After a stellar workshop presentation at the 2017 Fringe, BRAIN STORM returns to Toronto with its world premiere at the intimate Dancemakers Studio Theatre. An innovative performance, BRAIN STORM is a ghostly mix of dance, projection, and text that leads us through a young woman’s day-to-day, post-brain injury. The layers of performance—from non-verbal expressions, to versatile […]
Theatre Centre’s Progress Festival is one of my favourite annual festivals in Toronto. The programming is always sharp and smart, bringing cutting edge international performances to the Queen West theatre. I was only able to see a few shows in this year’s festival; this represents only a sliver of the festival’s programming. CAFÉ SARAJEVO Café […]
We, the audience, are waiting for the play to start. Kitch (Mazin Elsadig), on stage, is waiting for his friend Moses (Kaleb Alexander) to wake up. Moses is waiting for a lot of things. For the promised land, for the seas to part, for him to live up to his name sake. He’s waiting to […]
Be sure to check out our full list of Next Stage reviews. Dinner with The Duchess Meet Margaret (Allegra Fulton), a celebrated female violinist, who is retiring after decades of an illustrious career. She is being interviewed in her home by young prodigy journalist, Helen (Rosie Simon), who is intent on asking hard, smart questions. […]
Be sure to check out our Full List of Fringe Reviews Thousand Beginnings (A) A beautiful mix of movement, dance, and existential curiosities, Thousand Beginnings offers a simple and subtle exploration of the self and the female body. The two performers dance, play, question each other as they wonder about the contemporary moment with their bodies, their […]
Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, which premiered with Canadian Stage on Thursday, April 12th, is a fascination meditation on Love, Information, and the many places these two concepts meet. Under the direction of Tanja Jacobs and Allistar Newton, any production of this play is no small feat. A production has anywhere between 51 and 76 scenes and […]
Declarations, a new show by celebrated Toronto Playwright Jordan Tannahill, is yet another testament to the author’s ability to present innovative, new theatre. A fascinating meeting of text and movement—of the ephemeral and what remains—Declarations is a thoughtful, evocative exploration of form, body, text and grief. “This is the thing; This is not the thing.” So begins Declarations, as […]
Good Morning, Viet Mom “I can’t talk about my mom without talking about my dad. I can’t talk about my dad without talking about the divorce. I can’t talk about the divorce without talking about family. And I can’t talk about family without talking about my grandma.” And just so, playwright and comedian Franco Nguyen […]
The antechamber shows are short, 30 mins pieces, and some of my favourite Next Stage offerings. This year brought two high-energy clown pieces. Leila Live A self-described “real life Persian Princess,” Leila Live (pronounced with a short /i/), offers a 30 min clown/drag cabaret, with singing, puppetry, original song writing, rapping, and of course, lots of laughs. A […]
Jonno Another topical Next Stage piece, Jonno, offers a fictional account of a powerful, well-known radio host sexually assault women in Toronto. Most Canadians will recongnize the play as a thinly veiled fictional reworking of Jian Ghomeshi’s ‘alleged’ of sexual assault and hassment. In the first few moments, actor Jason Deline, playing the title character, starts his […]
Click Here to read Part I of our Ten-Minute Play Festival coverage The White show and Black Show are a two parts of the four-part series in InspiraTO festival’s ten-minute play festival, the largest ten-minute play festival in Canada. Indeed, there is something really unique about writing a well-rounded narrative in ten minutes. I had […]
I was shocked as I walked into the completely transformed space of Artscape Youngplace to see the Toronto Premier of Bad Jews presented by the Koffler Centre of the Arts. Completely decked out with risers, a lighting rig, a full stage and even a kitchen sink(!) I was amazed and slightly wary of the time […]
Two Birds One Stone “Some of this is true and some of it is not” Natasha Greenblatt says to openTwo Birds One Stone, which premiered as part of the Why Not Theatre’s Riser Project, Thursday night. But co-star and creator Rimah Jabr, disagrees. It’s all true, she tells us. What unfolds is an aptly named […]
The beautiful geometric highrises are dark grey, crisp and askew, creating a darkly modern, if slightly nightmarish cityscape which the audience observes as we wait for Acquiesce to begin. Downstage centre, an open briefcase is slightly illuminated with a gentle tungsten spotlight from above. Then, without warning— no dimming of the lights, no audio cue— […]
A Reason to Talk, produced by Why Not Theatre, has already started when you walk into the Theatre Centre mainspace. There creator Sachli Gholamalizad holds old family photos up to her laptop’s camera, which are projected in real time on to the screen above her. In this evocative way, Gholamalizad introduces us to the subtle […]
In the forward to Melancholy Play, Sarah Ruhl, makes a plea to future producers of the show: “The audience knows the different between being talked to and talked at. Talk to them, please.” This phrase is in many ways the essence of Big Plans, the dark comedy by Jeremy Taylor, and directed by Kat Sandler. […]
Click Here for our full coverage of the 2015 SummerWorks Festival. Offending the Audience (A) Offending the Audience, originally written in 1960, and here conceived by Christian Lapoint, is, if nothing else, an experience. An extended, poetic, contradictory monologue, the piece is, for the most part, an hour of taking the rules of theatre and […]
Click Here for our full coverage of the 2015 SummerWorks Festival. Like There’s No Tomorrow (A+) Like There’s No Tomorrow tells the story of the Northern Gateway Project, and it effect on people on First Nations’ communities in Northern British Columia. Based on interviews conducted by Architect Theatre in 2012 and 2013, Like There’s No […]
Click Here for our full coverage of the 2015 SummerWorks Festival. Upon the Fragile Shore (B+) Upon The Fragile Shore explores a number of human tragedies, from the Boston Marathon Bombing to the struggles in Syria. The strength the showis in its performers: a virtuosic, talented group that exemplify what can be done with movement, […]
As I walked out of Ballad of the Burning Star Tuesday night at the Theatre Centre, I ran into a friend walking into another show (Burnish, I believe). When he asked what Ballad was about, I said, with a kind of syncopated energy: “well, it’s a devised theatre piece, but it’s also very movement based, like […]
Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle was considered controversial when it was first written in 1976. Much has changed in the past 40 years, and yet this is still a controversial play in terms of its depiction of sexual violence and the performance of disability. As such, the question why stage this play was at the […]
“I wanted to write about obsession, about creativity, about risk-taking, about love and loss,” playwright Carolyn Smart writes about Hooked, now playing at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace. Certainly all of these elements and more are present in this intimate montage of the lives of 7 women. This eclectic one-woman show exemplifies not only the […]
way·ward (wāwərd) adjective difficult to control or predict because of unusual or perverse behavior. “I’m so glad you’ve taken an interest in our farm,” director Becky Johnson exclaims in character at the top of Cult Wayward, the all-female improv show at the Bag Dog Theatre. This new addition in the Wayward series did not disappoint: […]
John Patrick Shanley’s A Woman is A Secret opened at the Theatre Centre last Friday to an enthusiastic audience. Though what brought audiences to their feet at the end of the show is not clear to me. For while A Woman is a Secret was beautifully staged, actors were bogged down by Shanley’s overly poetic […]
It’s hard to know where to start in discussing vox:lumen, which opened at the Harbourfront Center’s World Stage last week. Do we being by talking about the show itself: a dance in the dark that made light a player on stage with dancers lighting each other and themselves from a variety of sources, including flashlights. […]
A Catholic Church cardinal comes on to the messy stage at the Harbourfront Studio Theatre. He shuffles around in the near darkness, comes to the front, and suddenly, looks out to the audience, as if noticing them for the first time. Or is it us he notices? For his gaze drifts upwards, and looking, towards […]