August is here, the weather in Toronto has finally started to catch up to the calendar, and the line outside Bang Bang refuses to die down; it’s officially time for SummerWorks. Made dramatically less awesome this year by the loss of the performance bar but revelling in the convenience and beauty of the new Theatre […]
I don’t think we talk about Kate Hennig enough (related note: I saw her understudy in both Stratford shows last year and was thus Hennig-starved in 2013), so let’s talk about Kate Hennig a bit, shall we? In the Shaw Festival’s lunchtime show, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, four musical theatre actresses take on […]
Juno and the Paycock suffers from a simultaneous case of too much plot and too little, issues that do, counterintuitive though it may be, go hand in hand. Upon reading Belfast-raised Jackie Maxwell’s director’s note, I was intrigued by playwright Sean O’Casey’s Irish civil war drama. Unfortunately, the moments of war-torn tension and aching loss […]
Hay Fever is sort of like watching a Shaw Festival production starring Lucy Peacock (a Stratford staple if ever there was one). But not one of the marvelous Shaw Festival productions that showcases the festival’s eye for young talent, a dull production designed entirely to show off the set budget and give ageing character actors […]
Fiddler on the Roof aside (because I maintain that it is a great musical even if people like to laugh at it), the Stratford Festival is having some content curation problems when it comes to musicals lately. There are hundreds of decent musicals out there but the festival keeps coming back to outdated, kitschy pieces […]
I’m supposed to tell you that The Mountaintop is about Martin Luther King Jr.’s fictional encounter with a motel maid the night before he is assassinated. That’s not what The Mountaintop is about. I mean, technically, yes, that is what happens in the play but The Mountaintop is much much bigger than that. It’s just […]
It’d been 5 years since I last saw my favourite Shakespeare play live, and many years since I’d seen it done well. So I was more than excited to see Stratford’s current production, despite my whole-hearted belief that the company’s chosen leading man was at least 20 years too young (and a sprightly man to […]
Occasionally (and I mean very occasionally, sadly) I see a Shakespeare play that makes me deliriously happy. This was one of those plays; the first at Stratford since Des McAnuff’s glorious 2011 Twelfth Night. I got a little bored in Act 5 (Act 5 of Midsummer being one of my least favourite things ever) and […]