The Fringe threw its biggest party in thirty years, and more people than ever before showed up! I’m ecstatic that the festival attracted its largest crowds this August, but more than that, finally blew past the 100,000 ticket barrier (selling a total of 104,142 tickets)! I’m sure some of this had to do with the [...]

Things we loved in San Francisco: Two Buck Chuck (Seriously. Wine for $2 a bottle in North America?) Consumer warning labels in stores (how’s that for awareness?) Scramble crosswalks (coming soon to Edmonton) Something else we loved? Sleeping in. We decided to give ourselves the benefit of a late start on day 5, as we [...]

A number of years ago, I remember being drawn to a Fringe show called Klang! Pow! Kersplat! primarily because it was promised that each of the scenes would involve stage fighting. I remember it being very entertaining, and really, I hadn’t seen anything like it before – there’s nothing quite like watching the dance of [...]

Catalyst Theatre is one of those companies that makes one proud to be an Edmontonian. Frankenstein and Nevermore, the previous two creations by Jonathan Christenson and Bretta Gerecke, were nothing short of spectacular, so their third production, commissioned by the Citadel Theatre, was highly anticipated with near-daunting expectations. Hunchback, as described on the Citadel’s website: [...]

On Saturday, Mack and I took in a matinee performance of Meat Puppet at the Varscona Theatre, a show put on jointly by Shadow Theatre and Northern Light Theatre (speaking of which, NLT has such striking poster designs this year – the use of dolls is eye-catching and inspired, though I suppose the poster for [...]

Workshop West’s Canoe Theatre Festival promised “some of the season’s most interesting artists and challenging performances.” Based on the promo for Operation EVAsion, by local company Firefly Theatre, it wasn’t difficult to see why this particular play was included in the roster: Operation EVAsion is based on the bizarre but factual account of the multiple [...]

Mack and I saw the play Homeless put on at Alberta College on Monday night, an event sponsored by Grant MacEwan. The price of admission was donations of food or clothing, small offerings in exchange for the opportunity to watch a show that has struck a chord with audiences at the Fringe and Kaleido Festivals, [...]

Mack and I headed to the TransAlta Arts Barns on Saturday evening to take in Any Night, a production from Daniel Arnold and Medina Hahn, the same pair that were behind the memorable Tuesdays & Sundays, a tragic romance that played to sold-out audiences at the Edmonton Fringe ten years ago. From the website: “A [...]

It’s not a secret that the Fringe is my favourite summer festival. The shows, the food, the buskers, the atmosphere – it’s a combination that rightly attracts an incredibly diverse crowd. I really admire what the Fringe is doing to try to build their audience from the ground up, tackling the age-old issue of those [...]

The Ambassador’s Wives, Stewart Lemonine’s newest play that just wrapped up its run at the Varscona Theatre, is one of the best Teatro la Quindicina productions I’ve seen in a while. Unlike some reviewers, I’m not smitten with every Lemoine piece – there are some that ring truer, or happen to entertain me more than [...]