Last year, I gave a rave review to an off-Broadway play called Hand to God starring a (possibly) satanic puppet named Tyrone McHansley and Jason, the timid, church-going boy who brings Tyrone to life. Well, this shocking and outrageously funny play capitalized on its stellar reviews and is now one of the best shows on […]
Editor’s Note: For six years running, contributing author Zach Adler has spent the month of April putting out a poem a day. By turns earnest and wry, these poems are based on prompts (and often forms) chosen at random that range from “The Grandfather Paradox” to “Emotional Adultery” to “White Person Dreadlocks”. This year we […]
Max Baker’s new play Live From the Surface of the Moon at The Wild Project is a frustrating and uncomfortable glimpse at Midwestern suburbia in 1969, juxtaposing vast technological advancements with the backwards sexual and social norms of the time. While Baker’s premise is an intriguing one, his play suffers from a lack of focus […]
The last time I dug into a comic book written in the fantasy genre, my focus was on a story derived from the world of Dungeons & Dragons. And, though modern writers may push the envelope of that world of swords and sorcery, there was a defined framework upon which it was built – a […]
“We know you built your life around us…but we had to change some,” Colin Meloy admits freely on the mostly tongue-in-cheek opening track of his band’s seventh album. It has been nearly fifteen years since The Decemberists’ first release, and in order to survive this long as a quirky indie project, change was unavoidable. Whether […]
The latest productions from Coal Mine and Safeword share a common goal: to leave you shaken. They share some other things too (small casts, hip tones, interesting spaces) but it’s that shared goal that stands out. That’s not what all theatre artists are doing; most want to entertain you, to move you, maybe even inspire […]
Theatre is a tough career. It’s long hours and hard work, low pay, challenging politics, tons of rejection and unwavering job insecurity. It’s hard to get noticed as a freelance artist and harder still to build an audience as an independent producer. Even if you’re brilliant, you’ll still likely spend your days as many of […]
John Patrick Shanley’s A Woman is A Secret opened at the Theatre Centre last Friday to an enthusiastic audience. Though what brought audiences to their feet at the end of the show is not clear to me. For while A Woman is a Secret was beautifully staged, actors were bogged down by Shanley’s overly poetic […]