Victoria: Having won over last year’s audiences, Nile Séguin comes out of the dartboard nook and onto the stage with a friendly stand-up act about genocide and racism . . . but with surprisingly good taste. History: Deleted Scenes and Extras takes you from Rwanda to Auschwitz with a shudder and a smile.
Victoria: A clown, Our Heroine, has to defend her sexually charged life when she reaches the Pearly Gates in this fun solo show. Vancouver playwright and actress Colette Nichol plays eight absurd characters—including a prude British grandmother, a Johnny Cochrane-style lawyer and God in need of therapy—but her singing voice is also a winning factor here.
Victoria: If this is the future, count me out. Vancouver’s Darren Boquist tackles Dawson Nichols’ 2000 hit solo show about a computer gamer, Nathan, who becomes trapped in a virtual reality program he was inserted into to calibrate emotional response; a murder mystery provides the set-up while poor Nathan’s mind and memories manifest in the virtual software. Confused? Add an onslaught of incomprehensible cyber-speak and a tornado of 20-plus characters and you have a show you may not understand, but one you’ll tell your friends about.
Victoria: 4 guys, drug addicts who plan to rob a bank, hang around, backs to audience, smoking, watching videos, channelling Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, King Kong, 'The Birdman of Alcatraz' and Roman Polanski. The fridge at the edge of the stage is the mother of their world, provider of mayo, hot sauce, beer, morphine - also cold, dark refuge from frenetic violent reality and, most dangerously, each other.
And why shouldn’t he? Between the success of his last two shows here (Giant Invisible Robot, Boat Load), he’s quickly become a Fringe favourite. His latest work, Fall Fair, should continue that trend.
Vancouver: I got to the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island a little tipsy on white wine and with meat still stuck between my teeth from dinner. Somehow, it seemed a fitting state to take in a burlesque musical.
Toronto: This sentence is the first sentence. This is the second sentence and it informs you, the reader, that this is a review for Red Machine Part 2, the second part of a theatrical experiment presented as part of this year’s SummerWorks Festival.
Toronto: I didn’t read the program notes before seeing Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry by Daniel Barrow (and part of this year’s SummerWorks Festival). So my initial impressions were quite far off base.
Toronto: Toronto Noir, a Cheeky Magpie production and part of this year’s SummerWorks Festival, is a smart evocation of film noir cast into the landscape of cotemporary Toronto. It tells three interwoven stories – kind of like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts for the stage. These stories were sourced from a collection of stories of the same name.
Vancouver: Powered by ecstatic dance, saturated with colour, and exquisitely staged, Bollywood Wedding is a unique midsummer spectacle. Featuring twenty-four dancers, thirteen actors, a full band, and three individual musicians, it was not only colourful but also a busy affair.
