Not just a soldier’s story

The first thing you will notice about the GCTC/NAC co-production of Vimy is that it looks amazing. The costumes are wonderfully detailed and, thankfully, not stylized: The greens and browns of military garb are real, the heft and clank of the props show they’re real equipment. The set and scenery are all evocative of trenches, dirty wood and burnt trees. A lot of love and care have gone into the look of this play, and it pays huge dividends in drawing you in through the senses. READ MORE

More than merely players

Taking up the burden of a classic with the stature of Romeo and Juliet is a huge task. It’s even ballsier to try to reformulate it to say something new. There’s an enormous inertia to Shakespeare plays: Like a rolling rock, they simply resist a push in any other direction. This production is classical in nature – a spectacle on a thrust stage full of light, shadow, merriment, festival, death and duels. In entertaining, little is restrained. 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

Winter Cultural Preview: Theatre

Winter theatre Some selections for the freezing season Randy Hughson and David Fox in Buried Child. Photo: Oliver Domenchini There’s a post-familial numbness in the new year that sets deep in the brain like a frost, caused by too much family, too much food and too much contemplation of the past. From all accounts, SevenThirty…

Year in Review: Theatre

A Year in Revue Theatre in Ottawa has seen one common theme: Growth When you think back over the past year, undoubtedly the biggest thing to happen to theatre in the Ottawa area is the renovation of the old home of the Great Canadian Theatre Company and its resurrection as The Gladstone. For an old…

Raising the kings

Raising the kings Seven Thirty Productions remounts a dark tale Kelly: “The bitterness, the savageness, comes through” “When I arrived here in Ottawa, this was my second play. I put it on in the upstairs of the Aulde Dubliner pub in the Market,” John Kelly’s voice lilts in a slow Irish brogue. “But of the…