A great night out
Tell Tale Harbour
Charlottetown Festival, Confederation Centre - June 29, 2022 Hopes aplenty are pinned on Tell Tale Harbour, both the fictional East Coast town and ...
Charlottetown Festival, Confederation Centre - June 29, 2022 Hopes aplenty are pinned on Tell Tale Harbour, both the fictional East Coast town and ...
Watermark Theatre - April 21, 2022 English playwright Duncan Macmillan’s 2011 two-hander Lungs flies by in a fleeting 80 minutes, yet it spans a ...
Charles Dickens’ classic 1843 novella A Christmas Carol has many virtues, among them its near-infinite adaptability. Everyone from the Muppets to th...
Christmas TV often focuses on beloved classics that people watch every year, like Charlie Brown and the Grinch; but there’s plenty of less famous TV...
Tuesdays & Sundays is a theatrical sucker punch to the gut; a swift, sharp jab that knocks the wind out of you. A dense one-act play running just ...
It’s a long way to Tipperary (or so the old song goes), and lately it’s felt like an even longer way to Georgetown. I last visited two years ago, ...
Remember Certs? Sporting dueling designations as a breath mint and a candy mint, their “two mints in one” slogan endured for decades. That old lin...
Dance shows are often part of the Island Fringe Festival slate, but this year they make up a whole third of the schedule: two of the six shows are dan...
The Island Fringe Festival typically includes solo productions, and this year it has two: one-woman show Head War (written and performed by poet Sadie...
Island Fringe Festival entries often go small, partly for reasons of logistics like financing and travel. This means many shows featuring one or two p...
“Oh boy, cards! The paper rectangles old people think are fun!” —Luz Noceda, The Owl House Often the odd man out in my extended family, I di...
As a COVID-haunted world emerges haltingly from hiding, mixed feelings loom: excitement over resumption of quasi-normal life, anxiety over the risks t...
Already a dwindling rarity by the time of your hoary historian’s youth, animated cartoon shorts were a fixture of movie theatres for decades, flouri...
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So says the oft-quoted line from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; and it feels pret...
Fascinating female trios abound in pop culture, from classical icons like the mythological Fates and MacBeth’s witches to modern examples like Charl...
The best and worst part of live theatre is how fleeting it all is. Every single performance is a one-time-only, one-of-a-kind entity all its own; and ...
My late, great grandfather Charles MacDonald – family man, checkers champ, covert dog fancier – was a World War II combat veteran. I don’t remem...
PEI’s fringe theatre imports often consist primarily of whatever lands in the Island Fringe Festival each summer; but new local company Desert Islan...
The Shame of the Meek is a deceptively simple show, yet also oddly complex. It’s simple structurally and conceptually – it’s a show about unwed ...
One sees certain plays repeatedly in the reviewing racket, especially classics, and the best of these hold up well. It’s partly a matter of pure, en...
Fringe 2019 features productions that are deep, dark, moving, profound, thought-provoking, stunningly original and/or just plain bizarre. My second-fa...
Your reckless reviewer often likes going into a show cold – knowing as little as possible about the play and the players beforehand, so as to make t...
Georgetown, sweet Georgetown – the town so gorgeous they named it George-ish (almost certainly not their official motto, though we haven’t looked ...
“I was a fine idea at the time,” Elvis Costello once sang. “Now I’m a brilliant mistake.” That lyric’s been on your susceptible scribbler...
Lorne Elliott usually works alone. He’s not antisocial – the witty, wild-haired comedian/actor/writer/musician has dabbled in many collaborations ...
For your anglophile analyst, the Charlottetown Festival’s endless run of Anne of Green Gables – The Musical™ feels a bit like the British sci-fi...
Accomplished PEI stage and screen veteran Dennis Trainor is a longtime ensemble contributor who is seldom billed as a solo star. A far fuller picture ...
Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men started life as a 1954 TV special. It’s been reworked in a host of stage and screen incarnations since then, but TV...
Your old-timey observer’s been at this reviewing racket long enough that I inevitably cover certain plays more than once – and Morris Panych’s s...
Charles Dickens’ classic 1843 novella A Christmas Carol has been reprinted, adapted, imitated and lampooned endlessly, so coming up with a new spin ...
Ye olde reviewer last visited The Guild to watch a musical based on an Anne of Green Gables novel, so it neatly bookends the month to be back there a ...
Island audiences tend to give standing ovations to just about everything, regardless of the quality of the play or the performance. I’ve seen standi...