Finster Finds

A quick post to tell you about Elephant Wake currently playing at Catalyst Theatre.  Thankfully they added an Industry Show on Monday night so I was able to see it.  They also had a very funny talk-back with actor and playwright Joey Tremblay and Catalyst Artistic Director Jonathan Christenson facilitated by James MacDonald. The show takes place in a paper filled ditch on the side of the road in Saskatchewan.  We are there to visit Jean-Claude (played by Tremblay).  Jean-Claude may not be the smartest person but he is a wonderful story-teller and during this Grande Visite we hear the story of his life, his town and the many deaths he has experienced.  It is magical and compelling, funny and sad, and simply beautiful. This is one of the best shows I have ever seen.  A good deal of that is due to the absolute completeness of Tremblay's characterization of Jean-Claude combined with a barrel full of stories that overlap and twist wonderfully to tell the story of his life.   It only

On Tuesday night the whole family headed to the Citadel to take in the wonderfully ridiculous One Man, Two Guvnors .  I had seen it earlier at Dress Rehearsal but was looking forward to seeing it again and having Mark and the boys experience it.  It was great to see it again and even better in that I got to hear Gibson and Oliver laughing hysterically at it.  Once The Craze started up Gibson was glued to the stage.  He's a big music fan and he was really impressed with the group and the variety of instruments on the stage.  He also loved the parts throughout the show when the other members of the cast joined in for their 'special' numbers.  I think his favorite was Jesse Gervais on the bicycle horns, but John Ullyatt on the Xylophone was also up there!  The show was simply terrific.  It's great to go to a show that you can still laugh at even though you've seen it before, even more rewarding when your 13 year old leans over 3/4 of the way through the first act

I wish I'd had more time this past weekend to post.  I would have written about Sequence by Arun Lakra, now playing at Shadow Theatre. I saw it last Friday and really liked it.  What I loved the most about it was the extremely clever and smart script.  This was the winner of the 2011 Alberta Play-writing Competition and it's easy to see why it won.  The play is a study of chance and probability, of genetics and mathematics, and of humans dealing with all of them.  Two stories, seemingly unrelated, are told simultaneously, and layer by layer the probabilities add up.  I'm a bit of a weird mash-up of science and drama so this was the perfect piece for me.  My Education degree is a Physical Sciences (Physics and Chemistry) Major with a Minor in English and Math.  I have since taken enough Drama courses that I could have a major in that, as well.  So I really enjoyed the merging of my many worlds.  I loved that the script is smart - not just throw-away puns, but sophisticated

Last night I took in the Opening Night of The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimbl e by Beth Graham at Theatre Network. On the surface, the play is about children dealing with their aging parent who is struck by early onset Alzheimer's Disease.  More specifically, it is about the middle child, Iris (played by Clarice Eckford), and her struggle to help her mother deal with the disease on her own terms.  To that end, we spend a lot of time with Iris as she tells the story very pointedly from her perspective. She even warns us that the story will be told through her filter as storyteller.  What that results in is vibrant characters in the form of the loud and brassy older sister Sarah (Patricia Zentilli), the withdrawn and tension avoiding younger brother Peter (Jason Chinn) and the warm, beautiful and wise mother Bernice (Susan Gilmour). Iris' filter exaggerates the good and the bad in each of them. There are many wonderful things with this production. Zentilli is terrific as