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 […]