Tag Archives: cox-o'connell

Energetic, fun and weird… in the best possible way

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Tiger Bride; which opened at Soulpepper on Tuesday is an adaptation of one of the stories in Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber. All of the stories take traditional folk tales but twist them to give the female protagonist a great deal more agency than in the original. The Tiger’s Bride, on which Tiger Bride is based, is in its turn a version of Beauty and the Beast and the adaptation, by Frank Cox-O’Connell (who also directs), Hailey Gillis and Andrew Penner has turned it into a sort of eclectic rock musical.

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The Comeuppance comes up a bit short

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Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance is playing at Soulpepper in a production directed by Frank Cox-O’Connell.  It’s an enormously ambitious play.  It takes the relatively banal setting of a pre-party for a high school 20th reunion and uses it to explore a wide range of issues concerning memory, personal growth (or not), what we keep and what we leave behind and, ultimately, our relationship with Death.

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Winter Solstice

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Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play Winter Solstice in an English translation by David Tushingham opened at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre on Friday night.  It’s directed by Alan Dilworth of Necessary Angel theatre Company in collaboration with Birdland Theatre and Canadian Stage.

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The Shape of Home

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The Shape of Home is a show about the life and works of Al Purdy currently being presented by the Festival Players in the Studio Theatre at the Streetcar Crowsnest. Actually I think it’s about a lot more than Al Purdy.  It does tell his story and use his poems as song material but in the creative process something a bit magical happened. It was created during lockdown using Zoom with the creator/participants messaging back and forth with ideas, snippets of songs and (mostly dark) thoughts.  The creative process must have been gruelling and at times disheartening but the final result is a show of high energy, and humour.  But above all it’s life and art affirming.  Performed in the tiny Studio Theatre it’s also very intimate.  For the first time since the theatres reopened I felt I had got my old life back.

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