Theatre Archives

Shirley Valentine, meet Lotty Wilton (Jane E. Craven), Rose Arnott (Helen Martin), Caroline Bramble (Alexis Kellum-Creer) and Mrs Graves (Alison Schamberger). For long before you made your trip to Greece to escape your humdrum life, these four women did the same thing way back in the 1920s on their own trip to Italy.

A cross between Rocky Horror Show and Debbie Does Dallas, The Musical, the John Water-esque comedy Reefer Madness is currently playing the PAL Theatre in Vancouver with an ensemble so full of energy that I was exhausted by the end of the evening. I also slept like a baby knowing that Vancouver's next generation of actors are a very talented lot if this group of primarily Capilano University students and graduates is any indication.

It is some pretty heady stuff (no pun intended) - a musical about brain surgery - and while the current production of A New Brain from Pipedream Theatre Project definitely has plenty of heart it suffers from poor acoustics and an ensemble that is more times than not overpowered by the small orchestra.

Axis Theatre Company has just announced that the ever-popular, wacky, zany side-splitting world-renowned show The Number 14 is coming back to Vancouver.  If you haven’t caught this bus this might be your last chance July 2-26 at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island.

It is quite fitting that a mere three weeks after original Survivor winner Richard Hatch was released from jail for failing to report his million dollar win in 2000 that we found ourselves on Granville Island witnessing our own local version of Survivor with the very funny people from the Vancouver TheatreSports League.

Local playwright David Blue, usually known for writing and directing his (and others) gay-themed plays, steps a little outside his comfort zone in his new comedy Six Grooms, a Bride and a Gun currently playing at Studio 16 through June 14th.

How do you take one of the world's longest running and most popular mega-musicals, Les Miserables, scale it down to fit the confines the Stanley Theatre and still create a great evening of entertainment? If you're the Arts Club Theatre Company you do it with great deal of passion, some incredible voices, a six-piece orchestra that sounds so much bigger and an ensemble that is as strong as the leads.

The idea of a power dinner with some of history's (and today's) greatest minds has always been a fantasy of mine. Every so often I will add someone else to my list of invitees or when someone more intriguing comes along I will even replace one of my other guests. I know that this recurring fantasy will never really play out for me unless I do what playwright Caryl Churchill has does in the first scene of Top Girls, currently on stage at the Vancouver Playhouse, and make it come to life on stage.

As undoubtedly Vancouver's hardest working actors on stage right now, the cast of Secretly Women Productions' Stop Kiss not only serve up a powerful and shockingly relevant piece but do so in the tiny confines of the Havana Theatre, on a shoe-string budget and no guarantees of even being paid for their efforts.

While the Arts Club explores women's rights on Granville Island, downtown, the Firehall Arts Centre presents a story of indigenous (native) rights with the Vancouver premiere of Thomson Highway's Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout.