The opening production of The National Ballet of Canada’s 2023/24 season pairs two short ballets about passion. Ironically, it’s Passion that is the least passionate of the pair, feeling disjointed and overly busy. The world premiere of Emma Bovary, on the other hand, is a cohesive triumph that led me and my guest to turn to each other towards […]
A Poem for Rabia (Tarragon Theatre) Spanning three continents and three generations, Nikki Shaffeeullah’s world premiere currently on stage in the Tarragon Extraspace is an intimate epic full of big ideas. The capable cast performs an exceptional array of accents- some executed with precision and nuance, others less successful- as they each take on multiple […]
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 […]
Canada’s most famous theatre town is famous for the company that bears its name. To “go to Stratford” means to attend a play at the Stratford Festival, North America’s most prestigious classical institution. But the real lifeblood of a theatrical landscape is not the most established, wildly well-funded companies with their bus stop advertisements and […]
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 […]
Prince Edward County is known as one of the most beautiful places in Ontario, a prime spot for well-to-do cottagers and family beach-goers alike. It’s also one of Ontario’s transit failures, a place so completely reliant on car access that, despite years of interest, I’d never stepped foot in the area until this summer. In […]
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 […]
When the Court House Theatre closed in 2017 and the Shaw Festival downgraded to just three formal venues, the easy assumption was that the festival would accordingly shrink. On the contrary, the expansion of programming in the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre has kept the average mainstage number around 10 or 11 every summer while current […]