history

The Women of Papiyek opens with Elizabeth, Martha and Taqood naming: the naming of those who are gone but who must be remembered. Transcending time and space, the women themselves are dead but are stuck in some kind of limbo looking for a way to the next level of existence.

The Women of Papiyek recounts the story of the three women, real women who once lived in what is now called Brockton Point in Stanley Park.

It turns out that the three women are of different ages and different eras but that was difficult to determine and...

Berlin Waltz is a masterful blend of musical storytelling that left echoes in my head and heart for hours after I left the Cultch. I wandered around Vancouver, feeling Weltschmerz (literally ‘world pain’—you even learn some German in the show), pondering the invisible walls within my mind and seeing the outside world with different, more wistful eyes until I entered my next show to be transformed again and again.

Not only did this piece give me some insight into Berlin’s amazing history and the “admirable theory and questionable practice of socialism,” but it also made me want to travel. And...

Sharing an audience with Stuart MacLean's Vinyl Cafe crowd, Elliott's homage to a semi-rural Ontario childhood nostalgia-fest is a sure-fire crowd pleaser for anyone from the generation prior to the last three letters of the alphabet. This musical and moving image performance is a confident, well performed and very personal visit to a past that is comforting to the intended audience and likely quite foreign to anyone born after 1970. The subject matter and imagery described and shown is both familiar and nostalgic. The reminiscences are important to recognize, as history informs who we are, even as emotionally reliving...

The first time I saw Robert Plant walk on stage I screamed like the fan girl I was. When John Bonham died, I cried. So when Stadium Tour brought Zeppelin was a Cover Band to Vancouver Fringe this year, I was curious to say the least.  

Part dinner conversation, part documentary, and part rock concert, Stefan Cedilot takes the audience from Africa to the Mississippi Delta and Chicago to England where the four members of Led Zeppelin got together and became one of the greatest bands of all time. From session musician to the genius behind their...

Honestly, I was a bit disappointed when I realized that each of Henry’s wives were going to be played by the same actor. One of the things I look forward to in theatre, especially in period pieces, is the costumes. With one woman in one costume I could tell this wasn’t going to be a “costume drama”. So with the revelation that Til Death: The Six Wives of Henry VIII was a one-woman show, aka, a one costume show, I prepared for an attire-less evening.

Within minutes all my disappointment evaporated with the laughter that engulfed me from...

Howard Petrick’s tribute to V.R. Dunne, is packed with intriguing information about the soft-spoken but unflinching union leader who spearheaded the 1934 truck drivers’ strike in Minneapolis. Petrick captures the quiet dignity of the man and tells us straightforwardly about his life of poverty and gruelling jobs for subsistence pay and his dedication to improving conditions for all workers at a time when unions were illegal and exploitation was rife.  

The low-key intimate start is sincere and engaging for the first fifteen minutes. We get the calm intelligence of the man with his glass of whiskey. We...

From the moment Jem Rolls steps onstage, the audience is bombarded by information. Facts. Anecdotes. Creative interpretations and rephrasings. I was stunned into inaction for a few minutes before finally remembering that I was writing a review and that this would be worth writing down.

He tells the story of Leo Szilard, a physicist of the early twentieth century whom he asserts was the first to conceive of nuclear fission. Brilliant, abrasive, and inexhaustible, he built a circle of key friends in physics simply by introducing himself to anyone he thought important enough to talk to. Instrumental at the...

Adapted and performed by stage veteran Clayton Jevne, fans of Shakespeare and history may enjoy this solo play. Jevne has adapted his script from Robert Nye’s acclaimed novel. I haven’t seen the character of Falstaff on stage before nor read about him. By reputation, I believed him to be the charismatic, jovial, and bawdy mentor of the future King Henry V. In this production, Falstaff seems ordinary and perhaps it is partly his advanced age that has sapped the legendary character’s irrepressible life force.

The...

"Spilling Family Secrets" was written, performed and produced by Susan Freedman in true Fringe style. It moved me to tears with its sincerity and love.

Susan Freedman is spilling her family secrets but in doing so she is giving us a glimpse into her parents life and their love affair through the letters they wrote to each other while apart during the depression of the 1920/30...

“Damn,” I thought to myself in the queue on Commercial Drive, smelling the melange of odours donated by several restaurants in mid-Drive business, various herbal vapours wafting past from patrons in need of their pneumonic medications, and a bit of bike smells, perfumery and human aromas. We had to line up on the curb to avoid blocking the strollers and becoming invalided by bikes on the sidewalk. I wished I knew more of One Crazy Frenchman’s first take on his alter ego. I wished I had seen it performed at that earlier Fringe.  

Havana is one of the Drive’s...

Pages