Category Archives: Performance review – Theatre

Shedding a Skin

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Amanda Wilkin’s Shedding a Skin premiered at London’s Soho Theatre a couple of years ago.  It’s now playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a Nightwood Theatre production directed by Cherissa Richards.  It’s a one woman show about a young woman escaping from corporate Hell and her boat dwelling boyfriend and discovering herself.  It’s set in contemporary London and Myah is black and very, very middle class; the daughter of successful immigrants with, as they tend to, ambitions for their children which Myah isn’t really living up to.

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FLEX

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Candrice Jones’ play FLEX got its Canadian premiere on Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre.  It’s the late 1990s in small town Arkansas.  The creation of the WNBA has provided another reason for young women (especially African American women) to try for one of the few escape routes from life in a town where the main employer is a prison.  In the prison-industrial complex it’s a sports scholarship or the military.

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Mahabharata – part 2

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There’s a change in both style and pace for part 2 of Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata.  (See review of part 1).  The stage band is gone and the whole back wall is given over to video screens.  Sometimes the whole is used and sometimes just the top half; often using split screen effects.  Hana Kim’s projections are front and centre in this instalment.

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Mahabharata – part 1

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Mahabharata is one of the great epics.  It’s long (my somewhat abridged translation runs 1400 pages) and it’s complex.  To condense it into five hours or so of theatre and still have it retain its essential qualities is astonishing but, based on the first part which I saw at the Bluma Appel Theatre last night, Why Not Theatre’s production does just that.

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The Masque of the Red Death

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The Masque of the Red Death is a an interdisciplinary theatre piece created and directed by Stella Kulagowski currently playing at The Assembly Theatre.  At its heart is a cabaret show where each performer represents a Virtue “complementary” to the canonical Seven Deadly Sins that Poe riffed off in his original short story.  Each Virtue is also associated with a colour in the rainbow Pride flag.

L to R back row: Rosalind Saunders, Parham Rownaghi, Rachel Manson, Joy Thompson, Rennaldo Quinicot
Middle: Bryna Bella, Eli Holliday
Front: Nailah Renuka, Stella Kulagowski

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Ninety fascinating minutes with a grumpy bastard

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RED by John Logan is a ninety minute play about Mark Rothko and the Seagram Building murals.  It premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in 2009 and it’s currently playing at the Theatre Centre in a production designed and directed by Kenzia Dalie.  It’s a two person show in which Lindsay G. Merrihew plays Rothko and Brendan Kinnon plays his young assistant Ken.

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Game of Life

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Game of Life is a two part exhibit/performance based on the personal story of bluemouth inc. artist Lucy Simic. Shortly before the pandemic she was diagnosed with brain cancer and the piece explores what it’s like to live with cancer against a backdrop of Lucy’s artistic life and relationships in Canada, and more recently, Brooklyn.

The first component of the piece is an installation; Lucy AI.  This consists of an interactive AI model into which aspects of Lucy’s personal history, beliefs and values have been fed (I understand an 800 question questionnaire was involved).  The piece loops for about 90 minutes alternating opportunities for audience members to interrogate the model with video clips, with voiceover, about Lucy’s life and journey.  I spent the suggested 90 minutes with the installation but I could probably have done pretty much as well with 20-30 for reasons that will become apparent later.

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Born-Again Crow

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There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death or, The Born-Again Crow is perhaps the longest play title ever but the play itself, written by Caleigh Crow, is a fast moving ninety minutes.  It’s a collaboration between Native Earth Performing Arts and Buddies in Bad Times and it opened on Thursday night in a production directed by Jessica Carmichael.

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Carried by the River

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Diana Tso’s Carried by the River is currently playing in the Extraspace at Tarragon Theatre in a production directed by William Yong for the Red Snow Collective.  It’s the story of a Chinese girl, Kai, who is abandoned by her birth mother because of the “one child policy”, adopted by a Hong Kong mother and brought to Canada as a baby.  When she’s about twenty her mother dies unexpectedly leaving her with many unanswered questions.  She travels to the province of her birth in search of.. do we ever know what we “are in search of”?

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