“The world we live in today needs a good story”. The packed house at the Toronto opening of Come From Away had been standing for awhile when Claude Elliott, former mayor of the tiny Newfoundland town of Gander, said those brutally true words. We’d been standing since the second the lights went to black at […]
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I love Seussical the Musical. I think it’s just about the cutest thing in the world, Ahrens & Flaherty’s songs are catchy beyond belief, and there’s more intellectual and emotional complexity in the storytelling than one might ever expect from such silliness. “A person’s a person no matter how small”, “tell yourself how lucky you […]
The Handmaiden is a tautly executed new thriller from Park Chan-wook.* Set in Japanese-occupied Korea, it tells the story of Sook-hee, a young woman who is hired to serve Lady Hideko, a woman who lives with her eccentric uncle in an isolated manor. But all is not what it seems; Sook-hee is secretly working with […]
Original musicals are hard to develop and expensive to produce so you don’t see that many of them crop up in the Canadian theatre landscape. Chasse-Galerie (both its quality and its trajectory) is a reminder that it can be done and why it’s worth doing. James Smith’s music and lyrics are toe-tapping delights, many of which […]
I’ve seen a lot of theatre this November but nothing’s surprised me quite like Echo Productions’ Dog Sees God, a tiny, under-marketed labour of love with only one week left in The Second City’s John Candy Box Theatre around the corner and two flights up from the rowdy mainspace. The trappings read like student theatre- […]
“That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Uncle Walt’s verse gets renewed life on stage in the millennial classic Dead Poets Society – an ode to nonconformity and self-expression in a world that vows to stamp out individualism in favor of conservative practicality. Despite its flaws, the film remains one […]
“True Love” is a sporadic feature in which I tell you about things in pop culture of which I’m an unabashed fan, whether it’s an embarrassing thing to admit or not. Love is how we all felt about Parks & Recreation, True Love is maintaining that Super Fun Night was the most interesting new sitcom […]
The first half, and probably two-thirds, of The Sewing Group is excruciatingly oblique. It opens on two women, clad in black mantles, sitting on bare wooden stools in a bare wooden room and sewing. These people are, according to the script, A (Jane Hazelgrove) and B (Sarah Niles). They sew and continue to, but before […]