Vancouver, BC: The Arts Club continues its run of crowd pleasing musicals with The Producers. The version of this musical now playing has had an interesting and unusual evolutionary history. The screenplay for the initial 1968 film The Producers, written and directed by Mel Brooks, garnered Brooks an Academy award for screenplay. It starred Zero Mostel as Max Bialystok and Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom. In a reversal of what usually happens, the film was developed into a Broadway musical, which opened in 2001 with Nathan Lane as Bialystok and Matthew Broderick as Bloom. Lane and Broderick recently reprised their stage roles in the 2005 film version of The Producers. This seems to be a new trend with Hairspray following suit.

Vancouver, BC: Pi Theatre’s world premiere production of The 8th Land, directed by John Wright, is truly stunning. Local playwright, William Maranda, melds Polynesian mythology, and cultural theories on the decline of the early Easter Island population with Aeschylean structural forms to create an eerily poetic sense of “other” place and time. Yet issues in this play will resonate with contemporary audiences: conflict between religious dogma and human needs; use of scarce natural resources; personal glory versus survival of a people.

Vancouver, BC: It is entirely understandable that a work like No Exit with its anti-life sense of alienation and hopelessness would be written at a time when Europe was mired in the hell of war with no obvious end in sight. Sartre’s three thoroughly unlikable characters, doomed to spend eternity together tormenting each other, have not a redeeming feature among them and a lesser production would make for a thoroughly depressing evening. But director Kim Collier and her strong cast dazzled in a technologically spectacular production that compelled attention.