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 […]
Recent Posts
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 […]
The Harold Experience This Assembly Improv show invokes the Harold Technique of audience participation to get suggestions from the crowd on which the theme of the show is based. The night I went, actors came down and bantered with the crowd, asking questions and making fast and funny connections between audience members until finally one […]
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 […]
Our favourite Fringe Festival ever, expanded dance coverage, and a shifting indie landscape were the defining features of our 2017 in Toronto theatre. Our staff collectively saw hundreds of productions and below are our picks for the best of the best over the past 12 months. Who Qualifies? Any production one of our Toronto […]
2017 was rough on a lot of people but the art, boy, the art was something else. This year saw a flood of television masterworks, a ton of killer theatre, and more fantastic movies released in the course of 12 months than we can remember in our lifetimes. It was something to see and we […]
We’re not exaggerating when we say that we can’t remember a year of movies better than this one. The prestige dramas were good, the action movies were good, the indie darlings were incredible. There were great superhero movies and great rom-coms and great monster movies and great war movies and even a great musical. Why […]
There’s so much TV these days that it’s impossible to keep up with it all. Nonetheless, we’ve tried to capture the best of the best on this list, representing a range of shows from the incredibly diverse TV landscape that made 2017 so memorable. Who Qualifies? Any show that released new episodes on TV […]