Finster Finds

This week I saw two very different plays.  One, Ravenscroft , was a mystery where the truth was slowly unraveled as lies and exaggerations were discarded.  The other,  Les Blues des Oubliées , was a french-langueage play with sur-titles. So in both,I had to work hard to figure out what was going on! Ravenscroft , currently running at Walterdale Theatre until October 24th, is a who-dun-it with a surprise twist at the end. Inspector Ruffing (Dan Fessenden) interrogates the 5 women of Ravenscroft Manor to try to discover exactly what happened the night the footman was killed.  It's a clever play with juicy characters set in an English Manor in the early 1900s.  I did the props for the show and due to my busy schedule this was first opportunity to see if the worked.  They did! It was great to see the show up on it's feet. The cast does a nice job creating the world and for me it was great to see 5 of the 6 cast members are newcomers to Walterdale. I also li...

I never know quite what to expect with Teatro la Quindicina .  That's a good thing.  I've learned to go into their shows with a spirit of " let's see what happens " because you never quite know what their show will be about.   The Hot House Prince was certainly that for me.  With references to Three Sisters (all played by the delightful and multi-faceted Kendra O'Connor) the play takes us to Russia during the revolution and a young Prince Dmitri Romanov-Orsk (Luc Tellier) must find a way to survive by fleeing the country.  It's a cautionary tale about entitlement and how that doesn't prepare us for the real world, but it tells it's story in a charming, humour-filled way. What saves Dmitri is his irrepressible hope and willingness to adapt and work hard.   The Hot House Prince left me feeling all warm inside!  The cast is terrific, led by the charming Tellier. I found the cast refreshing and engaging, and highlights for me were Jayce MacKenzie a...

I admit it. I had reservations about Bone Cage before I saw it. This was heightened when I read the Director's Notes which indicted the Oil Sands industry and it's toxic sludge of tailings ponds and the suggestion that if we really thought about what we were doing to make a living we would be sickened by it.  I've heard that rhetoric before and having spent most of my life in Fort McMurray I couldn't help but bristle a bit, but I was determined to view the play with an open mind. I was expecting a rhetoric laden piece about the environment, with blame laid here and there... but that's not what I saw.  Instead, I didn't see much of the environmental message earned. It was there, but it felt pasted on as a convenient scapegoat for the unhappiness of the people in the play. What played out was that these people were screwed up because of past tragedies - a lost son/brother, a wayward mother, a missing father, bad parenting, poor choices in school, or general imma...