Click Here and Here to listen to our Fringe Audio Preview. Click Here to find our Fringe Landing Page where reviews will be posted throughout the festival. A Comedy Show at the End of the World (A) You can always count on Jon Blair and he’s back again with one of his best shows ever. Playing a former […]
Click Here and Here to listen to our Fringe Audio Preview. Click Here to find our Fringe Landing Page where reviews will be posted throughout the festival. Playwright/director Emily Elizabeth’s interpretation of Much Ado About Nothing participates in a popular tradition- that of both updating Shakespearean comedy with modern language (see 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s […]
Click Here and Here to listen to our Fringe Audio Preview. Click Here to find our Fringe Landing Page where reviews will be posted throughout the festival. My Own Private Shakespeare (A-) I loved this unassuming solo show that seamlessly weaves Shakespearean text into a personal story that wields its unadorned realism strongly enough […]
Prolific Toronto musical theatre writer Andrew Seok has a signature style- all heart, total sincerity, soaring ballads with big ensemble harmonies. Your mileage may vary. The unrelenting prettiness of his work is a pro for me, though it can get repetitive, so it’s nice to see him stretch a bit with his latest piece. […]
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 […]
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 […]