Fifty years ago this month, the Savoy Society was born as it graced the stage at McGill with its debut performance: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. Today’s Savoy Society is honouring its golden anniversary by presenting the same whimsical, timeless operetta with which it first premiered so many years ago.[Read More…]
Theatre
Ancient conflicts are still pertinent in Tuesday Night Café’s Antigone
Visceral and thoughtful, Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Antigone exposes us to elemental human choices without asking us to provide an answer. Starting this weekend, McGill’s student-run theatre company Tuesday Night Café (TNC) is performing Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of the classic in a philosophically stimulating production. The plot begins with the end of[Read More…]
The Seagull will have Montrealers flocking to its stage
In Tom Stoppard’s introduction to his English translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, he writes, “You can’t have too many English language versions of The Seagull.” Although he very well may have written those words in the interest of stressing the relevance of his translation—particularly given the plethora of other[Read More…]
Family matters spiral out of control in All My Sons
The ‘dystopian suburban soap opera’ has become somewhat of a cliché in recent years. Between Alan Ball’s film American Beauty, Tracy Letts’s play August: Osage County, and David Chase’s television series The Sopranos, writers have managed to wring an impressive amount of drama out of debunking the American Dream. Legendary[Read More…]
Uproarious and lavish, cast shines in The Drowsy Chaperone
“The spit takes are lame and the monkey motif is laboured.” That’s not to be taken as a particularly aggressive start to this review, rather, it’s the judgment of a character in The Drowsy Chaperone—about the show itself. The self-deprecation is just one of the many charming aspects of this[Read More…]
The 25th hour: a strong finish at TNC’s playwriting dash
The stakes were high last Saturday evening at Morrice Hall’s Tuesday Night Café Theatre (TNC). With the pride of winning McGill’s most temporally concentrated dramatic competition—not to mention the promise of free pitchers of beer at Bar des Pins afterwards—on the line, a trio of hastily prepared student-written plays were[Read More…]
Opera McGill opts for relocation in Shakespeare adaptation
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s oft performed comedy of love, magic, and misunderstanding, was written more than 400 years ago and adapted by English composer Benjamin Britten in the 1960’s as an opera, which will be the format by which Opera McGill performs the story in their upcoming main stage[Read More…]
Behind green eyes
In his early 17th century play Othello, Shakespeare coined the phrase “green-eyed monster.” The phrase, used to describe jealousy, enjoys popular use to this day, and refers to one of humankind’s most irrational, yet common, emotions. Similarly, theatre companies remount Othello year after year, attempting to refresh and rejuvenate the[Read More…]
Heaven on earth?
The director’s note uses the words “oppression” and “repression” to describe the McGill English Drama & Theatre Program’s play Cloud 9, and those two words couldn’t have summed up the production more accurately. Cloud 9 explores these main themes within two separate but thematically connected spheres; the first act takes[Read More…]
If Shakespeare had written Lost…
The Tempest, the latest production by McGill’s Players’ Theatre, is the third installment in a season where the mission is “to juxtapose reality with what is magical and imaginative.” This play, believed to be the last written work of William Shakespeare, certainly does just that. Director Juliet Paperny blurs the[Read More…]
