Tag Archives: Theatre

The Judge’s Daughter At The Firehall Arts Centre October 24-29, 2023

20 Oct

The Firehall Arts Centre is playing host to a guest presentation of The Judge’s Daughter October 24 – 29, 2023.  The production tackles questioning the actions of our BC Supreme Court Judges. There are two ways the verdict could go and the final scene hinges on the judgment of you, the audience.

The play takes place in the Whistler ski cabins of brilliant lawyer, Judge Kelly Saint Patrick and her lawyer husband James Brown. Young love blooms for their daughter, Erin, and her activist boyfriend. When a sudden death occurs, it raises the morality of jailing anti-pipeline protesters, family relationships and professional reputations are threatened. It’s time for judgment and the audience is the jury. Tickets are now available online and range between $30 – $50. To purchase tickets, visit the Firehall Arts Centre.

Illustration: George Rammell

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Pulizter Prize Winning Play The Fairview At The Cultch September 27 – October 8

20 Sep

The Cultch presents Fairview, from Vancouver’s The Search Party in partnership with Toronto’s b current Performing Arts, running at the Historic Theatre from September 27 until October 8, 2023.

The Frasier family are getting ready for Grandma’s birthday party but things keep going wrong. Beverly wants everything to be perfect, but nobody is cooperating. Her sister Jasmine won’t help, her husband Dayton is more interested in the game and isn’t paying attention to her, her brother Tyrone is MIA, and Keisha—well, her daughter is a teenager. And while everything is falling apart around Beverly … maybe nothing is what it seems in the first place!

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s hard-hitting examination of race and surveillance premiered June 17, 2018, at Soho Repertory Theatre in New York Theatre. The response was immediate and substantial. Audiences were stirred up, and the show quickly gained momentum as it began gaining accolade after accolade. It went on to win the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was also nominated for six 2019 Drama Desk Awards. Since then it has been produced all over the world.

For Fairview’s Western Canada premiere, Vancouver’s award-winning company The Search Party is partnering with Toronto’s b current Performing Arts. Toronto’s Kwaku Okyere, a Ghanaian-Canadian director, will be joining The Search Party’s Artistic Director Mindy Parfitt to bring Fairview to the Historic Stage. “Often conversations about race can happen in silos with people who have similar lived experiences rather than cross-culturally,” says Okyere and Parfitt. “Our collaboration aims to model what the play is doing, which is to ignite conversation across differences.” For tickets, visit The Cultch.

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Tiva Quinn Reviews FADO The Saddest Music In The World On At The Firehall Arts Centre Until February 5th

20 Jan

It’s very easy to see why Fado was such a big hit at the Firehall in 2019 and why they decided to bring it back as part of getting into the swing of things with live theatre again.

This play attempts to blend an ambitious number of themes into a typical runtime of 90 minutes or so and not only succeeds but makes it look easy.

I went in not knowing much about it besides that I like Fado music even if I don’t listen to it very often. I expected to be impressed with Fado as a musical and a story of artistic ambition and development, and that’s 100% true. We get not just one but 3 incredibly talented singers showing us how an entire country could be in love with “the saddest music in the world” and the way it turns pain into beauty.

We get an appealing and sympathetic main character who wants to learn to sing Fado with true Portuguese passion even if she was born in Canada and some people think that makes her too happy and too lucky to pull it off. We get a cantankerous yet charming mentor figure. We get singing that shows strong yet unrealized potential – which is quite something to pull off when a lot of the audience isn’t very familiar with what the fullest expression of the form would sound like.

At the same time, we also get an interesting examination of Portugal’s 20th Century history and politics as seen from contrasting points of view – with a couple of questions that you may have never considered before such as, “can a song be fascist?” We get a conversation about whether emigrants can ever really leave the home country behind and whether they can ever really return to it, as well as what the imagined homeland means to the second generation. We get two love stories with some surprising twists and turns. And Fado fits all of this in with a script that feels like natural conversation, never forcing large chunks of backstory or introspection into anyone’s lines.

Performances are very strong across the board but for me the standout is Natércia Napoleao’s Luisa, the main character’s mother. She seems at first meeting like she’s going to be an Old-World Mum cliché, a bit of comic relief that we return to occasionally, wielding her precious iron to make everything fancy. However, she quickly blossoms into a complex character, although not always a likable one. She’s a woman who actively resists being stereotyped and complicates the narrative or speaks volumes by simply walking away when others try to dismiss her too easily. 

If I have any quibbles it would be that the play introduces a gay character whose story feels like it doesn’t quite have time enough to breathe or resolve properly. That said the character and his storyline are every bit as strong as the rest of this tale in the moments he does get – and it’s possible that too neat a resolution would be a dishonest way of presenting what it’s like to be gay in a very Catholic country. 

