Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Patricia Cano is a Canadian actor and singer who has performed around the world in a range of languages. Her artistic collaborations with Tomson Highway have produced a range of works, most recently in Toronto where the two […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Raised in Toronto and Goderich, Geoffrey Armour cut his teeth as an adolescent performer in shows at the Blyth Festival, before studying theatre both at George Brown and at L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Seemingly at home in […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series…
John Patrick Shanley is likely best known as the writer of Doubt: A Parable, the Pulitzer-Prize winning four-hander that was turned into the slightly over-embellished 2008 film starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, adapted and directed by the writer. But Shanley is an impressively prolific writer, with a long, vibrant list of works to […]
Patricia Cano slays Tomson Highway’s latest work, a cabaret-play hybrid that charts a typical afternoon in the life of a Métis post office worker in Northern Ontario. Featuring a full soundtrack’s worth of songs composed and played live onstage by himself on piano and Marcus Ali on saxophone, and sung entirely by Cano, The (Post) […]
The blatant irony of a title like Breathing Corpses, as with something like The Walking Dead, is that it is the ostensibly living characters who are all to some degree deceased: both because their lives are caught in a deadlock, and also because by the end of the play we know that many of these […]
Unless you are blessed from an early age with extreme self-awareness, patience, and unshakeable self-confidence, then your adolescence was (or is going to be) probably very fraught. It’s a period of time that upends the life you’ve lived up to that point: everything becomes more complicated, less secure, and a little more threatening. You simultaneously […]
I can only imagine that the experience of a refugee is one of exhaustion, fear, and utter resolve. But it must be one of tedium as well; so much time spent travelling in such uncomfortable, de-humanizing surroundings. Set in a literal shipping container which has been set up in the Berkeley Street Theatre courtyard, Zachary […]
For Shakespeare fans feeling like other interests of theirs are being underserved in the theatre, the Driftwood Theatre Group is offering audience members across Ontario the rare chance to enjoy some light S&M along with their Bard, and in the glorious outdoors. Director D. Jeremy Smith and dramaturge Myekah Payne’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s controversial play […]
Be sure to check out our Full List of Fringe Reviews Pressgang Storytelling (B+) For a more laid-back Fringe experience, Graham Isador is hosting his long-running evening of comic storytelling over at the Handlebar on Augusta. Each performance features a collection of six or so performers who get up onto the small stage area in […]
Be sure to check out our Full List of Fringe Reviews The Comedy of Errors (A) Shakespeare BASH’D bows out of the Fringe Festival with a fast and slick final show that is the most flat-out successful play I’ve seen so far at this year’s festival in terms of pulling off what it sets out […]
Be sure to check out our Full List of Fringe Reviews Denmarked (B-) Carina Gaspar takes on Elsinore in her clown-based reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the spirit of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (with fewer verbal fireworks and more physical exertion), Gaspar zeroes in on minor characters from the original play and pushes them […]
Be sure to check out our Full List of Fringe Reviews The Unending – 3 Short Plays (A-) Site-specific plays always have the potential to be alienating experiences: a bunch of plucky actors demanding an extra degree of engagement from the audience as they move through a unique space or spaces. If the work itself […]
John Steinbeck’s novella is such a staple of middle and high school reading lists that it may be easy (in my experience, at least) for it to blend into a series of vaguely recalled Western frontier archetypes typical of The American Novel, ranches and all. Unit 102’s intimately staged production of the author’s self-penned stage […]
The Archivist as a title for a performance piece suggests an exploration of a reserved, organized and knowledgeable figure. It can also suggest someone with a degree of detachment from the material they are curating; when I think of archivists, I think of slightly senior employees who labour away in the bowels of an institution, […]
The genie in the lamp meets his match in this operatic adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1891 short story The Bottle Imp, a morality tale (or perhaps morality thriller) about a bottle whose magic grants limitless wishes to its owner – but with, if you can believe it, a price. A co-production of Scottish Opera […]
Historically, operas that choose to focus on love tend to privilege sweeping romances, richly orchestrated melodrama, couples separated by social mores, and, more often than not, a gloriously tragic finale. If you’re going to have several dozen musicians thrumming beneath your story of romantic entanglement, then it seems more than fair for your performances to […]
The Witch opens with straight-on, successive shots of adolescent children, staring just off camera, listening to a member of their small Puritan community in 17th century New England banish their father and thus their entire family from its borders. For all its supernatural terrors and shocks, Robert Eggers’ debut feature is driven as much by […]
Click Here for our full coverage of the 2015 SummerWorks Festival. The Emancipation of Ms. Lovely (A-) Almost every play that I have seen at Summerworks this year has involved characters and events that transcend whole decades, and sometimes centuries. In An Evening in July, two women seem to be living simultaneously in the early […]
Click Here for our full coverage of the 2015 SummerWorks Festival. An Evening in July (A-) The outdoor square and refreshment room of St. George the Martyr Anglican Church in Grange Park are currently littered with recognizable objects from a bygone era: a Country Life magazine from June of 1963, a dead carriage clock, a […]
Click Here for the Full List of our 2015 Toronto Fringe Reviews Big Love (A-) One of the graduating class of the Randolph Academy have produced this dynamically staged and well-acted play, and its aand appreciably ambitious work. Like the HBO show with which it shares its name, Big Love focuses on a group of […]
Click Here for the Full List of our 2015 Toronto Fringe Reviews That’s Just Five Kids in a Trench Coat! (A-) I didn’t take too many notes during this sketch show because it’s really funny. The Dame Judy Dench troupe (composed of Jessica Greco, Claire Farmer, Chris Leveille, Shannon Lahaie, and Gavin Pounds) are a […]
Click Here for the Full List of our 2015 Toronto Fringe Reviews How May I Hate You? (B+) The service industry is a torturous waiting room inhabited by increasingly older and more qualified employees, and How May I Hate You? bluntly but trenchantly spoofs the attendant frustrations that come with this reality. The series of […]
Click Here for the Full List of our 2015 Toronto Fringe Reviews Urban Legends (A-) In the last 24 hours I have inadvertently sat through four consecutive dance shows at the Fringe. While not exactly the way I would have arranged things had I realized just what it was I was scheduling, it hasn’t been […]
Click Here for the Full List of our 2015 Toronto Fringe Reviews Everyday Oppressions (B) A movement piece that explores exactly what you would expect it to explore based on the title, Everyday Oppressions is blessed with excellent dancers and some strong sequences highlighting not just oppression as an independent act but also as a […]
Click Here for the Full List of our 2015 Toronto Fringe Reviews Bout (B+) Sully’s Gym at Dupont and Dufferin serves as the setting for this two-hander about a coach and his determined boxing apprentice, written and directed by lead Stephanie Carpanini, in collaboration with her co-star Matthew Gouveia. Jackie (Carpanini) is a struggling actor […]