Though indie theatre is still scrambling to exist, Toronto’s mid-tier theatre scene finally feels well and truly alive again. This April was the first time since early 2020 that there were so many openings that critics had to pick and choose and I’m thrilled to report that I haven’t seen a bad thing all season. […]
Touting an 8+ year development process, countless participating artists, and the longest list of donors and grants I’ve ever heard, the Shaw Festival’s long-awaited presentation of Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata premiered yesterday with a double header of its two parts: Karma and Dharma. Everything about the way Mahabharata is being presented feels like the […]
Alice in Wonderland in all of its iterations has primarily focused on Wonderland being a mental representation of Alice and her current situations. Whether it was from the original story about Alice embracing the nonsensical and learning to question, or the American McGee games that took Wonderland and Alice to more mature/darker realms of living […]
A still relatively new but already beloved Toronto holiday theatre tradition is Three Ships Collective/Soup Can Theatre’s site-specific Christmas Carol staged at the historic Campbell House Museum. As the production prepared to get back on its feet after a two-year pandemic hiatus, we caught up with director Sare Thorpe and playwright/assistant director Justin Haig […]
The expansion of the Shaw Festival season to include a duo of holiday shows every December has proven to be a truly winning innovation. The mini-season in the winter forms a welcome bridge between the festival’s regularly scheduled April-October season and makes the company feel like a full year player rather than a summer getaway. […]
There is a joke once seen on tumblr that describes different nationalities’ approaches to death in stories. American writers write I WILL DIE FOR LOVE! British writers write I WILL DIE FOR COUNTRY! And Russian writers write I WILL JUST DIE! An overly simplistic take but this critic’s first thought when seeing that joke was […]
A restorative 90 minute tour of the heart by way of a gruff Canadian poet, The Shape of Home is an original narrative concert born in isolation with roots in a familiar form. Joined by fellow multi-instrumentalist super-talents Beau Dixon and Raha Javanfar, it’s thrilling see perennial favourites Frank Cox-O’Connell and Hailey Gillis reunite for […]
I love the concept behind Soulpepper’s bold Lear Family Double Bill that pairs a very solid production of Shakespeare’s King Lear with a new play by Erin Shields that imagines what might have happened seven years earlier to inform the behaviour of the characters in King Lear. Shields’ play Queen Goneril focuses not just on […]