Eat, Buy, Repeat (The Second City) This “Guide to the Holidays” from the Second City Touring Company is charming and fun if a little imbalanced in quality. We begin with a group song about coping in the hellfire that is 2016 but the fact that no one in this cast can sing becomes a problem […]
“The world we live in today needs a good story”. The packed house at the Toronto opening of Come From Away had been standing for awhile when Claude Elliott, former mayor of the tiny Newfoundland town of Gander, said those brutally true words. We’d been standing since the second the lights went to black at […]
I love Seussical the Musical. I think it’s just about the cutest thing in the world, Ahrens & Flaherty’s songs are catchy beyond belief, and there’s more intellectual and emotional complexity in the storytelling than one might ever expect from such silliness. “A person’s a person no matter how small”, “tell yourself how lucky you […]
Original musicals are hard to develop and expensive to produce so you don’t see that many of them crop up in the Canadian theatre landscape. Chasse-Galerie (both its quality and its trajectory) is a reminder that it can be done and why it’s worth doing. James Smith’s music and lyrics are toe-tapping delights, many of which […]
I’ve seen a lot of theatre this November but nothing’s surprised me quite like Echo Productions’ Dog Sees God, a tiny, under-marketed labour of love with only one week left in The Second City’s John Candy Box Theatre around the corner and two flights up from the rowdy mainspace. The trappings read like student theatre- […]
“True Love” is a sporadic feature in which I tell you about things in pop culture of which I’m an unabashed fan, whether it’s an embarrassing thing to admit or not. Love is how we all felt about Parks & Recreation, True Love is maintaining that Super Fun Night was the most interesting new sitcom […]
Secrets of a Black Boy (Playing with Crayons/Theatre Passe Muraille) A constantly evolving mix of storytelling and narrative theatre, playwright Darren Anthony’s moving and evocative Secrets of a Black Boy brings five very different black men together for one last game of dominoes before their community centre closes. The play begins with a theatrical montage […]
It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Rough couple of months. All of 2016, really; it’s kicking humanity’s ass and it’s hard to see any light in a tunnel that doesn’t look like it has an end. The news is a daily deluge of depression, social media’s awash with empty protest, and I keep googling […]