NS reviews

Reviews of theatre and art in Nova Scotia and beyond

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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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Voyages into Indigenous Cultures and Fairytale Worlds in Halifax Exhibits

Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia On the third floor of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, at opposite ends, two films blast out in sound and movement. At one end a Yanomami shaman dances in a storm of orange feathers observed by fellow tribesmen in a Brazilian village; at the other, two Finnish Sámi sisters perform an elegant, contemporary dance that devolves from soprano voices […]

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Wildlife Recovery Concert this Friday at Scotiabank Centre: tickets $20 to $200

The Nova Scotia music industry is coming together to present the Wildlife Recovery Concert at the Scotiabank Centre in Halifax this Friday, June 9, at 7pm. All proceeds will be donated to the United Way. Performing artists are: Adam Baldwin & The Jenny Wren, Classified, Dave Sampson, Deedee Austin, Jah’Mila,Jenn Grant, Joe H. Henry, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Kim Harris, Matt Mays, Neon Dreams and Rankin MacInnis. Tickets go on sale […]

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Pottery and Portraits on the South Shore

Before the tragic fires of this past week, I got a chance to go down to the South Shore twice to see two art shows by highly talented, Nova Scotian women and, coincidentally, have two different servings of fish cakes. CHESTER: Marla Benton, whose exhibit From Table to Wall is at the Chester Arts Centre just through today, let her imagination loose on her functional pottery for a large and […]

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Billy Elliot More Than Worth The Wait; tickets still available

Delayed by the pandemic for three years, Billy Elliot storms onto the Neptune Theatre stage in an exciting whirlwind of steeped emotion, powerful dance and heart-throbbing music. This excellent, high-octane production of the Tony Award-winning musical has an unusually high number of actors for Neptune – 32 – and is helmed by the same team behind Neptune’s 2018 hit Mamma Mia! – director Jeremy Webb, choreographer and co-director Ray Hogg […]

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Revel in landscape, see art in Point Pleasant Park, go to Thursday’s Starry Night Gallery Hop

Halifax artist Hallie Watson immerses you like a bee in a giant, dazzling, flower garden in her solo exhibit Northerly, at the Chase Gallery, Nova Scotia Archives, to April 28. This uplifting show of stunning, large-scale paintings and oil pastels bursts with colour, energy and beauty as one feels the artist herself reveling in the landscape of her family farm called Northerly in Mono, Ontario, near Orangeville. It’s a landscape […]

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