These are crazy times and we’ve all taken on a bunch of new projects as we socially isolate in order to help stop the spread of Covid-19. We’re donating where we can, we’re cleaning the pantry, we’re organizing the 2300+ title dvd library. We finished work on the Nominee Interview Series even though the live event for our […]
For all its traumas and sadnesses, the pandemic was, at the very least, an immensely clarifying experience. With our lives irreparably disrupted and access to so many things denied, it very quickly became obvious how I truly felt about the things in my life that had become routine. My character-defining love of television stood firm […]
Lessons in Temperament is a film adaptation of Outside the March’s notable solo show of the same name, wherein writer and performer James Smith teaches the audience how to tune a piano while telling stories about his neurodiverse family. If you’ve admired this piece since its site-specific premiere in the 2016 Summerworks Festival, or if […]
Soulpepper and Bad Hats Theatre’s Alice in Wonderland (available to stream at home until Sunday, April 18) is a welcome detour into a world no more absurd than our own. Lewis Carroll’s classic is an ideal canvas for a creative mind – a story so popular that even this young audience will know it well […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2019 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards…
Before we announce the winners of the 2019 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. First Act Productions has a knack for assembling strong ensembles but Pasek & Paul’s early off-Broadway piece Dogfight might have been their strongest yet with rock solid leads (including Outstanding Performance in a Play nominee Taylor […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2019 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. As Rose, the sensitive soul of Pasek & Paul’s 2012 Off-Broadway hit, Taylor Hubbard gave such a beautifully vulnerable performance that our hearts felt tied to hers from curtain up to curtain down in the First Act […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2019 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Originally from Calgary, Felix Beauchamp is a bilingual performer who has worked in both English and French across Canada both onstage and on film. His work extends into clown work and music as well: he’s a […]
Red Sky Performance’s AF is true to brand a force of nature. The rhythm is urgent, the energy is youthful, and the choreography showcases the athleticism of the dancers. The driving beat of the vocals and percussion carries an urgent intensity throughout the work, with the dancers using percussive movements heavily influenced by locking and […]
The Canadian Opera Company designed a playful Winter Season…
Casimir and Caroline opens on a balcony. No…. more than that. The play opens on a balcony at a corporate office party while the heads of corporate are in fact up in the sky in a zeppelin. Now have you ever actually really experienced a balcony at a corporate office party while the heads of corporate are […]
Little did I know what a truly magical and inspiring experience I was in for coming to HERE Arts Center on a cold winter night. This was my first time attending a performance by EPIC Players, “a nonprofit, neuro-inclusive theatre company dedicated to creating professional performing arts opportunities and supportive social communities through the arts […]
The SpongeBob SquarePants Musical, presented by TO Live at Meridian Hall, was a breakout Broadway success in 2017/2018 garnering 12 Tony Award nominations and is the first in what TO Live is hoping to be an ongoing Broadway series. It is a production that will delight the children in the audience and entertain their adult […]
It’s Christmastime, which means that many people are either celebrating beloved family traditions or searching for some moderately pleasant activity the whole family can agree on. The solution Toronto’s commercial theatre producers are offering up is musical theatre. And not just any musical theatre- big, shiny, happy, mostly stupid but very nice Musical Theatre. The […]
I think I have a new Christmas tradition. I’ve always known the story of A Christmas Carol, but it’s never been a big part of my life. It’s the one with the crotchety old man? Bill Murray was in the movie? In The Three Ships Collective production, however, there are no low blows, and it […]
It’s the holiday season which means we get to relive the quintessential secular Christmas story – apparently the only one, again and again. Avid Carolers are spoilt for choice – after leaving Spadina Museum full of festive cheer, you can head to The Three Ships Collective’s remount of last year’s brilliant Carol at Campbell House […]
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 […]
The safest compliment for art is that it knows who it’s for. Stratford’s roster in a given year mostly consists of sober, supposedly thoughtful pieces aimed at some cross-section of a reliable clientele: there will be something for the Shakespeare crowd, a high-concept work that tickles critics pink, and maybe a disappointingly rote dalliance with […]
I was so excited to find myself in Vancouver during the Fringe Festival this fall (it’s crazy that there are still Fringe Festivals happening once it’s officially “fall”). Having covered the Toronto leg of the epic Canadian indie theatre circuit for years, I was curious to see how things compared out on the west coast. […]
I remain firm in my assertion that Canada’s major artistic directors need to hire musical theatre consultants to help them pick what to produce because their knowledge base and taste level just seem off when it comes to the singing and dancing portions of their programming (just one coffee with Mitchell Marcus per year and […]
After I saw Brigadoon, the Shaw Festival’s magical staging of a reimagined classic musical, I right away sat down to write about the experience. At least for me, the night I saw it, the mood I was in, Brigadoon was a fully contained theatrical moment about which I had plenty to say. Another staff writer […]
Michael Healey’s new adaptation of the much-adapted 1928 Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur newspaper farce starts with boredom. It starts with a bunch of sloppy newsmen and a single newly incorporated newswoman (Michelle Giroux, right at home) just sitting around waiting for something to happen. As a purposeful contrast to the madcap zip of the […]
This show hit me straight in the heart. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to say that about a Shaw musical and I’m grinning ear to ear to be able to say it now (also because I literally just left the theatre so the post-musical glow has yet to wear off). Loewe’s love […]
Some stories take a few tries to find their perfect medium. Les Miserables, for example, is a meandering bore of a novel (hot take? Whatever, I don’t want to hear about it) but, when it found its rightful home in musical theatre, everything clicked. Eugene Onegin is a poem, an opera, and a musical, but […]
If you ever get the chance to see The Lion King on Broadway, you have to take it. Stop me if you’ve heard this lecture before but I honestly believe Julie Taymor’s visionary adaptation to be one of the great feats of human imagination in theatrical history. First some crazy person in a Disney boardroom […]
Well, this is it. The series is done. I started writing these articles in 2016, right before season six started. It seems like such a long time ago, three years and two seasons. Almost seems like a simpler time, when Jon was coming back from the dead and Dany was getting reintroduced to the Dothraki. […]