Next week, Theatre Aquarius puts on its Reading Week. The artists in the various programs that Theatre Aquarius supports during the theatre season will get a chance to present an excerpt from the piece that they’ve been working on. My turn is on Wednesday (June 19). It’s always good to get your work in front…
Is there such a thing as talent? Does it exist? The more I think about it, the less likely I think it is. There’s definitely skill acquisition, but I think talent is a myth. I think we call people talented because we see the result of their hard work and perseverance. And because we see…
One of the big takeaways I had from doing the Hamilton Fringe Festival last summer was that marketing is important. Really important. How do you get people to go see your show when there are 30 other shows they can see? And a thousand other reasons for them NOT to see it? And how do…
The Good, the Bad, and the Mean As artists we put weeks, months and sometimes years into a project and present it to an audience. A reviewer sees it once and, depending on their skill and time pressures, writes something in a fraction of a fraction of the time we’ve spent on it. Sometimes…
The currency of a Fringe Festival is word of mouth. And reviews of shows are what get carried by word of mouth. Tom Mackan is a familiar presence in the Hamilton area theatre scene being a well known director, actor, reviewer and general encourager of Theatre. He won the Theatre Ontario Maggie Basset Award in…
When you rehearse a play, you spend weeks with the same people going over the script, learning lines and testing out blocking. It is an insular experience and after a while, it is easy to feel that you don’t have an objective view about the piece that you are working on. Something is missing… You…
The 2014 Hamilton Fringe Festival is almost upon us! It opens a week from today on July 17, 2014. There will be some great theatre to be seen and some not-so-great theatre to be seen… or not-seen. But the Fringe is an important part of the theatrical environment in any city and Hamilton is lucky…
peter gruner 