The National Arts Centre’s website calls Jivesh Parasram’s Take d Milk, Nah? a “highly-hyphenated story about the search for identity.” This is certainly the case: Parasram’s burst onto the national scene is a not-quite identity play, an Indo-Caribbean-Hindu-Canadian hour-and-a-half of reconciling experience and impact, and a nearly-incredible solo show. Take d Milk, Nah?, in its insistence on …
riginally posted by Patrick Langston on Arts File. Jan 1 2020 How do you maim a perfectly good musical? Run the show through an abysmally tuned sound system in the NAC’s Southam Hall, one that, on opening night, cranked the volume but frequently made performers sound like they were singing into soup cans, distorting voices …
From the pre-show announcement, we know we won’t catch all that is said onstage during Unikkaaqtuat; in being honest, we won’t have to. In freeing ourselves from the tethers of language-anchored “theatre,” we give ourselves over to a looser, more vibrant performance – one not without flaws, but one with absolute power to inspire and captivate …
To escape the mundanity of our own everyday. To revel in the ephemerality of storytelling. To imagine, to empathize, to learn, to transmit. The reasons we still attend, enjoy, and review theatre are remarkably similar to the those for which we recycle Greek myths, even in a 2020 beyond what our predecessors could have conceptualized. …
An unexpected pleasure this year. The panto seems to be geared for adults as much as for young ones with nasty jabs at Doug Ford, at Brexit, at Ottawa’s problematic light rail and much more to titillate the adults .There was also an extremely naughty Nanny Annie, the ‘dame’ played by the irreplaceable Constant …
Christmastime in Baltimore calls for afternoons spent immersed in the city’s ever-improving cultural scene, from indie concerts in Fells Point to touring musical theatre at the Hippodrome. This year, Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre contributes to its local theatre scene an excellent take on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, a perhaps-welcome break from more “seasonally-appropriate” …
Gone are the days when, on a cold winter night, the family gathered around a fire to listen to the new radio play, gracing the airwaves at seven o’clock. In the Golden Age of Radio, this is what brought families together, listening to a new story, performed live on air, filled with sound effects, …
Sometimes it’s only by seeing a new production of a show that you realize what was lacking in an earlier version. That’s the case with Where the Blood Mixes by actor/playwright/director Kevin Loring, now artistic director of NAC Indigenous Theatre. A searing, often funny and ultimately semi-hopeful exploration of the intergenerational legacy of residential schools, …
The winter holiday season generally brings a Charles Dickens’ play to theatres. At the New Repertory “A Christmas Carol,” the usual piece has been replaced with Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver” adapted from Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” first produced in London in 1960 and regarded as Great Britain’s first modern musical. Michael J. Bobbitt, the company’s …