by Mark Augustine

Funny!  Incredibly harsh but extremely funny!  Maja Ardal’s performance in You Fancy Yourself at the Theatre Passe Muraille backspace deserves kudos for the effort and talent she exerts to transform harsh schoolyard life and childhood torment into a comedy juggernaut.  This one-woman show will catch the audience off-guard with the clean and deliberate energy that kept me applauding for more even after 2 hours.

Continue reading You Fancy Yourself – Theatre Passe Muraille (backspace) →

Review by Mark Augustine

Q: What do you get when you cross the Twilight Zone with Italian Opera and throw in Norma Desmond as the lead character?

A: I’ll be damned if I know.  But it’s pretty much what you can expect from Zona Pellucida – a 45 min. one person show from Montreal which played at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

My friend Earnest and I didn’t really know what to expect from “Zona Pellucida”.  The posters gave little indication of plot and the programme offered little more.  It is one of those kinds of shows where you sit there for the first ten minutes thinking “Ok, I just need to concentrate harder and maybe I’ll get the purpose here!”  By the time we hit 25 minutes I just decided to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Continue reading Zona Pellucida & the Needle Exchange (A Double Bill) – Buddies in Bad Times Theatre →

By Mark Augustine

A friend of mine said a while back that theatre in this country was at a standstill because everything seemed to be about identity politics.  “Who are we?” “What does it mean to be Canadian?”  Thankfully, Brooke Johnson doesn’t go anywhere near that. 

Turdeau Stories, currently playing at Theatre Passe Muraille, gives you something very personal and delightfully offbeat that is still uniquely Canadian.  In a little over an hour Johnson takes the audience down a path that shows us a side of our PM that few of us knew.  It is a personal tribute to a privately shy and simple man with simple pleasures of life who, like any of us, sought the comforts of true friendship.  The difference is, this man was Pierre Eliot Trudeau.

Continue reading Trudeau Stories – Theatre Passe Muraille →