I freakin’ loved this show! Loved, loved loved! As a singer with an eclectic background in music, Kevin Armstrong’s Opera for Heathens spoke to my soul. But, you defiantly do not need any musical training to fall on love with this show.
When Missie walked on to the stage I saw a shy woman, slight build and…well…the silver onsie is hard to ignore. But then she spoke and I was captivated by her confidence and poise. Missie is a spoken word poet, so this performance is, as you would expect, a collection of spoken word poems. She ties them all together with a suitcase filled with dates, both in the future and the past. She speaks about her religious upbringing, sneaking her dad’s sci-fi books as a kid and how this all tied in to her vision of what today should look...
To begin my review for this play I decided to go on to Free Theatre Radical’s website and take a look at what others had to said. There are some amazing reviews on there, about their last play. Sadly I think Utopia fell short of the acclaims for Free/Fall from 2010.
I have to say, I was a bit concerned when I was going in to this one. How the heck is one woman going to play seven different people without losing the audience entirely? Right from the first scene when the first wife falls in to Purgatory I was entranced.
This new play by Morag Haysom endeavors to bring forth an alternate to the accepted assumption that Vincent Van Gogh’s death was a suicide. Haysom’s narrative draws us into the troubled mind of Vincent Van Gogh, who, having always felt he was living in the shadow of his namesake, his brother Vincent who died at birth, fell into an ever increasingly restless life of loose hours and looser women, and, descended into mental illness, his angry self-righteousness alienating him and eventually leading him to self-mutilation and the loss of his ear.
Intrusion is presented by anima theatre – a Vancouver theatre company aiming to bridge the gap between University and Professional Theatre. Company Co-Founder Veronique West has penned Intrusion and directs her Co-Founder Afshin Haidari and three time Jessie Richardson Award winning actress Wendy Noel in this production at the Carousel Theatre.
Sadie Goldstein (aka “Knitting Nell”) invites us into her wartime knitting group. (Got your knitting? It’s strongly encouraged. Don’t worry if you can’t bring your own, Sadie may just have a scarf or two in her little basket that you can work on.)
Musical Theatre, Cabaret, Opera, All Ages http://www.melaniegall.com/knittingnell/
I had pretty high expectations for when I arrived at the Havana for the Opening Night of The Furious Anger Fun Hour. I mean this Vancouver Sketch Comedy Troupe is made up of the hilarious physical comedy duo Peter n’ Chris (Peter Carlone, Chris Wilson), Sam Mullins (Tinfoil Dinosaur) and stand-up comic Bryan Nothling. About thirtyish audience members joined me in the theatre (which at the Havana is over half full) and we were greeted by a stage empty except for a microphone in a stand & a well-loved loveseat.
Bravo to this writer/director and the wonderful group of actors for creating a lovely understated piece of theatre. This play is about the microcosm of life that takes place every day in the Net Loft on Granville Island and appropriately is performed in the Net Loft space. Kudos to whoever worked to make that happen, not easy but the result is a really good one.
Simply put, it rises to the challenge of saying something profound about Death and the experience is both heart wrenching and comforting. John Grady lays it out for you, he helps us understand what to do, or rather how to be, when someone is dying and then he gets on with it. He takes on perhaps the greatest task of loving in our lives, which is being supportive and selfless for someone else at the very end.
Mr. Grady says the rest so very well I won’t go into my interpretation but will say he does it simply and efficiently....
