Kelly Bedard

At the Small World Centre in the Queen W Artscape Youngplace building, Apothecary Theatre & Dandelion Theatre have teamed up to create a new adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, onstage now through Halloween.   Slimming the epic down to two performers and a single hour, adapter/stars James Llewellyn Evans and Augusta “Gus” Monet aka […]

The 2023 Stratford season was our first full summer back at Canada’s biggest repertory company since 2018. After the bittersweet strangeness of the 2021 outdoor season and missing a bunch of last year’s late openers, it was a pleasure to return to a full Stratford schedule no matter how the productions themselves shaped up. So […]

  Kelly Bedard

This week at Kew Gardens Park, Toronto Shakespeare fans said farewell to one of the city’s summer theatre institutions. Technically ending tonight with their tour’s final stop in Burlington, Driftwood Theatre’s “Final Bard’s Bus Tour” features not their usual adaptation of a Shakespeare text but an original 90-minute one-man-show wherein the company’s founder tells his […]

Understudying was always one of the hardest jobs in theatre but in 2022 it’s taken on a whole new meaning. Gone are the days when an actor might learn a role only to see the entire run go by without performing it. In the first full season back for many of Canada’s biggest theatre companies […]

I love the concept behind Soulpepper’s bold Lear Family Double Bill that pairs a very solid production of Shakespeare’s King Lear with a new play by Erin Shields that imagines what might have happened seven years earlier to inform the behaviour of the characters in King Lear. Shields’ play Queen Goneril focuses not just on […]

  Kelly Bedard

We’ve been waiting for this one. The young Shakespeare enthusiasts who came up watching Slings & Arrows only to graduate into a decade of shy Shakespeare from the festival we were indoctrinated to adore, this is the production we’ve been waiting for. We wanted new blood, we wanted new ideas, we wanted someone under the […]

  Kelly Bedard

The landing page for all of our Shaw & Stratford Festival reviews from the 2022 season. Stay tuned as this page will update throughout the summer. 

  Alexander Franks

Content warning: This piece contains mentions of emotional/psychological manipulation, trauma, and suicide…