Sky Gilbert writes timely plays. St. Francis of Millbrook is about growing up gay in rural Ontario. Gilbert provides a good dose of humour to make his message of acceptance and tolerance more palatable, but the scene where the father savagely beats his teenage son for being gay is a sobering moment. The fact that […]
Be prepared. This show is loud, but then it is about rock ‘n’ roll. Backbeat: The Birth of the Beatles is the 2010 stage adaptation of a 1994 movie that details the legendary group’s early years between 1960 and 1963. Iain Softley, one of the movie’s writers, has penned the book of the musical with […]
American playwright David Mamet is all about language and rhythm. Characters like to hear themselves talk. They go off on riffs. Just a word from someone else can trigger the verbal diarrhoea. Other people can barely get a word in edge-wise. When something akin to dialogue happens, the words are fragments of thoughts which makes […]
Thirtysomething American playwright Noah Haidle is known for his “strange and off-kilter” plays. Outside The March Theatre Company is remounting Haidle’s Mr. Marmalade, a huge hit at last year’s SummerWorks. And what’s the play like? Not surprisingly, strange and off-kilter. But it is also dark, disturbing, provocative, poignant and satiric. OtM has set the play […]
Marie Dressler was a force of nature whose fascinating life was crying out to be made into a play. The Oscar-winning actress/comedienne was born in Cobourg and raised in Lindsay, and that made her the perfect subject for a 4th Line Theatre production. The company only does original plays anchored in Northumberland and Peterborough counties […]
