A Woman’s Story: Brown Wasp Goes Where Few Shows Have Gone Before

Brown Wasp, a charming, intimate and insightful one-woman show at the Halifax Fringe Festival, is unusual as it delves into the icky, largely unspoken world of female body experience. In Meah Martin’s award-winning, 50-minute play, Sarah St. John is an older woman at a spa hoping for a cure in the sacred, healing waters of Little Manitou Lake, Saskatchewan. The character’s self-deprecating story of many surgeries for “female problems” and […]

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Romeo and Juliet at Point Pleasant Park Full of “Teen Spirit”

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Downed Hearts: the heart and soul of theatre by one of Canada’s top playwrights

A friend reaches across to hold my hand at the end of Downed Hearts at Ship’s Company Theatre and we nod and smile at one another, tears in our eyes, because Downed Hearts is a very good play and it has touched us very deeply. The two-hour drama, premiering at Ship’s through Aug. 27, is a heartrending, uplifting tale of love and loss and survival. It is so compelling and […]

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ANTIGONE: Spellbinding, Ancient Tale Brought to Life Around a Blazing Fire

Antigone By Fire is a beautiful, impassioned, haunting production, told around a blazing fire, as a 441 BCE play claims the chill and darkness of a 2023 night. Don’t let the content warning – “Antigone contains physical violence, death, and suicide” – deter you. The 75-minute play – a Two Planks and a Passion Theatre production at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, near Canning – is strong stuff […]

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HALIFAX AND ANTIGONISH: A TALE OF TWO FAIRYTALES

VIVA PINOCCHIO! The talent on the grassy Cambridge Battery stage for Shakespeare by the Sea’s Pinocchio: The Musical Adventure, at Point Pleasant Park, 7 p.m., through Sept. 2, is amazing. Director Jesse MacLean, SBTS artistic director, has a powerhouse cast bringing this remount of the 2016 show back to roaring life. It’s a classic mix of what makes SBTS family musical comedies so popular: rapid dialogue, some comical contemporary references, […]

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The Secret Codes: a Must-See Feast of Colour, Community and Creativity

The Secret Codes: African Nova Scotian Quilts The Secret Codes is a joyful, must-see exhibit celebrating culture, creativity and community in quilts and paintings by 25 Black Nova Scotian artists. You can revel in the fascination of hot, pulsating colour; traditional and contemporary patterns, fabric choices and stitching techniques in quilts from the 20th and 21st centuries. But this is more than a quilt show. It is a display of […]

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Fearless, funny show about being a trans woman searching for love and sex – lots of it.

F*cking Trans Women, Zoë Comeau’s one-person show about navigating sex and love as a transgender woman, is dazzling. Even for a buttoned-down, heterosexual female like myself, the show is funny, joyful and rooted in the universal need for love, touch and sex – lots of it. Comeau, a Dalhousie theatre graduate and Théâtre DesAssimilés creator, has extensively revamped and re-designed her Halifax Fringe Festival show for a run at the […]

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Alisa Snyder’s Notes on the Terrain: lovely, lyrical, painterly works at Chase Gallery

Alisa Synder’s gentle, lyrical oil paintings of undergrowth and ground cover beneath trees in the woods – at the Chase Gallery just through July 28 – are a seasonal, meditative encounter with the beauty and form of oft-forgotten and unseen nature – of blades of straw grass bent above wintry, blue snow; of dead brown ferns rendered like a spattering of jewels, of blazes of tiny yellow leaves in the […]

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Rain On The Parade: A Theatrical Satire Like No Other

Rain on the Parade is a theatre nerd’s delight. To call this play self-referential is an understatement. Think The Producers, 17th century drama and theatre of the absurd. This new musical, whose Villains’ Theatre workshop production wraps up its short run today, 2 p.m., at Neptune’s studio theatre, is about a troupe of actors devastated by the death of their audience in a fire the previous season. Do they attempt […]

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