The Prairies: Critics Dwindle Down to a Precious Few

Theatre criticism in western Canada is increasingly a narrative of diminishing returns, at least in terms of legacy media—whether you’re talking about Alberta or Saskatchewan, with Manitoba the lone outlier—judging from a series of email and phone interviews conducted with theatre and newspaper professionals in May 2016. While traditional newspaper criticism is on the wane, it’s being replaced, to a degree, by various micro-cultures, including blogs, podcasts, and digital aggregators in different locations across the Prairies, creating a critical landscape as idiosyncratic as the theatre scenes in each prairie city.

Start with southern Alberta. Calgary lost one of its two newspaper critics—myself—in late January 2016, when Postmedia merged the Calgary Sun and Herald newsrooms, opting to run longtime (freelance) theatre critic Louis B. Hobson’s reviews and previews in both papers. That event, coupled with the 2015 closure of the alternative weekly Fast Forward, as well as reduced travel budgets for national culture reporters based elsewhere, combined to produce a substantial decline in coverage of the performing arts in Calgary.

Alberta Theatre Projects artistic director Vanessa Porteous says the decline was felt especially with ambitious productions, such as her theatre company’s March 2016 world premiere of Jonathan Garfinkle’s Cockroach, an adaptation of a novel by Rawi Hage about a Middle Eastern immigrant in Montreal. The show’s attendance struggled the farther it got from its initial round of previews and reviews. “I feel like this season, with the change at Postmedia, we’ve reached a tipping point,” Porteous says, adding, “I really feel like in Calgary this year, we disappeared, or we [theatre in Calgary] became a tiny dot on the [cultural] landscape. The issue of not having any critical discourse around our work is—I’m going to use the word—devastating to me.”

That diminished discourse has been replaced in Calgary by bloggers, such as Jenna Shummoogum, who reviews for GetDown.ca; Rodrigo Flores, who blogs reviews at Joyful Magpies; and Vince Kanasoot, whose theatre reviews are published in Branded, an online lifestyle magazine (although Kanasoot moved to Vancouver in June 2016). CBC Radio’s morning show The Eyeopener has recently added two reviewers, Jennifer Keene and Jonathan Love, after a lengthy on-air absence of theatre coverage following the departure of former critic Jessica Goldman to Houston two years ago.

Edmonton, where the North American fringe theatre movement was born in the early 1980s, has always enjoyed a reputation as being the strongest theatre community in western Canada. At one time, the city had four dedicated theatre critics, at the Edmonton Journal (Liz Nicholls) and the Sun (freelancer Colin MacLean), as well as Vue and See magazines. Now it’s been reduced to longtime Journal critic Nicholls alone—her reviews and previews currently run in both papers—along with a few reviews by MacLean in Gig City, as well as What It Is, a local podcast that profiles the city’s theatre scene. “It seems,” Nicholls says, “like there’s a dearth of voices when it comes to reviewing here.”

In Saskatoon and Regina, the daily papers each employ a single paid critic, while bloggers try to provide alternative critical voices. “For the most part,” says Saskatoon Star-Phoenix critic Cam Fuller, “we’ve been a ‘one newspaper town,’ and TV and radio don’t opinionize as far as I know.” Saskatoon also offers a community radio show on CFCR hosted by Jenna-Lee Hyde and Kate Herriott called Mom, I’m a Thespian, which features interviews and coverage—but no reviews—of the city’s theatre scene. There’s also an alternative weekly, Planet S, that does offer some theatre coverage, but not a lot in the way of reviews (Fuller). In Regina, Leader-Post critic Jeff Dedekker occupies much the same position as Fuller in Saskatoon, Hobson in Calgary, and Nicholls in Edmonton. “I would say I’m the only one in the city who does it on a regular basis,” says Dedekker. “We’ve got an independent biweekly called The Prairie Dog, and they kind of pick and choose [which...