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 […]