Stir Vancouver

Your correspondent (that’s me) has seen Hazlett once before, performing an absolutely mesmerizing solo acoustic set last year at Seattle venue Neumo’s (which might have actually been packed beyond capacity, but you didn’t read that here).

“Frenzy for Two”, which Wolfe chose to adapt partly because of resonances he felt between the play and the ongoing violence in Ukraine and Gaza, follows an absurd argument between a married couple over whether a turtle and a snail are really the same animal. Meanwhile, a war is raging outside the window and the couple’s home is gradually reduced to ruins. Wolfe and his team didn’t have the budget or the materials to create a fully destructible set—they had to get creative.

The Goblins are back. But you probably already knew that if you've paid even minimal attention to what’s going on at Bard on the Beach this year. They're hard to miss. There’s something almost automatic about our response to these characters. The fleshy realism of their masks is just unsettling enough to make anyone pause (they’re undeniably creepy), but something about the permanent little smirk carved into their faces makes it really hard to not want to approach or at least keep looking.

IT’S 1975 AT GRANVILLE and Broadway, and the late, great Aristocratic Restaurant stands as a beacon in the night. Rising Vancouver photographer Greg Girard has set up his tripod on the sidewalk and captures a blurred figure entering the glass door to the diner, where a waitress busies herself behind an illuminated cigarette machine. Around its corner a pink-neon “DINING ROOM” sign beckons over a window that reveals lone customers eating under bright fluorescent lights.

Conductor and VO music director Jacques Lacombe. Photos courtesy City of Burnaby VANCOUVER OPERA IS about to pull out big-time Italian arias and overtures for this year’s free concert at the Festival Lawn in Deer Lake Park.

“From the start, pop sensibilities have been pretty to the fore in this project, and then everything else kind of supports that,” the frontman says. “Somewhere along the way I let some of the fun guitar stuff that brought me into being in a rock band in the first place go to sit in the back of the arrangements a little bit more. So now it’s kind of coming up to the fore.

THIS SUMMER, A WALK through Granville Island or a visit to the library might reveal a masked figure wrapped in rope, a Bharatanatyam dancer, or a contemporary juggler. New Works’ event All Over the Map returns with free outdoor performances that turn everyday public spaces into unexpected stages.

STAFF MEMBERS OF Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and their supporters picketed outside the nonprofit’s workplace after bargaining negotiations reached an impasse between Centre A’s leadership and its staff’s Union, IATSE B-778, Arts and Cultural Workers Union (ACWU).

“A WOMAN’S CHARM is fifty percent illusion.” Fading Southern belle Blanche DuBois has a knack for saying the quiet part out loud. Having lost Belle Reve, her family’s once-grand Mississippi estate, she arrives at the cramped New Orleans apartment shared by her loving younger sister Stella and Stella’s hostile husband, Stanley Kowalski, carrying enough lace, costume jewellery, and Southern gentility to assemble multiple versions of herself.

Fast-forward to 2022. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in contemporary jazz piano at Humber College and an ARCT designation in classical piano from the Royal Conservatory of Music, Yerofeyeva was by then firmly established in a career as a professional musician, both as a founder of the popular wedding/dance band StereoFlavour and as an explorer of everything from jazzy chamber-pop to edge-of-night trip-hop with DoVira.