A one-woman show is playing at the Arcola Theatre. It tells the story of Sarai, a barren woman who heard a prophecy telling her to leave her home and create a new nation. While this may seem strange at first, it does not take long for the audience to get swept into the narrative told […]
Most of my favourite television shows are a little bit brutal. Not really brutal like The Americans or Daredevil, that sort of long-slog, pitch-dark, blood-bathed stuff. Just a little bit brutal. Usually half hours, often billed as comedies but ultimately hard to define as such, my favourite shows tend to have vague, commonplace premises like […]
‘Lights up on Washington Heights’—this adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s uniquely brilliant, Tony Award-winning musical is an absolute must see for anyone with even a slight interest in theatre. Set in a diverse but mainly Latino area of New York’s Washington Heights, the musical surrounds a close-knit community of friends and family and introduces us […]
It may come as a surprise to find that Stereo Dynamite Sessions, Vol. 1, just released in Canada on October 16, 2015, is the debut solo album from Simone Denny. After all, we’ve been hearing her voice tearing up the dance floor for years. The five-time Juno Award winner is the former lead singer of […]
A Mamet play is all about the language. Everything you need to know is right there in the half sentences and blustering speeches, the interruptions, the curses, that strange combination of grandiosity and hyper-realism. In the slice-of-life one-act Lakeboat– with the exception of Stephen Macdonald, whose leading performance as a sensitive recruit is marked far more […]
Oh, Giuseppe Verdi, how I adore your dedication to stories worth telling. You are, of course, a splendid composer whose soaring melodies and lush orchestrations fly beautifully from the mouths of the COC’s chorus and the bows of its spectacular orchestra (here under the capable baton of Marco Guidarini) but the real reason I love […]
IFC’s latest comedy Benders is about grown men who are obsessed with their division eight hockey league. Three episodes in, the bro-ish series from Tom Sellitti and Jim Serpico (both fresh from the Denis Leary stable) mostly just feels like a weak League imitation. Lindsey Broad is somewhat fun as a refreshingly-not-a-drag wife but, for […]
Guns and those who flaunt them recklessly are hardly a laughing matter, yet guns are the subject of Dylan Lamb’s serious and seriously funny comic drama Ten Ways on a Gun, currently being presented at Theater for the New City in the East Village. An analysis of behind-the-scenes theater politics as well as the propensity […]