NS reviews

Reviews of theatre and art in Nova Scotia and beyond

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Ballad of the Motherland powerful, insightful, chilling

Writer-director Annie Valentina’s 70-minute drama, Ballad of the Motherland, is a chilling, darkly funny and very powerful play about a Canadian blogger kidnapped by a Russian separatist in the Ukraine in 2014. Based on a true story, Valentina, who is Bulgarian/Canadian, explores little-known international politics, what it takes to survive under extreme circumstances and the pursuit of identity for Canadians whose parents are from different cultures but have told their […]

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Falling Head Over Heels for Fall On Your Knees

Fall on Your Knees is gripping, haunting, dazzling theatre. Sixteen actors, seated at the back of the stage with four musicians, step out of the murk of the past to blaze as the tormented Piper family – a family of music, madness and malignance – in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s bestseller set in 1890s Cape Breton and jazz-age New York. Beautifully and clearly adapted by award-winning, Halifax-based playwright Hannah Moscovitch and directed […]

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Mark Delaney makes Every Brilliant Thing “somethin’ else eh?”

Mark Delaney has nerves of steel. The Sydney actor, all alone, surrounded by strangers in a brightly lit church basement with tape on the carpet and salt stains on the floor, conjures up a story of sadness and survival and it’s hilariously funny. “Something else eh?” a woman says to me, a complete stranger, at show’s end. The magic trick in British playwright Duncan Macmillan’s much-produced, 75-minute Every Brilliant Thing, […]

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In Lieu of Flowers: a powerful, poignant, poetic new play about grief — with lots of comedy!

Faly Mevamanana as Eddie and Allister MacDonald as Erin in Alison Crosby’s In Lieu of Flowers. (Stoo Metz) For a play about grief, In Lieu of Flowers is remarkably funny as well as spiritually deep. Cape Breton writer Alison Crosby’s 90-minute play is a striking and powerful journey into grief – something everybody experiences but no one wants to talk about. This world premiere, running through Sunday as a Neptune/Highland […]

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These kitties are not making nice: Mathew Reichertz delivers an amazing, immersive, comic book, art experience

Dated February 2, 2023 Mathew Reichertz puts viewers inside a graphic novel in giant murals of fighting cats, tumbling kids and a mysterious motorcyclist at Hermes Gallery. This enchanting exhibit, wrapping up Sunday with an artist talk at 3 p.m., is playful, beautifully painted and a great fusion of narrative and contemporary art with a dark, urban edge. The gallery, 5682 North St., just below Agricola, is open today, Saturday […]

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Punch Up: an hilarious tragicomedy about comedy itself

Kat Sandler’s Punch Up, co-produced by Matchstick Theatre and Hello City! at the Bus Stop Theatre, is a madcap but meaningful comedy and a laugh riot in spite of its voyage into despair. If you’re looking to get out of your own head and laugh and laugh, this 2014 Canadian hit is an indie must with six pay-what-you-can shows tonight through Sunday (https://www.tickethalifax.com/events/130423137/punch-up-by-kat-sandler). Sandler creates an explosive situation when a […]

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ALL THE WORLD’S A CRAFT

For the lover of fine art craft, WhichCraft? is a thrilling exhibit in its diversity of media, scale and expression at Harvest Gallery on Wolfville’s Main Street to Nov. 20. Autumn Larch, silk, merino and linen, Sanna Rahola. There are lots of fun connections to be made in an excellently laid-out display of art in stone, fibre, wood, metal, clay and paint by 21 artists. For example a witch’s pot […]

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LEAF and PAHLKE: Two Lifelong Creative Spirits exhibit in Halifax and Cape Breton

Artist Edith Pahlke exhibits her graphic and text prints at Hermes Gallery through Nov. 13 in North End Halifax. (Photo: Ariella Pahlke) Popping into Hermes Gallery one recent Sunday I was happily met by the artist herself. “Can I give you a tour?”said Edith Pahlke, generously taking me through her exquisitely-rendered, precisely-detailed linocuts of words and letters transformed into pictorial images. Pahlke’s daughter, award-winning Nova Scotia documentary filmmaker and artist […]

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The Pain, Passion and Politics of Hair in rockin’ new musical Love, Peace & Hairgrease

Thaydra Gray stars in the new Nova Scotia musical Love, Peace & Hairgrease at Alderney Landing Theatre through Sunday. (Daniel Wittnebel) Just saw the new musical Love, Peace & Hairgrease by East Preston’s Tara L. Taylor with over 200 high school students, who brought the roof down as the cast sang their hearts out in a tale of troublesome kinks in the hair and the soul. This two-hour co-production by […]

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Finding the sacred in the everyday: Ian McKinnon’s Harvesting/Time

Ian McKinnon combines the precious and the everyday in shimmering, delicate artworks in Prismacolor pencil on gold gesso on wood. The Halifax artist, who exhibited this month in Harvesting/Time at the Artists’ House Gallery, Lucky Rabbit & Co., Annapolis Royal, celebrates ordinary objects, people, the land and the sky referencing iconography in his use of gold. For McKinnon the act of art-making is sacred and these pieces are both sacred […]

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