two-year hiatus from summer performance in the verdant Strathcona Park, Odyssey Theatre returns to its bread and butter: theatre under the stars. This year the company presents They All Do It, a commissioned work from local playwright Jan Irwin. Loosely based on the opera Cosi fan tutte, the company aims to straddle the divide between the old-fashioned classical opera and contemporary theatre with a genre-mixing, intellectually interesting show. READ MORE

Hit hits the road

Hit hits the road Touring production of Broadway success Avenue Q arrives in Ottawa Whenever I get tasked with an article about one of the touring Broadway productions, it’s always a bit of a headache. What is there left to say about Avenue Q? Unless you’ve been living under a rock with poor television reception,…

Canadian animator draws admirers, critics for updated Looney Tunes

Canadian animator draws admirers, critics for updated Looney Tunes By Bruce Ward and Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston,  Ottawa Citizen May 26, 2010 OTTAWA — The wit and wisdom of that rascally rabbit and his cartoon sidekicks captivated Canadian animator Jessica Borutski when she was a little girl. “I started learning these characters when I was maybe six,”…