Category Archives: Reviews

“Not just prepared but Miss Katelyn-prepared!”: Tiny Bear Jaws takes us to readiness school. A review

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca It’s been a banner year or five for traumatizing apocalyptic anxiety. It’s nerve-wracking and exhausting to be in a perpetual state of red-alert, barely suppressed. On the other hand, who can call it outlandish paranoid fantasy … Continue reading →

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The importance of being Oscar: a comic masterwork finds a home at Teatro La Quindicina: a review

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca It has been called the most perfectly constructed comedy in English theatre. And it’s certainly one of the funniest. Funny, then, how The Importance of Being Earnest is full of serious people. That’s the hard, crucial … Continue reading →

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Nostalgia for a lost age: Forever Plaid at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca In their one review ever, in The Wiltsburg Times Chronicle, a nameless writer delivered the opinion that The Plaids’ sound “is to modern music what Formica is to marble.” It is a measure of their infinite … Continue reading →

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An exciting new Hamlet for the park: a review

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca “Is not this something more than fantasy?” The guards on duty in Elsinore are talking about a dead king who’s been appearing nightly from behind his official royal portrait. They’re right on another count, too.  Something … Continue reading →

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The world’s a zany, baffling place: The Comedy of Errors in the park

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca At a crucial mistaken-identity moment in The Comedy of Errors — a transaction-gone-askew involving a goldsmith, a chain, and a wayward husband arranging delivery on pricey bling for someone not his wife — a magpie perched … Continue reading →

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The hunger to know and the mystery of the past: a compelling new play by Stewart Lemoine premieres at Teatro La Quindicina

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca A man, a well-known TV investigative reporter, returns to the small-town house where he spent a year as a six-year-old boy. He’s having coffee with the affable current owner, a stranger to him, when he discovers … Continue reading →

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“I need you like water”: relationships in a time of oil in Last Chance Leduc

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca The fulcrum of Katherine Koller’s Last Chance Leduc — the third in her Alberta Landworks Trilogy about human relationships destabilized by seismic shifts in industry — is the moment of Alberta’s gold rush. I refer, of … Continue reading →

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A man, his ghosts, his dog, his quest for meaning: Terry and the Dog, a review of Collin Doyle’s mysterious new play

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca “I’m trying to find meaning here,” Terry tells us in the very first line of Terry and the Dog. It’s a theme he’ll return to at the end, and regularly in between. So are we all, … Continue reading →

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Seek out Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story at the Citadel. A review

Posted on May 10, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca “We all come out of the same box,” declares the top-hatted bushy-bearded Wanderer (Ben Caplan) who’s just emerged from an outsized shipping container at the start of Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story. What is so … Continue reading →

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The modest dreams of the working class as farce: Fly Me To The Moon, a review

Posted on April 29, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca “Hold on just a moment there…” says one Irish home-care worker to another near the start of Fly Me To The Moon, by the Belfast playwright Marie Jones (Stones In His Pockets), the loopy little  comedy … Continue reading →

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