A swift kick of theatrical intensity, this lean one-act from playwright Adrienne Kennedy receives a calmly unadorned production that stands out for its impact in a lighter-than-average Shaw season. The play is functionally a solo show starring the ever-reliable Sophia Walker as an author guest lecturing at her titular alma mater. While André Morin is […]

 

Welcome to our landing page for the 2026 Toronto Fringe Festival.   Below are links to all of our reviews from this year’s festival, written by Kelly Bedard, Lisa McKeown, and Dom Harvey.   Click HERE and HERE to listen to our preview podcast featuring show pitches from the artists themselves.   The Shows   […]

The Toronto Fringe Festival runs June 30-July 12 at locations throughout the city.   We’ll be on site reviewing as much as we possibly can, so be sure to bookmark our Fringe Homepage to read all our reviews as they’re published.   In the meantime, we asked the artists to send us their best show pitch […]

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 […]

There are few modern innovations as inspiring as National Theatre Live. Broadcasting high profile stage productions into movie theatres is an astounding arts accessibility measure that knocks hoity toity work right off its pedestal and brings it to actual audiences regardless of their location or disposable income (see also: PBS Great Performances; irreplaceable). It’s downright […]

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the Canadian Film Festival. The festival as a whole showcased 16 features and as many more shorts over the course of six days. I caught the final two days of the festival and enjoyed an impressive run of 12 films. Here’s a short round-up in chronological order: […]

Last weekend was Toronto’s annual Comicon.   I say annual but it’s really bi-annual as FanExpo, the company that runs the event, runs another weekend (appropriately titled “FanExpo”), also at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, that resembles Comicon in nearly every way except that it’s about three times the size (45,000 attendees vs 135,000, roughly). […]

 

This production has had ample time to mature. It marks director Christopher Alden’s second revival of Rigoletto for the COC (2011, 2018) and the original staging dates back to the Lyric Opera of Chicago (2000). Yet there’s little evidence it has evolved in any major way. It makes no effort to engage with the sociopolitical […]