For tickets, visit the Firehall Arts Centre.

By Tiva Quinn

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Firehall Arts Centre Presents A Christmas Carol

21 Nov

The Firehall Arts Centre invites you to celebrate the holiday season with its presentation of A Christmas Carol from Wednesday, December 14 to Saturday, December 24, 2022. Sanjay Talwar plays all 40 characters in this one-version of the familiar tale produced by Blue Ridge Repertory Theatre.   Tickets start at $25 and are now on sale at the Firehall Arts Centre.

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Yaga – A Crime Thriller Comes To The Cultch October 27 to November 5, 2022

23 Oct

Just in time for Halloween, The Cultch hosts a crime thriller from October 27th to November 5th. Yaga is a play that features a mysterious disappearance and suspected murder of a college bad boy. The disappearance finds a small-town sheriff, a young private detective and a university professor with a taste for younger men into a labyrinth of secret lives, ancient magic and multiple suspects. You are invited to check out this genre-bending crime thriller that we hear conjures up the dark magic of a wicked old witch, BabaYaga. Yaga will lead you on an unforgettable world of trickery and revenge. Tickets are on sale now and available online at The Cultch.

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POSTPONED – Bad Parent Comes To The Cultch April 21 – May 1

11 Apr

Norah and Charles are trying to navigate their lives as parents of a toddler, but are figuring out who they are in relation to their son, to each other, and to the audience. Bad Parent, is a hilarious new feel-good comedy from Ins Choi, the creator of the hit CBC sitcom and play Kim’s Convenience, is an honest, no-holds-barred portrait of young parents struggling to find their way through the messy reality of parenthood.

Like all the best fiction, Bad Parent was born of true experience. “There was a turbulent time, early in our marriage, when my wife and I argued a lot. I began writing long unfiltered rants in an attempt to clarify how I was feeling and why,” says playwright Ins Choi. “Many years later, I came across those rants and felt sorry for that couple back then trying to make ends meet, meet each other’s needs and the needs of a newborn.”

Renowned award-winning Vancouver theatre company vAct has gained a reputation in the city for premiering groundbreaking works by some of the biggest names in Canadian theatre. They are one of the only theatre companies in the country to focus on Asian Canadian creators, and they have been responsible for creating and producing some of the most exciting theatre on Canadian stages. Bad Parent, the latest of their Mainstage productions, written by one of Canada’s most famous contemporary playwrights continues the legacy of telling great stories from incredible Asian Canadian talent. “Stories disarm by inviting us into the lives of others wholly different from ourselves only to help us realize how similar we all are,” says Choi. “Through stories, we’re entertained as a group and comforted to know we’re not alone both in our struggles and what we find funny.”

Bad Parent takes the stage in the Historic Theatre at The Cultch from April 21 to May 1, 2022.  Tickets start at $26 and are available online at The Cultch.

Photo: Emily Cooper

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The Cultch Presents Beautiful Man February 24 – March 5

20 Feb

The Cultch presents Beautiful Man, from Pi Theatre, at the Historic Theatre, February 24 – March 5, 2022.

Governor General Award-winning playwright Erin Shields’ Beautiful Man examines traditional gender roles as they are portrayed in popular media, and turns them on their head. In this satirical play, three women chat about the Hollywood movies they have been watching. Only, in the world of Beautiful Man, men are the objects, while women are the subjects. From genre to genre—everything from cop shows to greek tragedies—the absurdity of traditional conventions are brought to the surface. Beautiful Man not only mocks the media’s representation of women, it exposes the underlying violence of objectification with a sharp wit.

Vancouver’s Pi Theatre has made a reputation producing plays that are “intellectually alive and emotionally charged.” In business since 1984, and under the leadership of Richard Wolfe since 2008, they have produced over 100 shows, and been awarded 34 Jessie Awards. “I chose to produce Beautiful Man here in ‘Hollywood North’,” says Wolfe, “because I feel Erin Shields’ relevant play takes an incisive look at how capitalism packages bodies, most often women’s bodies, and sells them as mere objects of entertainment.” Chosen specifically for the task of directing, Keltie Forsyth feels that rage is a powerful tool. “I have shared that rage many times in my life. As has every femme person I know,” she says “… In this piece, Shields finds a way to channel her rage and use it to target the ways the media feeds and upholds patriarchal structures.” Part of The Cultch’s fifth annual Femme Festival, Beautiful Man brings a powerful feminist perspective. Here’s what people are saying about Beautiful Man:

“Erin Shields’s Beautiful Man is a razor-sharp satire that hilariously skewers the tropes of female characters in film and TV.”
Samantha Edwards, Now Toronto

“Shields is a very talented, intelligent, and funny writer with a powerful message”
Ilana Lucas, Mooney on Theatre

“Beautiful Man is a deeply insightful criticism of gender roles enforced by society through the media we consume…”
Isabella Perrone, Broadway World review 

“[Shields is] still writing directly in dialogue with contemporary culture, getting inside it, wrestling with it, taking the royal piss and then throwing it down.”
The Star

This is an in person production with Covid-19 protocols in place. To purchase your tickets, visit The Cultch.

