Women of the Fur Trade is an amazing, multi-layered, 110-minute satire with a hot emotional core around land, love and loss. It’s a delightful feminist twist on history and an insight into a conflict over land and culture that very much reverberates today. Running without intermission at Neptune’s studio theatre until Oct. 11, the play by Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright Frances Koncan is so funny you are unaware of its […]
The Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro brings three of Canada’s First World War nursing sisters back to life in a powerful, touching and enlightening 75-minute drama Bluebirds, by Canadian playwright Vern Thiessen. This production is excellent in casting and design as Thiessen gives voice to long-lost heroines based on real people and real events in 1918 in Étaples, France. There is even archival film footage within a brilliant projection design […]
Frenchy’s: The Thrift Musical is a fun and fun-loving family drama set in one of Nova Scotia’s beloved second-hand clothing stores. The musical comedy by playwright David S. Craig and composer John Roby got an immediate standing ovation at a recent, sold-out matinee at the Ship’s Company Theatre, Parrsboro. Tickets are in high demand for this world premiere, running to July 26. The surefire hit, a co-production with Eastern Front […]
Two Planks and a Passion Theatre’s gala opening for its 35th season was marked by joy and high drama amid the glorious fields and skies of the North Mountain near Canning. The weather was dramatic; the fact there was a season at all was dramatic; and the two plays, to August 15, are rich and rewarding outdoor theatre that sticks in the mind and the heart. It was a blistering […]
Edward Albee’s 1962 hit, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, glitters in all of its comedy and savagery in a riveting production at Neptune Theatre just to March 15. Albee’s suspenseful psychological drama about a devastated marriage — and so much more — is a cat-and-mouse game between two couples who take the gloves off as soon as they connect on a night of alcohol, revelations and personal attacks. It shocked […]
The only way to truly walk in another person’s shoes is through art. Lisa Nasson’s Mischief, premiering in the Neptune studio theatre to Oct. 12, draws us into the heart and soul of a contemporary Mi’kmaw woman who has lost her passion and her path. Set during the protest in Halifax over the statue of city founder Edward Cornwallis, this powerful, emotional and comic play is a wonderful mix of […]
Coal Bowl Queen is an epic story of love, loss and identity and a love letter to New Waterford. This funny, powerful and emotional drama simply must travel to Cape Breton; in the meantime go see it at Alderney Landing Theatre, Dartmouth, through Sept. 21 in a glorious co-production by Eastern Front Theatre, HEIST and Ship’s Company Theatre, where it premiered in August. New Waterford-born writer Richie Wilcox, who is […]
Trapped at home by the pandemic, Karen Kulyk missed her beloved Italy so much that she decided to travel there through paint. Physically, she was at her easel in her Dartmouth home; imaginatively, she was in Italy where she had spent close to 10 years hiking in the country’s northern and central areas in both spring and fall. Painting “brought me back to a kind of peace,” says the cheerful, […]
If you’ve ever been on Zoom or a conference call, you’ll laugh out loud at all the technical glitches in The Huns. The hilarious, black comedy by Toronto writer Michael Ross Albert, so aptly set in a Neptune boardroom, is about the chaos of today’s office technology, interpersonal relationships and, on the more serious side, the insanity of life in a cubicle. The playwright beautifully unravels and reveals what’s going […]
“Welcome to our nest,” the young, white-clad actor says to me as I approach the York Redoubt staging area for Icarus, Falling of Birds. He whimsically offers me a paper feather from the nest that I pin to my sweater. I have unwittingly become a bird and tied my heart and soul to a true and a sad story. Icarus, Falling of Birds is an amazing and deeply moving experience […]
