The Toronto Fringe Festival runs June 30-July 12 at locations throughout the city. We’ll be on site reviewing as much as we possibly can, so be sure to bookmark our Fringe Homepage to read all our reviews as they’re published. In the meantime, we asked the artists to send us their best show pitch […]
Coming Soon
The latest from Toronto drag icon Pearle Harbour is a sad, wild, itty bitty little tragicomedy staged in a hidden bar in the swanky Royal York hotel that is barely big enough to walk through. It’s surreal, it’s uncomfortable, it’s wacky, it’s depressing. It may be a masterpiece. Justin Miller’s alter ego is so […]
Critic’s Note: The performance reviewed was the June 12th preview. Experimental writing and the plays that come with it is tough. The art of saying something while sometimes saying nothing. The art of nothing happening but saying a lot in that nothing. Samuel Beckett made a career of it; Seinfeld ran on it. It […]
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, to deal with isolation and lack of live theatre, we started gathering some of our favourite people every Tuesday & Saturday night to read scripts over Zoom. We read all 38 Shakespeare plays in six months. Then we kept going. We decided to create mini-seasons featuring highlights from the canons of […]
A lack of professional polish hinders this ambitious but frustrating new work from By the Word Productions currently playing in the Crows Studio Theatre. In the tradition of Schiller’s Mary Stuart or Stetson’s The Meeting, playwright Franca Miraglia imagines a fictional meeting between non-fiction characters. The jumping off point is a passage from Arthur […]
Next to Normal is a polarizing show that beautifully humanizes and trickily simplifies mental illness. Tom Kitt’s rock score demands big vocals and complex harmonies with extremely careful dynamic calibration as the characters lash out and collapse inward. These thematic musical extremeties lead to some really distracting sound balance issues in the intimate Aki Studio […]
The National Ballet of Canada’s summer double bill is a perfect contrast of modern athletic flair and romantic narrative tradition. The much-lauded Emma Bovary is the evening’s main attraction with its elegant design and beautiful corps work. The title character was played on opening night by first soloist Jenna Savella, one of the ballet’s […]
