Gloria’s Cause (which was part of the Club PuSh programming at this year's PuSh Festival) is a knock-down drag-out fight between dance, movement, theatre, and rock, and the winner is We the People. If I had to help you get a grip on the show, I could call it a Rock Opera. Or I could say it’s as if Frank Zappa dosed the Tea Party with mushrooms, and then jammed with them on Jerry Springer.
Hard Core Logo (presented as part of this year's PuSh Festival at the Rickshaw) has a lot going for it. Not least is that it’s the first musical I’ve ever seen that sparked nostalgia for my younger days of drinking myself stupid on cheap draft at the Royal Albert Hotel, watching the hardest-cranking punk bands of the era.
City of Dreams (part of this year's PuSh Festival) provided an entertaining hour watching six performers use found or inexpensive objects with a recorded audio “soundscape” to create a map of Vancouver and depict its history. It is fitting that this work is presented at the Roundhouse Community Centre as it extends the Labyrinth and Rangoli activities of the Winter Solstice celebration held in the same venue into a complete piece of performance art.
Floating at the Arts Club Revue Stage tells the tale of how the island of Anglesey detached itself from Wales and went gallivanting around the globe. Self-effacing, innocent and thoroughly charming, it is a performance not to be missed.
Collecting 100 people to appear on stage for three shows and a preview over three days - as Theatre Replacement did with 100% Vancouver in co-opeartion with SFU Woodward's - seems a staggering task. That the cast more or less represented the demographics of the City of Vancouver today through word of mouth combined with a deliberate screening process is quite remarkable. To see the vision executed over the course of just 70 minutes in the new Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at the SFU Woodward's building was quite exhilirating. Music provided throughout the show by...
Iqaluit (currently on as part of the ongoing PuSh Festival) combines film, technology and sculpture to create an environment that allows the audience to walk into a part of Canada most know little of or will ever be able to visit for themselves.
Created and performed by Waawaate Fobister, Agokwe tells the story of two young Anishnaabe men whose first love is painfully distorted by their community's small-mindedness and homophobia. The story focuses on the early unrequited the attraction between Jake -- who is sensitive and self-aware, if not entirely at ease with his sexuality -- and Mike -- a hockey star from the neighbouring community who is struggles to hide his orientation.
--- warning spoilers ahead ----
Fobister performs all of the characters in Agokwe, principle and supporting. These include Mike's mother –- a tough but kindhearted recovering alcoholic -- Goose,...
With his writing, Ernest Hemingway wanted to create the sense that the lives of his characters continued on before and after the narratives he created; to achieve a sense of looking at a snapshot in the lives of real people rather than providing characters whose actions conformed to demands of plot or theme. With This, currently on at the Vancouver Playhouse, Melissa James Gibson, evokes a similar created reality: it is as if we are dropped into the world of her characters – in this case, educated, mid-lifers, living in New York – and then suddenly pulled out as their...
Celebrated Canadian playwright Judith Thompson spearheads Sick!, a brave and insightful work (now playing as part of the Next Stage Theatre Festival) which gives voice to a myriad of young performers - some of whom are practiced actors, some not - but all of whom have a real ailment or non-medical condition which they share and parse for the audience.
It's a candid collection of personal stories told in direct address that move and resonate, partly due to the lack of pretence permeating the majority of performances, partly due to the often difficult details of the lives described. Sick!...
This deceptively simple dark comedy from writer David Egan (playing now as part of the Next Stage Festival) is the kind of play that one knows is good if for no other reason than by virtue of the fact that despite its dramatic restrictions, one is just as engrossed at the end of sixty minutes as one is at the beginning.
