Don’t be fooled by the cute title. Little One is anything but. As the audience enters the theatre a man sits with his back to us. Once every one is seated he turns around. It seems he has been waiting to tell his story and once he starts it all spills out. What follows is a harrowing tale. What is disturbing about it is the believability of it all.
Little One features Daniel Arnold and Marisa Smith as brother and sister Aaron and Claire. They tell of their childhood growing up in a respectable neighbourhood in Ottawa. But all is...
If you are a fan of The Twilight Zone, Tales from The Crypt or CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, this is the play for you. If you aren’t, this play could make you a fan. The play opens with an announcer in the style of the 1940’s radio show “The Mysterious Traveller, welcoming us to Spectral Theatre’s Late Night Double Feature. Thus begins the first of the two stories.
The stories aren’t original, variations of them have been done in the mystery, science fiction, horror genre before, but that is beside the point. The execution of the themes is flawless and plays...
From its description, I knew that this was a show that I wanted to see. Not just because I would catch every Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) reference, but also because I was intrigued to learn how and why Amy would transform herself. Nancy Kenny's one-woman roller derby adventure has been touring the Fringe circuit since May. The delivery was polished, the story was heart-warming, and show was so much fun to see.
Amy loves stories about superheroes and chosen ones, but she herself has never tested her own strength. She has also always been overshadowed by her younger sister, June. So...
Anatolia has prepared a slide show and a speech to tell her English as a Second Language (ESL) class the story of her life in Edmonton and how she arrived there from Bosnia. The class interrupts her with questions and she is pushed to tell parts of her story that might not otherwise been told. As the slide show progresses the audience gasps when a photograph appears with Anatolia in the picture. The audience has been confronted with the reality of this play.
A powerful and painful story, Anatolia Speaks is an account of the genocide that was the Bosnia...
"didn’t see that coming" a phrase many of us can relate to you when reflecting on moments in our life. Beverley Elliott, a local actress known for her role as Granny in the TV series Once Upon a Time, shares her “didn’t see it coming “ moments of her life.
Online dating, her first rock concert and the endurance of a hot yoga class are some of her stories interspersed by original songs sung by Elliott in a clear, crisp powerful voice that captures the hope and awe this actress has in the life that has unfolded for her....
Halfway through Wet Ink Collective’s production, Nina (Susan McFarlen), the eponymous Dirty Old Woman, finds herself in the arms of a much younger lover. Time stops. Nina turns to the audience and asks “Is it wrong to delight in such beauty?” The answer to us, obviously, is no. The fact that writer Loretta Seto has heavily stacked the play’s conflict on conservative moral wisdom is the slightest detriment to what’s otherwise a very good production.
“But sir!” critics of critics might object, “is this not the same conservative antagonism that exists in the real world?” It is, yes,...
You have never seen anything quite like Aidan Flynn. Mump and Smoot are as close as I can come, which is not close. Nathan Howe and Morgan Murray are the "creators" and performers, and Howe also the director.
The two-character piece has only music and gibberish, and advances so fast that significant moments can easily be missed. A young man builds a structure resembling a human with a wooden cart, an abacus, a twig for an arm. He dismantles it and raises a corpse (I think, for this part is done with shadows). The...
Fringe Description: Silly · Weird · Warm and Fuzzy
Al Lafrance is a funny guy, and his one-man show, The Quitter, has some interesting insights. Anyone who attends Fringe knows that one-person shows based on personal memoir are perhaps 25-50% of all shows, and this is another one in that category.
In this autobiographical work, Al describes how he gets used to the idea of failure and quitting. It starts in high school, where he tires of being the "smart kid" who is sometimes ostracized and who misses out on various social activities because of his emphasis on being a great student. He goes on from failing a math...
Time is a slippery thing to define. A person will try to define time in itself, but will really only define the process of being in it. Time is now. Time is now. Time is now. Time is a succession of moments consciously experienced, or, in the case of Iris Lau and Elliot Vaughan’s dance/performance piece Definition of Time, time is an overwhelming idea that we chase in hopes of outrunning our own mortality.
Not that it isn’t a noble pursuit. In its purest abstract, a piece of dance exists outside the stream of time; its...
Fringe Description: Weird · Warm and Fuzzy · Poetic
Lac/Athabasca by Len Falkenstein is the premiere production of a project to hone a play inspired by the train derailment and fire at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec last summer as well as another similar oil train derailment and fire that took place this past spring in New Brunswick. Produced by Theatre Free Radical, a company of artists out of New Brunswick, these incidents and the web of economic and social circumstances and choices that led to them hit, literally, close to home. The piece is a strong beginning – the monologues and scenes personalize what was, to me, a terrible...
