Great pilots are hard to find in any genre (the recent Alphas was an exception). Great pilots for comedies- especially fairly generic comedies about twenty-somethings learning to deal with life and love- are really hard to find. Nearly every one I’ve seen over the past 5-10 years has been trying so desperately to distinguish itself […]
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The second season of Canada’s best primetime soap finished off last night with back to back episodes. True to its Grey’s Anatomy formula, the cop show avoided the dreaded sophomore slump by simply getting better with age. This season we got to know our central rookies even better as an awkward but fun love triangle […]
In our first year covering Toronto’s Summerworks Festival we saw a total of 10 vastly different productions. From the beloved to the despised; from uber professional to pathetically amateur; pretentious to earnest; new works, established favourites, ensemble projects, two person vignettes, musicals, absurdist parables, dance pieces, hits, bombs, comedies, dramas and every possible thing in […]
From the start, it’s kind of hard to peg down what kind of a show Alphas wants to be. It has whip-smart writing and glorious one liners (see Random Thoughts, at the end) that seem to lend themselves to a wisecracking action comedy. It has a complicated mythology filled with good, evil, and mind control, […]
As the background notes in Soulpepper’s Glass Menagerie playbill remind us, Tennessee Williams had a preoccupation with delicate people. He loved them. Himself being a fairly delicate person, he found them the most sympathetic, the most relatable. I, who greatly admire Williams’ poetic language and unrelenting dedication to emotional complexity, really struggle with the plight […]
A friend recently told me that I was a renaissance man when it came to geek culture. I know a little bit about everything, but not a ton about most things (the exceptions being Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). “No”, I happily replied, I was not a dabbler in all things geek: I […]
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is one of the most interesting theatrical pieces written in the 20th century. It’s quick-witted and academic, funny and touching, thought-provoking, heart-breaking and wildly entertaining. With heavy parallelism linking the superb characters between two eras in a single household (1809 and 2011- the studied and the studying), Arcadia becomes a sort of […]
Colin Farrell is trying to sleep with your mom. Go ahead, take a second and digest that. Pretty freaking horrifying, right? And because he’s Colin Farrell, even if your mom is a tough-as-nails Toni Collette, she’s probably going to let him. But just in case that gonorrhea-influenced mess isn’t enough to send you into a […]