Written by Jordan Tannahill, directed by Eric Brubacher and Cara Spooner, Concord Floral is currently opening Canadian Stage’s 2016-2017 season. To top it all off, just a few days ago, the play earned Tannahill a nomination for a Governor General’s Award. The play centres around Concord Floral, an old abandoned greenhouse in Vaughn nesting within […]
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In one sense, it’s the ultimate indulgence to a craving no-one asked for. I don’t mean “ban experiment; bring on the potboilers”, I mean that this production feels irrelevant, and that irrelevance is compounded by the awkward pose of its prose. No’s Knife is an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s obscure mini-tales, Texts for Nothing, and […]
I’ve never watched The Bachelor Canada but I am loving our first foray into the franchise’s tables-turned better half. The Bachelorette is the less skeezy, less catty, way more dreamy iteration of a guilty pleasure premise and a Bachelor cycle without a Bachelorette is simply not worth airing. Once the Canadian version of the show […]
A very accomplished production of a show that boasts an utterly enchanting score, Floyd Collins is sophisticated, intriguing and beautifully performed with some truly breath-taking moments. It is clear that every detail of this carefully produced musical has been considered meticulously, with the piece emanating waves of meaning and feeling. Instantly you know you are in […]
If it takes seven people to tell a story, you hope it’s a good story. Luckily, The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas is a good story and a gripping performance. At the start of the production, the audience is tremendously confused. There is a guy named George who had bad luck in love and in life, but […]
Click Here to read previous instalments of Skinner Box Storytelling. Recently I’ve been playing Elite: Dangerous, a free-form space combat and trading simulator that is a modern update of a classic 80’s PC title. My dad’s enthusiasm for Elite and recent retirement from work has resulted in hour-long phone calls and emails full of screenshots […]
Noises Off Did we need another 70s-set backstage theatre farce mere months after Jitters? No. But Soulpepper’s production of Noises Off made me laugh louder and with more obnoxious uncontainable shrieks than anything else I’ve seen this year so I’ll welcome the repetition. Simon Fon’s fight and stunt work was still too careful and a […]
Adapting a novel for the stage is certainly no easy feat. Sacrifices and changes must be made to slim down what can be a lengthy and detailed narrative into a coherent, streamlined and more visual medium. The risk lies in the impact this conversion can have on the end-product, specifically whether what works on the […]