The Cirque du Soleil is in Halifax this weekend with Corteo, a show of breathtaking physicality and passionate beauty with intense theatricality in music and design. If you loved Baz Luhrmann’s movie Moulin Rouge you’ll love this show; the time period is the same – around 1900. The mood is an historic European one charged with emotion and familiar design elements – baroque, Art Nouveau, Victorian costume, a nod to […]
Letitia Fraser took a deep dive into abstraction without totally leaving realism for three large masterful paintings that speak about tradespeople but also have a lovely language of paint. The Sobey Art Award longlisted artist holds true to her great colour sense and her intent to make visible the invisible in her exhibit, High Visibility, at the Lunenburg School of the Arts, 6 Prince Street, just through June 6. The […]
The painting looks at you from across the room at the Chase Gallery. Elise Doane’s acrylic vision of a Halifax Harbour sunrise, inspired by a Sherman Hines photograph, is a magical, masterful painting full of dreamy, varied orange light contrasted with deep foreground blues and blacks. Doane’s painting won the Pauline Manning Award in the Contemporary Arts Society’s 49th exhibit on view through May 31 at the Nova Scotia Archives. […]
Take a walk (or dance) on the wild side with Dance Nation, a fierce and funny, loud and large play about 13-year-old dancers fighting, laughing and crying on the road to a national dance competition Clare Barron’s Pulitzer-Prize nominated play, first produced in England in 2018 and inspired by the TV reality show Dance Moms, has a limited run through Sunday at Alderney Landing, Dartmouth, by Keep Good (Theatre) Company […]
Accelerated Erosion – exposing ancient clay is a beautiful, innovative exhibit about clay and erosion at the Craig Gallery, Alderney Landing, Dartmouth, to May 26. The medium is the message as Seaforth artists Iris Naessens-Patterson and Marlene York experiment with locally-found red clay for a variety of artworks from carved landscape plaques to York’s series of paintings using clay as paint. (Pottery enthusiasts take note; Naessens-Patterson’s functional dishes and vessels […]
Rarely does a play come with a food allergy warning. But David French’s 1972 Canadian hit Leaving Home, in a must-see Halifax production of stunning acting and realism, requires the Mercer family to sit down for a tense dinner of seafood casserole and green beans. Director Jake Planinc dreamed of mounting the two-hour, semi-autobiographical story when his Mount Allison drama teacher recommended this fan of Chekhov and Ibsen read a […]
Deepwater is a gripping, powerful mystery about a female detective trying to unravel the disappearance of a child over four years ago. Psychological, philosophical and poetic, this new play by The Villains Theatre’s Dan Bray is a departure for the author of often comic, classically-derived plays like the popular super-hero Knight of the Bat series. Set in Kempt Shore, N.S., the play opens with an experienced investigator, Questa (Liliona Quarmyne), […]
Fall on Your Knees, the epic six-hour co-production by Neptune Theatre and the National Arts Centre, among others, of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel by Hannah Moscovitch, and Downed Hearts, a new play staged at Ship’s Company Theatre, Parrsboro, by N.S. Governor General’s award-winner Catherine Banks, dominate this year’s list of Merritt theatre award nominees. However, most of the province’s major players including Festival Antigonish Summer Theatre, The Villains Theatre, Shakespeare by […]
I didn’t see the Lord of the Rings movies so I didn’t know who Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd were apart from the stars in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, now enjoying a soldout run at Neptune Theatre. But now, having seen this epic, existential play, I know what they are: fantastic British stage and film actors, as well as longtime friends, who bring an absurdist duo that would make […]
The Last Show On Earth™! is an absurd, high-colour, funny yet compassionate story about the apocalypse told through a queer lens. Writer Breton Lalama, who played Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Show at Neptune, started writing the play as they were coming out as trans and “…that felt a death of sorts, which made me start thinking about all the millions of little deaths, or world endings, that we […]
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