Tina Fey’s film about an Afghanistan war correspondent isn’t strictly a comedy but I wouldn’t call it a dark comedy (where the comedy comes from the darkness) or a dramedy (where the parts that are comedic are more subtle) either. It’s pretty obviously a comedy- act one plays out like a grownup, transplanted How to […]
True Blue (Bad Dog Theatre Company- improv) I lied (“everybody lies” says the poster for this show). The title of this post is Comedy Tonight but the first piece I’m talking about is not a comedy. It’s full of people you’re used to seeing in comedies- Bad Dog regulars and funny people borrowed from VideoCab, […]
Scarberia (Young People’s Theatre) As the lights dimmed on Evan Placey’s coast-jumping, Shakespeare-referencing, mind-bending one-act about two sets of teenage boys tied together by a young woman who goes missing in Scarborough, Ontario and shows up in Scarborough, England, the early-high school audience began muttering that it was “too complicated” and “confusing”. It is really […]
I was a season one Girls hater, for all the reasons why so many people stopped watching Girls after that zeitgeist-busting debut. When I try to explain to one of said people why modern day Girls is not only worth returning to but might just be one of the greatest televisual creations available to the […]
The best thing about John Carney’s latest musically saturated film is the music itself (some classics like Duran Duran plus quite a few originals). The plot is fairly tired (teenage misfits start a band to impress a girl) and the characters fairly conventional (troubled bad girl, disillusioned big brother) but the music, boy, the music […]
This month we were treated to two pieces that weren’t really musical theatre, nor were they strictly concerts. They were cabarets, I guess, but they were really stage-bound musical explorations of people and place by musicians who make theatre and theatre people who make music. Ryan G. Hinds’ Say Grace Sidelined for 6 months […]
I have only 4 rules when it comes to great theatre: – make it coherent – make it honest – make it mean something – limit blackout set changes That’s it. That’s all I ask. The following three companies refuse to adhere to this final point with their current productions and it’s perhaps telling […]
We Three is a collaborative new work by Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman with a clever title inspired by the Henry V speech a character passes off as “a poem she wrote”; a speech about brotherhood forged in shared experience and unshakeable as years pass. If only the bonds between modern women were as simple as those between Shakespeare’s soldiers, […]