Creating a new musical

by Sean McQuaid

Success has many fathers. For me, that old saying evokes Anne of Green Gables – the Musical where nearly the entire population of Avonlea takes credit for Anne’s accomplishments. The same adage applies less debatably to Anne’s long-gestating stage sister Evangeline, in which an interprovincial extended family of theatre professionals are helping give birth to one o

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An Evening of Fairy Tales

Review by Sean McQuaid

A first-person confession: I’m prone to poking fun at my own ever-advancing years in these pages, partial as I am to a good running gag; but ACT’s latest show makes me feel seriously ancient, as its very young cast includes multiple children of actors whom I reviewed as young adults way back in the previous millennium.

Yes, my reviewing work now spans

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Calendar Girls

Review by Sean McQuaid

It’s an age-old naked truth in entertainment: skin sells. Whatever the product or project, any hint of nudity will often attract attention and bolster business. P.E.I. theatre has tested that truism twice in recent years, with two plays based on popular film comedies about nudity: the Charlottetown Festival’s 2011 production of The Full Monty, and the Harbourfront Pla

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Launch of Prince Edward Island Legislative Documents Online

by Sean McQuaid

Over the course of decades upon decades of political action in this Island’s history, stretching back to centuries past, events and activities that occurred in our Legislature have been recorded for posterity in the Clerk’s Journals of the P.E.I. Legislative Assembly.

Handy things those Clerk’s Journals, each one summarizing t

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Wizard of Oz

Review by Sean McQuaid

Your rusty rambler adores MGM’s iconic musical film classic The Wizard of Oz (1939) with its timeless Harold Arlen/E.Y. Harburg songs; so the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1987 stage musical adaptation by John Kane, recently remounted as the Confederation Centre’s latest community Christmas play, is an easy sell for this reviewer.

Most Earthlings know either L. Frank

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Extraordinary People Care About Art
UPEI Theatre Society

Review by Sean McQuaid

Your dilapidated diarist has always fancied one-act plays. Done well, they’re a happy marriage of economy and artistry, packing all of a story’s essentials into a conveniently compact running time. Stage two or more of them together and you add some welcome variety to an evening’s theatre.

Extraordinary People Care About

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Macbeth

Review by Sean McQuaid

Your ramshackle reviewer has a soft spot for Macbeth, it being the first Shakespeare play he read purely for kicks as opposed to by academic decree.

In that benighted bygone age dubbed the 1980s, this pale student of unhallowed arts (a.k.a. comic books) was branching out into more highfalutin leisure reading – like the school library’s little blue hardcover copy of Macbeth.

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The Kitchen Witches

Review by Sean McQuaid (preview show)

Your calcified critic has all the culinary acumen of a vending machine, but he knows what he likes – and The Kitchen Witches, while corny and fluffy, is a satisfying light theatrical meal.

Cooked up in 2003 by Charlottetown Festival alumna Caroline Smith during her time as founding director of the Stirling Festival Theatre in Ontario, compact

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Popalopalots

Review by Sean McQuaid

And then there were seven. The Popalopalots improv comedy troupe is back for another season at The Guild, now with a newly expanded cast.

Sketch-22 veterans Rob MacDonald and Graham Putnam teamed up with comic book merchant Dylan Miller and actors Renae Perry and Dave Phillips to form the Popalopalots last summer. Perry and Phillips have since moved on, replaced

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Anne of Green Gables—The Musical™

Review by Sean McQuaid

Some rare first-person musings from your prehistoric prattler on the subject of introducing his daughter to an old friend: Anne of Green Gables—The Musical™.

It’s been years since I last saw the show, though Anne is always with us here on PEI. She’s the Rod Serling to our Twilight Zone, an omnipresent entity forever haunting, defining and symbolizing our

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Ring of Fire

Review by Sean McQuaid

The Charlottetown Festival has long made good money off great musicians. Buddy Holly, Stan Rogers, Gordon Lightfoot, Patsy Cline – they’ve all been the focus of “jukebox” musicals built around their respective songbooks, and those musicals have all played Charlottetown over the years with varying degrees of success.

That success made new Festival production Ring

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PEI Community Theatre Festival

Review by Sean McQuaid

Moving back to his PEI birthplace has often made this writer feel old. Ancient, even. As if his daughter’s occasional talk of “Daddy crumbling into dust” (inspired by a movie mummy’s fate she once witnessed) were more factual than fanciful.

That feeling is often keenest in theatrical settings. Mature figures have always loomed large in PEI theatre,

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