List rites
Every Brilliant Thing Beaconsfield Carriage House, Charlottetown January 19, 2023 PEI theatre often hibernates in January, even a January as unna...
Every Brilliant Thing Beaconsfield Carriage House, Charlottetown January 19, 2023 PEI theatre often hibernates in January, even a January as unna...
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Watermark Theatre - November 30, 2022 Dark events can cast surprisingly bright shadows. That’s true of the 1958 Springhill mine disaster, which br...
The Guild, Charlottetown - August 19, 2022 Theatrical world premieres in PEI tend to be either plays written by local artists or shows staged at o...
Island Fringe Festival ‘22, Havenwood Dance Studio, Charlottetown - July 29, 2022 Way back in the golden pre-COVID summer of 2019, Toronto, Onta...
Watermark Theatre, North Rustico - August 12, 2022 Watermark Theatre artistic director Robert Tsonos is clearly having fun. Doing the pre-show intr...
Various venues, Charlottetown, PEI - July 28-30, 2022 While five of this year’s Island Fringe Festival (IFF) productions were solo acts, the res...
Various venues, Charlottetown, PEI - July 28-30, 2022 With a random drawing determining which applicants enter the Island Fringe Festival (IFF), t...
The Mack - August 8, 2022 The Charlottetown Festival has a long history with jukebox musicals, plays that bundle preexisting popular songs together...
Watermark Theatre - July 15, 2022 Best PEI theatre summer ever? As of mid-July, I’ve seen three deeply disparate shows at three different venues...
Charlottetown Festival, Confederation Centre - June 29, 2022 Hopes aplenty are pinned on Tell Tale Harbour, both the fictional East Coast town and ...
Victoria Playhouse - July 2, 2022 Fusty old fuddy-duddy that I am, I’m seldom the hippest hepcat regarding the quirks of modern slang; but I have...
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 ...
Kings Playhouse, Georgetown 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....
Watermark Theatre, North Rustico A long time ago in a province far, far away, I spent nearly a year living and working on a remote northern First N...
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...
Despite his oft-muted mug, your somber scribbler likes a fun time. The Island Fringe Festival’s literally random selection of plays tends to be hit-...
The Island Fringe Festival’s selection of shows via random drawing tends to produce an eclectic mix, but this year’s slate yielded an interesting ...
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...