vancouver

Screaming Silently: A Hot Mess

Frankly, the title says it all -- because that's what I was doing throughout most of the show.  Screaming Silently is a trainwreck, I'm afraid, and no amount of cute stage business or earnest delivery can save it.  The play is about four adult siblings reunited upon the death of their egomaniac film-director father, one Giles Forbes.  In the style of such stories, the siblings return home to pay their last respects and rivalries and dark secrets emerge.

Screaming Silently
September 14th, 2011 · By Kirstie McCallum
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The Women of Papiyek - to Name and to Remember

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...

September 17th, 2016 · By Melody Owen
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And Bella Sang with Us – Raw Emotion, Splendid Music, Serious Issues

And Bella Sang with Us is a play about the first women police officers in Canada. Set in Vancouver in 1912, these two women: Constable Harris, played by Leanna Brodie, and Constable Miller, played by Sarah Louise Turner, try and make it in the “men’s” world of policing. This is a serious drama that authentically portrays some of the issues that the city still grapples with today. With raw emotion, splendid music, and uncomfortable issues, And Bella Sang with Us is an intriguing fictional history of Vancouver.

Directed by Sarah Rodgers, And Bella Sang with Us is performed...

September 13th, 2016 · By Selene Dublanko
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How to Adult: the Musical - Hilariously Relatable

Fantastic! This is definitely worth seeing, as any musical usually is. But there is something about How to Adult that just hits the nail on the head. Set in a co-housing situation in Vancouver, 4 young 20-somethings live together and try to be adults. With a runtime of just under an hour, it will leave you humming the tunes and wanting more.  

Together these four young millennials write out a list of things they think they each need to do in order to become more adult-like. The list includes things like: getting a job, eliminating co-dependent relationships, and...

September 13th, 2016 · By Selene Dublanko
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Badmatch – Horrible Dates Make Great Stories

As I was waiting for Badmatch to start, I chatted with my seatmate about our own experiences with online dating in Vancouver. Clearly it is a subject many are familiar with since Studio 16 was sold out for the show. In Badmatch, Leanne Kuzminski shares the love lessons she learns on her dates from hell as she tries to find love in Vancouver’s notoriously aloof dating scene.

I was a bit impatient with the opening sequence when they asked the audience to recount our first loves and what we would do on our perfect date. All I really wanted was for them to...

September 13th, 2016 · By Stephanie Lo
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27 Voices: A Jarring Chorus

27 Voices is a work in progress written by S.M. Hunter and directed by Quelemia Sparrow was read by :
Sam Bob, Jennifer Brousseau, Nyla Carpentier, Madeleine McCallum, Joel Montgrand, Melissa Oei, Shyama Priya, Varya Rubin, Donna Soares, Tsawaysia Spakwus. 

There were ten readers, but no identity was given to any of them. I was looking for characters and 27 different distinct voices with their own stories. I heard out some voices speaking about a still birth in the bath tub, kneecaps in pig manure, pimps and pain, yearnings for love, rape, menstruation blood, and labour pain. But there was no...

September 18th, 2015 · By Birgit Martens
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Jigsaw - Performers Can't Save This Show

Written by Katherine King and Hannah Vaartnou, this show is 45 minutes of pure cringe-making hell. Pretentious beyond belief, boring, amateur, with two young performers caught way over their heads. If the performers had produced this mess themselves I might just forgive them, instead they are betrayed by King’s hubris. (Here’s a concept for you, Ms. King - study that one and leave the hero’s journey and cabaret alone. No matter how “off balance” you try to keep us as an audience you cannot disguise the lack of talent displayed here.)

Performers Maya-Roisin Slater and Paisley Nahanee deserve better....

Our reviewer doesn't pull any punches...
September 10th, 2011 · By Christopher Gauthier
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Jigsaw: existentialist feel-good fun

Jigsaw is a blend of feel-good fun, smart humour, and quiet sincerity, and its young performers work hard to bring its nuances to life. Billed as “a youth-produced cabaret” that draws inspiration from the 1920s, The Hero's Journey, and our modern desires,” it is a series of inter-connected vignettes that follow two loosely-sketched characters (played by Maya-Roisin Slater and Paisley Nahanee) on a psychological and theatrical journey through the world of 1920s stage-performance. The scenes are conntected thematically, but each is also a self-contained drama and characters shift and transform from scene to scene.

Though it wanders into serious territory,...

Jigsaw
September 9th, 2011 · By Kirstie McCallum
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