Tag: Sean McQuaid

List rites

Every Brilliant Thing Beaconsfield Carriage House, Charlottetown January 19, 2023 PEI theatre often hibernates in January, even a January as unna...

Holiday viewing

12 days of Christmas movies

[et_pb_section admin_label="section"] [et_pb_row admin_label="row"] [et_pb_column type="4_4"] [et_pb_text admin_label="Text"] After last...

Man of the deeps

Beneath Springhill: The Maurice Ruddick Story

Watermark Theatre - November 30, 2022 Dark events can cast surprisingly bright shadows. That’s true of the 1958 Springhill mine disaster, which br...

Horsing around

The Two Horsewomen

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...

Dancing while it burns

The Fourth R: reduce, reuse, recycle, Revolutionize

Island Fringe Festival ‘22, Havenwood Dance Studio, Charlottetown - July 29, 2022 Way back in the golden pre-COVID summer of 2019, Toronto, Onta...

Drawing power

The Drawer Boy

Watermark Theatre, North Rustico - August 12, 2022 Watermark Theatre artistic director Robert Tsonos is clearly having fun. Doing the pre-show intr...

Triple plays

Island Fringe Festival 2022 (ensembles)

Various venues, Charlottetown, PEI - July 28-30, 2022 While five of this year’s Island Fringe Festival (IFF) productions were solo acts, the res...

Five times one

Island Fringe Festival 2022 (solo shows)

Various venues, Charlottetown, PEI - July 28-30, 2022 With a random drawing determining which applicants enter the Island Fringe Festival (IFF), t...

A Voice from the past

Hey Viola!

The Mack - August 8, 2022 The Charlottetown Festival has a long history with jukebox musicals, plays that bundle preexisting popular songs together...

Tragedy made fun

Educating Rita

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...

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 ...

Ship-wracked

Beyond the Sea

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...

Lung story short

LUNGS

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 ...

A Christmas Carol

Review | By Sean McQuaid

Charles Dickens’ classic 1843 novella A Christmas Carol has many virtues, among them its near-infinite adaptability. Everyone from the Muppets to th...

12 Days of Christmas TV

Holiday Viewing | BY Sean McQuaid

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...

A small, dark gem

Tuesdays & Sundays

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 ...

History swings

Greetings: An Army Musician’s Message Home

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....

Rice-capades

Cottagers & Indians

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...

Box to the Future

Old Stock: a Refugee Love Story

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...

Astounding Feets

Island Fringe Festival 2021: Inner Urban Ecosystem/Kings and Queens

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...

Solo Flights

Island Fringe Festival 2021: Cowardice/Head War

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...

Playing Dead

Island Fringe Festival 2021: Deenie’s Exit/Playground

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...

Review: The Gin Game

“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...

Review: Off The Grid

As a COVID-haunted world emerges haltingly from hiding, mixed feelings loom: excitement over resumption of quasi-normal life, anxiety over the risks t...

Public domain

Stray Shorts Stories | by Sean McQuaid

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...

Double Feature

The Brackley Drive-in

“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...

Ladies Night

Fascinating Maritime Ladies

Fascinating female trios abound in pop culture, from classical icons like the mythological Fates and MacBeth’s witches to modern examples like Charl...

Review: Doubt

Second chances

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 ...

Review: At the Dog Leg Turn of the Road

Out of the past

My late, great grandfather Charles MacDonald – family man, checkers champ, covert dog fancier – was a World War II combat veteran. I don’t remem...

Review: Punch Up

Underground Comedy

PEI’s fringe theatre imports often consist primarily of whatever lands in the Island Fringe Festival each summer; but new local company Desert Islan...

Review: The Shame of the Meek

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 ...

Review: Salt-Water Moon

Moonstruck

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...

Review: Island Fringe Festival 2019

Fringe Oddities

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-...

Review: Island Fringe Festival 2019

Fringe Femmes

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 ...

Review: Island Fringe Festival 2019

Magic vs. Science

Fringe 2019 features productions that are deep, dark, moving, profound, thought-provoking, stunningly original and/or just plain bizarre. My second-fa...

Review: Real Estate

Playing House

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...

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