Review: (Montreal) Urban Tales

Danielle Desormeaux (Photo by Victoria Laberge)

Brava, Brava, Brava!
by Aleksandra Koplik

If anyone has watched New York, I love you or Paris, je t'aime, this play has a similar concept. Several writers tell the stories of (in this edition) different women during the holiday season in Montreal. With an acting cast of seven very talented women, including: Patricia Summersett, Johanna Nutter, Julie Tamiko Manning, Tamara Brown, Alarey Alsip, Leni Parker and Danielle Desormeaux, these gals really delivered! Everyone laughed, at times, uncontrollably even. 

CharPo's Real Theatre! December 6, 2013

A Fly on The Wall, December 6, 2013

Rage in the Mirror
by Jim Murchison 
@JimMurchison

It's a funny thing the way people express themselves. When you're pushed you can react quite irrationally. I was watching a man chase a bus down the street the other day in the middle of the street, pounding on the side of the bus and screaming, “I’m gonna fuck you up! I’m really gonna fuck you up!”

My friend and I were watching and almost simultaneously said, “Good thing that bus was faster than him. Yeah, he really would have fucked it up.” Now I don’t know if the bus driver had said something to him and he was angry or if he was trying to make an important appointment and had just missed the bus or if he had been forced to leave the bus by some authority on the scene. It doesn’t matter what pushed him to do that it was pretty interesting theatre.

Review: (Montreal) Contes urbains

Hubert Lemire                   Photo Courtesy Urbi et Orbi

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like...
by Élaine Charlebois

This year’s edition of Contes urbains indulged its spectators with a series of six holiday stories that reflected the mindset of our generation. Belonging to the same generation, each writer and actor brought great energy and dedication to each piece, keeping the La Licorne audience delighted from beginning to end. 

Review: (Montreal) Blindsided

The layers of Beginnings and Endings

by Chad Dembski

Blindsided premiered last night at Théâtre La Chapelle as part of their Festival Artdanthé, an ambitious festival of Montreal and Quebec artists who often cross disciplines with their practice.  Although I have only seen one other piece in this festival so far (Clea Minaker’s Book of Thel) I have been impressed by the commitment to a vision and aesthetic that each artist has brought to the modest but exciting Théâtre La Chapelle.  It is exciting in these conservative and cut-back times to see a theatre programming ambitious and risk-taking work by Montreal artists.

Picture of the Week, December 5, 2013

I don't think we have to look far beyond this photo to understand that Ronnie Burkett's new work, Daisy Theatre now at The Cultch is not a kiddy show. There is something ripe and creepy about this scene - the curlicued hair on the one character's chest and his distinctly pronounced nipples and let's not even talk about his hand on the weird child-figure's shoulder. Yup, yup, yup - Mr. Burkett warned us! Hell! read his first-person piece about the creation of the piece.

Review: (Winnipeg) Hirsch

The Master and MetaTheatre
by Edgar Governo

It's always hard to speak ill of the ones you care about. Even when you know you're right, even when you feel you're speaking truth to power, there is an element of pain to it, and a part of you wishes you had kept things to yourself.

Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson have clearly struggled with those feelings in their biographical play based on the life of John Hirsch, well-known enough in Canadian theatre but a legend in Winnipeg theatre.

Bringing their work to the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre (RMTC)  Warehouse -- that is to say, The Tom Hendry Theatre, named after the man who co-founded RMTC along with Hirsch, whose own namesake theatre is just down the street -- is fraught with potential tensions they wouldn't have had to deal with when it premiered at the Stratford Festival or when it played at the Edinburgh Fringe. For one thing, neither of those runs had to contend with a bronze statue of the man in question practically within earshot.