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…]
Theatre
Uproarious and lavish, cast shines in The Drowsy Chaperone
“The spit takes are lame and the monkey motif is laboured.” That’s not to be taken as a particularly aggressive start to this review, rather, it’s the judgment of a character in The Drowsy Chaperone—about the show itself. The self-deprecation is just one of the many charming aspects of this[Read More…]
The 25th hour: a strong finish at TNC’s playwriting dash
The stakes were high last Saturday evening at Morrice Hall’s Tuesday Night Café Theatre (TNC). With the pride of winning McGill’s most temporally concentrated dramatic competition—not to mention the promise of free pitchers of beer at Bar des Pins afterwards—on the line, a trio of hastily prepared student-written plays were[Read More…]
Opera McGill opts for relocation in Shakespeare adaptation
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s oft performed comedy of love, magic, and misunderstanding, was written more than 400 years ago and adapted by English composer Benjamin Britten in the 1960’s as an opera, which will be the format by which Opera McGill performs the story in their upcoming main stage[Read More…]
Behind green eyes
In his early 17th century play Othello, Shakespeare coined the phrase “green-eyed monster.” The phrase, used to describe jealousy, enjoys popular use to this day, and refers to one of humankind’s most irrational, yet common, emotions. Similarly, theatre companies remount Othello year after year, attempting to refresh and rejuvenate the[Read More…]
Heaven on earth?
The director’s note uses the words “oppression” and “repression” to describe the McGill English Drama & Theatre Program’s play Cloud 9, and those two words couldn’t have summed up the production more accurately. Cloud 9 explores these main themes within two separate but thematically connected spheres; the first act takes[Read More…]
If Shakespeare had written Lost…
The Tempest, the latest production by McGill’s Players’ Theatre, is the third installment in a season where the mission is “to juxtapose reality with what is magical and imaginative.” This play, believed to be the last written work of William Shakespeare, certainly does just that. Director Juliet Paperny blurs the[Read More…]
NTS graduate Colm Feore graces local stage once again
It’s no secret that there is a healthy amount of tension between Anglophone and Francophone cultures in Montreal, but one place the two co-exist beautifully is at NTS, a school that fosters the acting, writing, and directing talents of young people of both languages. Canadian actor Colm Feore graduated from[Read More…]
Oral tradition: Montreal edition
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Canada’s annual Spoken Word Festival, and the first time the festival has graced a Montreal stage. Since its inception in Ottawa in 2004, the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word has grown from six teams of poets to 20, with a constantly growing audience[Read More…]
Great vengeance and furious anger
The history of racial relations in North America has certainly been a topic of interest among filmmakers and playwrights in recent years—one which audiences have been happy to engage in. One need look no further than the recent successes of Django Unchained, Fruitvale Station, or the buzz around 12 Years[Read More…]
