“Welcome to Montreal’s MPROV Festival, the place where everything is made up and the points don’t matter.” That Whose Line is it Anyway tagline may be what some audience members would expect to hear at the beginning of any of the improv comedy festival’s shows over the past week, seeing as[Read More…]
Theatre
What the Butler Saw is shocking good fun
Farce is a notoriously difficult genre to pull off. If the comedy is played up too much, character nuance gets was out in favour of cheap gags and nonsensical plotting.
Great venegance, furious anger, and Shakesperian dialogue
Spectators arriving to see Bard Fiction are immediately greeted by the warmth and intimacy of the Plateau’s Mainline Theatre. In anticipation of the show, audience members mingled in a small, dimly lit room filled with couches and the buzz of conversation. Eventually, a flute coaxed the audience into their seats[Read More…]
Green is the warmest colour in Glengarry Glen Ross
The devious machinations of modern capitalism provoke an awful lot of hand-wringing, but they sure make for a great spectacle. Though much of the contemporary media coverage of Wall Street tycoons tends to be negative, the fact that they receive so much interest in the first place indicates the undeniable[Read More…]
The Vagina Monologues: continuing an incomplete dialogue
I sit peacefully in the depths of a blissfully dark, cavernous Leacock 132, waiting for The Vagina Monologues dress rehearsal to begin—until a blood-curdling scream cuts through the silence and I jump from my seat. The shriek gives way to another and then another; they ring together in a cacophonous[Read More…]
Players’ production of Peter Pan forces audiences to grow up
A university is the ideal place to stage the story of a boy who never wants to grow up; few understand the sentiment of wanting to be a little kid and have fun forever better than those of us on the cusp of adulthood. As we stress over midterms, job[Read More…]
Savoy Society turns 50
Fifty years ago this month, the Savoy Society was born as it graced the stage at McGill with its debut performance: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. Today’s Savoy Society is honouring its golden anniversary by presenting the same whimsical, timeless operetta with which it first premiered so many years ago.[Read More…]
Ancient conflicts are still pertinent in Tuesday Night Café’s Antigone
Visceral and thoughtful, Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Antigone exposes us to elemental human choices without asking us to provide an answer. Starting this weekend, McGill’s student-run theatre company Tuesday Night Café (TNC) is performing Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of the classic in a philosophically stimulating production. The plot begins with the end of[Read More…]
The Seagull will have Montrealers flocking to its stage
In Tom Stoppard’s introduction to his English translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, he writes, “You can’t have too many English language versions of The Seagull.” Although he very well may have written those words in the interest of stressing the relevance of his translation—particularly given the plethora of other[Read More…]
Family matters spiral out of control in All My Sons
The ‘dystopian suburban soap opera’ has become somewhat of a cliché in recent years. Between Alan Ball’s film American Beauty, Tracy Letts’s play August: Osage County, and David Chase’s television series The Sopranos, writers have managed to wring an impressive amount of drama out of debunking the American Dream. Legendary[Read More…]
