GOING ONLINE!
Selling The Sizzle
With the publication of Michael Davie’s Fishing for Bacon, about a lovesick 18-year-old with a terrible name (Bacon Sobelowski) and even worse timing, Edmonton’s NeWest Press is making an admirable effort to find  fresh ways to promote it. Starting this weekend at fishingforbacon.com, you can watch a Fishing for Bacon “trailer” — a humourous interview between Davie and his fictional hero. Such a gimmick wouldn’t be right for every book, but this one perfectly suits Fishing for Bacon’s whimsical tone. You can also buy the book with the click of a button, and Arts News recommends you do just that.

TRAVELING BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS!
The Time Is Out Of Joint
Think of James Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years (The Third Space, Mar 12-14) as a cross between Harold Pinter’s Betrayal and Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along: it’s a chamber musical that tells the story of a marriage between a writer and an actress both backwards and forwards at the very same time. If you’re a realist, you can follow along with Martin Galba’s Jamie, an author who tells their story chronologically. But if you’d prefer a happy ending, maybe you should focus on Erin Foster-O’Riordan’s Cathy, an actress who experiences their failed marriage in reverse.

HEADING NORTH!
Not Glacially Paced
Arts News likes the name that the local TYA theatre company The Cookie has chosen for itself: anything that gets kids thinking of theatre as a delicious treat instead of a cultural chore is fantastic by us. Their latest production sounds pretty tasty too — albeit not exactly warm from the oven. It’s Beneath the Ice (Arts Barns, Mar 13-15) by Edmonton writer/filmmaker Eva Colmers, who weaves Inuit mythology into a story about a boy who is a reluctant participant in his oceanographer mother’s research trip to the icy north. What, it’s not cold enough in Edmonton to suit her?