Unsurprisingly, Balfour Anderson’s Christmas Day gift to Jamaica was a play. The title is Jamaican Hustlers, and it is now running on weekends at Green Gables Theatre, Cargill Avenue. What might be surprising, however, is the type of production he...
“It’s gripping from beginning to end.” That’s one patron’s feeling about Basil Dawkins’ latest play, Once Upon a Watch Night, playing at the Little Little Theatre, Tom Redcam Drive. The prolific playwright-producer, who has been staging plays at...
It took nearly two hours on Sunday for her audience to begin to plumb the professional depths of Jamaican-Canadian artist and educator, Dr Lillian Allen. And even at the end of the session, we knew precious little about her personal life. Gathered...
“Is that it!” exclaimed broadcaster Tony Patel. “It’s finished already?” It was 6:10 p.m. on Sunday, and we were in the St Luke’s Church, Cross Roads. The applause for the annual Advent concert presented by the Diocesan Festival Choir and Chamber...
The 2023 concert by the National Chorale of Jamaica (NCOJ) which delighted audiences at the Hope United Church, St Andrew, on Sunday was an example of “all’s well that ends well”. Owing to the heavy rains and flooding that the island has been...
“We wanted to do something good to honour his fiftieth,” said Jean-Paul Menou, the director of the production now running at the Edna Manley College’s School of Drama. He and I were leaving the Dennis Scott Studio Theatre on Saturday afternoon,...
If you want to know the causes of Jamaica’s major disease, crime and violence, go see Keith ‘Ginger’ Knight’s play Whiplash, now playing on weekends at Little Little Theatre, Tom Redcam Avenue. If all the causes are not there, the fundamental ones...
The Father Ho Lung and Friends musical Ruby (also called Ruby Magdalene, to make an analogy with the Magdalene of the Bible) is making its third public appearance. The first two productions were decades ago and many years apart. It has improved...
The launch of the digital Jamaica Poetry Archive is set to shake up the access to and understanding of literature and Jamaican culture by increasing accessibility to Jamaican poetry. A digital treasure trove of seminal works, it will serve as a...
Dr Amina Blackwood Meeks answered with passion when she was asked this question on Saturday: “Why should Jamaicans be interested in our own storytelling when we have all sorts of online entertainment from all over the world?” “First, you have to...
It’s 7:30 Saturday night at the Philip Sherlock Centre, Mona. Milling around you are scores of beautifully dressed people. The ones wearing multicoloured Pitchy Patchy T-shirts are focused on specific actions related to the main event of the...
We’re living in hot times, just now. First, there’s the crime and violence. Then there’s the weather, with July reportedly having been the hottest month on record. Among the ways people are seeking relief is by going to the Little Little Theatre....
In his short Message from the Artistic Director, Marlon Simms refers several times to wanting the 61st season of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) to engage emotionally with the audience. He writes of taking us “on a journey of movement and...
It’s as if the University Singers are trying to make up for the last three annual concert seasons they missed because of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The 2023 season is bigger, bolder and brighter than before. In other words, “extra-large”. Consider the...
In opening the School of Visual Arts Final-Year exhibition at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts on Saturday evening, Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams shared the hope that it would bring “calm and solace” to a...
Over the past two weeks, hundreds of visitors to and residents of Jamaica have heard a play which, in the words of the author, is “a devastating exposé of the Anglican Church’s involvement in the Codrington Estate in Barbados” during the period of...
The intriguing title, Bathroom Graffiti Queen, that Opal Palmer Adisa gave to her play may suggest a fun show. But the piece is, in fact, quite harrowing. Produced at The University of the West Indies’ Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts (...
What happens when Christian meets Rastafarian? For decades in Jamaica there was hostility, violence and even death. But when Jon Williams, a committed Christian and a musician, encountered Bob Marley, an avowed Rastaman and a musician, it was the...
Evan Jones, one of Jamaica’s most prolific writers, who rose to international acclaim, was laid to rest on Wednesday. “Uncle Evan was buried today (Wednesday) in London in a private ceremony attended by wife, daughters and his four grandchildren,”...
Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms proved less popular than Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Ashbourne and Daniel Hass at a concert in the University Chapel, Mona, last Thursday evening. Music by the two groups of composers was presented in the different...
Acclaimed soprano, Lori Burnett, had the honour of being the inaugural performer in an annual music series planned for the Mico Centenary Chapel at The Mico University College in the Corporate Area. Her hour-long recital in the chapel last Sunday...
The latest Patrick Brown comedy, Guilty with Explanation, got a favourable verdict at its matinee staging on Saturday at the Courtleigh Auditorium, New Kingston. Judging from the enthusiastic applause and laughter throughout the show, the jury –...
It’s Easter morning. Part of an audience of hundreds, you are sitting in the Little Theatre, Tom Redcam Avenue. At 6 o’clock sharp, the lights go down in the auditorium and up on the stage in front of the red curtains. The aprons at the sides of...
It’s a tribute to both the universality of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the creativity of the directors that the current School of Drama production of the tragedy – though one the playwright couldn’t have imagined – is a complete success. One...
The manager of Bob Marley and the Wailers had to threaten and actually “get a little rough” with the radio disc jockeys who refused to play his clients’ music in the early 1970s. In fact, it seemed to him that the music of the group, and of other...
