This is getting a little ridiculous. Once again this year, the best productions at The Stratford Festival were musicals. Now, unlike last year, it’s not actually that big a deal. New Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino didn’t stack the deck with four musicals against three Shakespeare like the 2012 season; he gave Shakespeare (and straight plays) […]
Okay, I’m going to try really really hard to make it through this review without making it about my hatred of Hair. I don’t understand why people still perform such a senseless outdated text and yet I find myself roped into seeing production after production of the hippie musical. What has come, at least, of […]
Let’s start with the good news- within DJ Sylvis’ long-awaited new play The Nefarious Bed & Breakfast there lies a founding idea that is incredibly strong. What happens when a super villain wants out? Say he just wants to settle down, run a quaint little establishment with a focus on customer service. Will the so-called […]
I like Kat Sandler a lot. She’s one of Toronto’s most consistently excellent young playwrights, always offering up vivid characters, spry dialogue, fabulous pacing and unique plots. But Sucker, the first two-act piece I’ve seen from her, is way better than typically good Sandler. It’s identifiably her- that wondrous wit is still there in spades; […]
Following up their universally beloved production of Angels in America, Soulpepper has embarked on a fall program that is both varied and ambitious though not altogether successful, at least not comparatively speaking. 2013 was the season of the multi-part play at The Young Centre with The Norman Conquests ‘ three parts playing a key role. […]
I find opera very hard to connect to most of the time. The outrageous plots, the technicality of the music, the stiffness of the acting, the surtitles- it all works out to a medium that rarely holds my attention the way I want it to. That’s why Peter Grimes is proving such a refreshing change […]
The Canadian Opera Company is kicking off their 2013/14 season with a really smart choice. Puccini’s La Bohème is among the world’s most famous operas but it’s also one of its more entertaining. Far from the unrelenting doom and gloom of every other example I can think of (except Gianni Schicchi, that one is a Hoot), […]
Both of CanStage’s current productions are contemporary one-act contemplations of female power as attained through sexuality (to put it as simplistically as I possibly could). In The Flood Thereafter, the mythological sirens are represented in the figure of Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster as a brash and modern young woman paid to unceremoniously remove her clothes once […]