“Bluenose is a lighthearted romp on the high seas with a powerful undercurrent. It is about intolerance and ignorance and profound moments of epiphany. It is also a play that had an opening-night crowd of 5-to-12 year olds laughing themselves silly. How about that… Playwright Emil Sher deftly weaves insolence with insight, coaxing laughs while encouraging thought… Don’t be alarmed by the gravity of the message. This is a play for the whole family. There’s plenty of broad physical humour and a generous sprinkling of one-liners to enjoy as you ponder the fall out from unchecked bigotry.”
Kathryn Greenaway, Montreal Gazette
“Girls are gross. Boys are stinky. If there is a child in your life, chances are, you’ve heard remarks like these, as well as other put-downs about race, creed and body type. How do parents, teachers and other adults teach children to accept and embrace our many differences? Seattle Children’s Theatre has a tool to help. Bluenose, by Canadian playwright Emil Sher, explores such themes as acceptance, diversity and self-esteem, offering a platform for intergenerational discussion. But the play is hardly a moral treatise. Showing rather than telling, last weekend’s hour-long premiere took the audience on board a pirate ship. There they watched a play laden with humor and punctuated with polished singing and dancing, juggling and sword fighting. Time and time again the action was interrupted by giggles and guffaws.”
Alice Kelso, Seattle Herald
“Pirates! A great way to open Seattle Children’s Theatre’s new season – with a seafaring tale of the ocean, storms, and finding one’s own way to think about things… Adults can enjoy the wordplay… Another child-at-heart bonus is two full-on song-and-dance numbers enthusiastically performed in perfect harmony. … Our resident 6 year old was riveted throughout, laughing a lot. He thought that pirates were a good thing to have in a show, and decided afterward that, “Actually, it was the funniest show I ever saw!” The rest of the nearly full house seemed to agree.”
Machelle Allman, Seattle’s Child Magazine
“My daughter came home repeating favorite lines and impersonating the actors… I appreciated the play’s approach to discrimination overall. The pirates are ignorant and bumbling but also likable and sympathetic, living examples of how good people can sometimes have small minds.”
Lora Shinn, LittleKidsBigCity.com
“Ahoy, matey! Pirates have invaded the Seattle Children’s Theatre. But not the kind of pirates you have to protect your children from. These are the jolly, buffoonish and ultimately not very dangerous hoodlums of the sea in Bluenose, a lively… comedy for young ones. In reality, pirates are no joke. (There are some extremely nasty ones on the high seas today.) But in mythology and literature, from “Peter Pan” to “Pirates of the Caribbean” to this hour-long work by playwright Emil Sher, they often are colorful bumblers… The script’s wordplay and the energetic slapstick bits …are often entertaining – particularly for the show’s target audience of 6-to-10-year-olds.”
Misha Berson, Seattle Times