I’m halfway through the 7th (and final?) Global Cabaret Festival weekend down at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. Here are the highlights so far: UPDATE: Read Part 2 HERE. Best Show (so far) The American Pie Songbook I know, I’m the most predictable person in the world, but the songbook show music directed […]
The newest theatrical anthology from Toronto’s geek theatre company is shaped around four instalments of “Sidekicks”, a rumination on the role of henchmen and second fiddles by Manda Whitney & Errol Elumir (of Debs & Errol). Starring Andrew Gaunce, adorable as a hapless but mouthy minion, and the charming Jordi O’Dael in the much more complex […]
Two strong but ultimately uninspiring productions are currently playing at the Four Seasons Centre as the kick off to the Canadian Opera Company’s 2014/15 season. Though they’re of comparable overall quality, Falstaff and Madama Butterfly have little in common. The former is visually grand with lots of awkwardly long breaks to change the elaborate sets […]
Netflix be damned, this month alone I raced through the first season of Game of Thrones, the third season of Mad Men and the fifth season of The Good Wife, all on the great and sadly dying medium of TV on DVD (Netflix, by the way, only has one of those three things available in […]
… that’s an order. I mean it. If you let awards-ready Sundance hit Whiplash go to wide release without already knowing and loving the work of one of the best young actors in Hollywood, I can guarantee you’ll feel like one of those people who hadn’t heard of Melissa McCarthy until Bridesmaids. From 2010’s Rabbit Hole […]
Showtime’s new drama The Affair is compellingly elusive. At the end of the first hour, not only do we not know why the principal characters are being interrogated, we don’t know where we are, when we are, and, despite having seen the same flashback action play out twice over the course of one episode, we […]
Enemy of the People: an open forum Florian Borchmeyer’s modern adaptation of the Ibsen play An Enemy of the People (translated by Maria Milisavljevic) attempts to instill the 1882 play with new immediacy and contemporary commentary. We’re destroying the earth! Bureaucracy will kill us all! Everyone is corrupt! Resistance is futile! It all works fairly […]
This is a Cabin in the Woods-type movie. I don’t mean a riveting and inventive take on the horror genre (though it is, in some ways, that too; sort of), I mean that to reveal the full premise of this film is to undermine the experience of it. So I’m going to be coy about […]