Melora Hardin is always in charge. Known as the hard-ass from corporate always squashing the Scranton Office hijinks, Sarah Pfefferman’s uncompromising ex on Transparent, and the high-end event planner keeping Brian Austin Green’s Wedding Band in line, Hardin has made a career as an authority figure who says no to pretty much everything and never […]

 

It’s time, once again, for the On DVD series featuring new releases from Paramount & 20th Century FOX.  Criminal Minds (The Twelfth Season) Season twelve was something of a watershed year for the stalwart FBI drama. It was the first season without fan favourite heartthrob Shemar Moore (he guests in the season finale but that’s it) and the […]

Party Today (Panic Tomorrow) is an apt name for The Second City Toronto’s silliest and least political mainstage show in a few cycles. There are moments when the bold political humour that made the last revue so impactful shows back up (Brandon Hackett makes a police brutality joke out of nowhere and its lack of […]

 

I was really hard on the Stratford productions I didn’t like this year but it was actually a pretty strong season and the things that were good were Really good. This is them.   Tartuffe Director Chris Abraham’s instinct to present classic texts in a contemporary setting is one of my top five favourite Chris […]

 

This was not my favourite season at The Shaw Festival. They had fewer bad productions than Stratford but they didn’t have as many great ones either. The best production of their season was a one-act playing sporadically at different venues, the second best a very limited run in the small studio space, then there’s a […]

 

In a really pretty strong Stratford season, these mostly good productions fell to the middle of the pack because other things were better, not because they were bad at all. These were Stratford’s mixed bag productions of the year- some polarizing (Bakkhai), some just generally medium (Romeo & Juliet) and the best recommendation I can […]

 

The thing to understand about the so-so list for The Shaw Festival this year is that they’re all pretty good productions; they mostly didn’t make the cut to be must-sees on account of the expectations game. All the over-promoted stuff of the year is on this list, the things that promised to be (had the […]

 

I promise everything gets better from here. Please keep in mind that I refuse to pull punches so you can believe me when I tell you you really should see the other stuff. Warning: brutality ahead.   Twelfth Night I consider Twelfth Night to be Shakespeare’s most perfect text. That’s not to say it’s my […]