Photo Credit: Emily Cooper

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Find Out What’s At The Bottom Of The Ocean In Sea Sick Coming To The Cultch Feb. 9-19

5 Feb

The Cultch brings you Alanna Mitchell’s production Sea Sick to The Cultch February 9-19, 2022.

Based on Mitchell’s international bestselling book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis (2009), Sea Sick is a critically acclaimed production about climate change, and the state of the global ocean. This production has toured Canada and the world including two previous sold out runs in Vancouver (2015 & 2019). Mitchell’s non-fiction play uses science and delicate wit to tell us about her journey to the bottom of the ocean, the demons she discovered there, and her hope for the future.

An award-winning Canadian journalist and author (New York Times, CBC’s Quirks & Quarks, Globe and Mail, and more), Alanna Mitchell writes about science and social trends specializing in investigative reporting. Before writing Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis she set out on a three year quest to find out information from top scientists all around the world. Over the course of 13 journeys, from Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico, to Zanzibar, and even to the very depth of the ocean in a submersible, Mitchell sought the answers to her questions. Her book, and later her play—commissioned by The Theatre Centre, with directions from Franco Boni and Ravi Jain—would open many people’s eyes to the perilous state we find ourselves in if we do not pay attention to our oceans. What people are saying about Sea Sick:

“Almost like a glacier, Sea Sick steadily and robustly ploughs through the vast ecosystem  that is the current discourse on climate change, and indelibly transforms the  landscape which came before.”
Exeunt Magazine

“This isn’t a lecture about the catastrophic repercussions of burning fossil fuels, or a guilt trip about how we’re to blame for the state of the Great Barrier Reef. Instead, it’s an unravelling – an unveiling – of a crisis; a clear-eyed pathway toward comprehension and a knitting together of the important, largely siloed work of marine biologists across the world.”
The Guardian

“80 minutes flies by because of Mitchell’s inspired storytelling… Terrifying, laugh-out-loud funny, and ultimately hopeful, Mitchell’s Sea Sick is a must-see”
Vancouver Observer

This is an in person production with all Covid protocols in place and 50% seating capacity. To purchase tickets, visit The Cultch.

Photo Credit: Alejandro Santiago

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World Premiere Of Do You Mind If I Sit Here? At The Russian Hall January 26-29

14 Jan

Theatre Replacement announces the world premiere of their latest work: Do you mind if I sit here? which will be performed at the Russian Hall January 26 – 29, 2022.  This production is part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Do you mind if I sit here? is about 3 social planners that visit the Russian Hall 30 years from now. They intend to repurpose the space for common use, but discover a squatter that has been living there through decades of an environmental catastrophe. The performance is eclectic in style with a metaphorical narrative. They will dare you to imagine the future in terms of our most important hopes, fears and beliefs. This is an in person event with Covid-safety protocols in place which include 50% seating capacity. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

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The Firehall Arts Centre Opens Their 2022 Season With John January 12 – 15

8 Jan

The Firehall Arts Centre opens their 2022 season with Helen Walkley’s powerful dance/theatre piece, John. The production takes place from Wednesday, January 12 to Saturday, January 15, 2022.

“John is a memoir of my oldest brother who disappeared from Vancouver in May of 1969, never to be heard from again. I sourced from an archive of family letters dating from 1959–2010, which document the years leading up to his disappearance, his medical history, and the subsequent tracking my parents did of his disappearance. He was twenty-three at the time and I was thirteen.” – Helen Walkley.

“John is such a powerful, intimate piece that you are left feeling like you know this mysterious person,” says Artistic Producer Donna Spencer. “The performers, Josh Martin and Billy Marchenski, work together and apart in a manner that captures the inner feelings and outer conflicts of this young man. The work takes you on a journey of hope and loss with gentleness and frustration – it is a wonderful and memorable night of dance theatre.” – Helen Walkley

The production is choreographed by Helen Walkley and performed by Josh Martin and Billy Marchenski, John premiered and wowed audiences during its sold-out run at the 2019 Dancing on the Edge Festival.

Performances at the Firehall Arts Centre are continuing live at 50% capacity, masks and proof of vaccination will be required. To purchase tickets for the live performance, visit Firehall Arts Centre.

Photo Credit: Chris Randle

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