How can one make a modern-day audience hang on every word of a three-thousand-year-old story? An Iliad, a one-man show directed by the McGill Classics department’s Lynn Kozak and produced by Chocolate Moose Theatre, proves that remakes of classic texts can be executed in both a skillful and entertaining way.[Read More…]
Tag: theatre
Play Review: Never Swim Alone is much more than absurd
Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone is an ironic parody of gender as well as a mildly unsettling piece of theatre. Directed by Katey Wattam, Never Swim Alone is not the kind of play an outsider would come to expect from McGill’s Player’s Theatre. Everything about it is minimal in terms[Read More…]
Peer Review: Franc-Jeu theatre company displays innovative spirit in Alter-Ego
McGill’s francophone theatre company, Franc-Jeu, has come into its own since its creation two-and-a-half years ago. Its latest production, Alter-Ego, was a testament to the progress that it has achieved over time. Dramatic, emotional, and humorous all at once, Alter-Ego reflected on themes relevant to students. The play explored subjects[Read More…]
TNC’s The Flood Thereafter feels entirely washed up
The Flood Thereafter was a risky choice for a student production. Tuesday Night Café Theatre (TNC) Directors Daphné Morin and Cleo da Fonseca chose a complex piece that weaves surrealism, small-town identity, and Greek myth together. Coming in closer to two hours than the promised hour and a half, The[Read More…]
Race and RENT: A look at racial representation within the McGill theatre community
The poster for the Arts Undergraduate Theatre Society’s (AUTS) most recent production, RENT, might have unsettled those who know the original musical well. Their first question would likely be: “Wait, why is everybody white?” RENT is a musical that centres on the lives of poor artists in 1980s New York[Read More…]
The life not lived: “The Secret Annex” uses alternate history to examine the Anne Frank mythos
What if Anne Frank had survived? What would her life and struggles consist of after enduring the most well known genocide of the past century, possibly of all history? This is the alternate universe that writer Alix Sobler portrays in The Secret Annex, directed by Marcia Kash. With a cast[Read More…]
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly offers an immersive experience
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opens with the beeping of life support, and a comatose figure; right away the audience knows that what follows will be as hard-hitting as it is intimate. Like the novel and film version of the same name, Tuesday Night Café (TNC)’s stage adaptation of[Read More…]
Conspiracy! is about more than just theories
History is a black box where nobody in the present can ever really know what happened in the past. Lies become truth through force of attrition, and truths are lost forever to the erosion of records. This unsteady ground is the foundation of Chocolate Moose Theatre Company’s production of Conspiracy!,[Read More…]
La vie Boheme: AUTS’ RENT sheds light and darkness on New York’s starving artists
Sentimental is a term that is often used in a derogatory way in criticism. Strong emotions are juxtaposed with a more savvy and self-aware, or clear-headed and objective approach to human issues. ‘Sentimental’ is a label frequently applied to musicals, and this year’s Arts Undergraduate Theatre Society (AUTS) production, RENT[Read More…]
McGill English department’s “In the Next Room” flicks back to a complicated era
The McGill Department of English’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) is all about electricity. The play takes the audience to early 20th century Saratoga Springs, New York, a time when on-off switches were a technological marvel, a Victorian-level of propriety was imposed on every[Read More…]
