The blatant irony of a title like Breathing Corpses, as with something like The Walking Dead, is that it is the ostensibly living characters who are all to some degree deceased: both because their lives are caught in a deadlock, and also because by the end of the play we know that many of these […]
In the month or so leading up to Fringe, there isn’t much going on in the indie Toronto theatre scene but two Canadian-written…
I hate plays with fake accents. Unless your name is Oliver Dennis (or you work at the Shaw Festival), your British accent is not as good as you think it is and I’d really rather you just not use it. And a British accent (usually a posh one, sometimes cockney) is the accent most Canadian […]
There’s something of a false hierarchical narrative around Shakespeare performance that suggests the grander the stage, the stronger the performer, the mecca that is the Stratford festival theatre serving as the (Canadian) pinnacle where only the best of the best are allowed to tread the boards. If you’re somehow unconvinced that this narrative is nonsense, […]
The Immigrant (Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company) You know Mark Harelik, or at least you know his face. He has a recurring role on The Big Bang Theory; he was Topanga’s dad on Boy Meets World; he’s in an episode of Breaking Bad! The reason Mark Harelik is here to be a familiar face in […]
Creditors (Coal Mine Theatre) The final piece in Coal Mine Theatre’s fantastically successful inaugural season is a dark domestic drama from August Stringberg set in a 19th century world of rampant misogyny and even more rampant psychotic jealousy. The solid production benefits greatly from director Rae Ellen Bodie’s background in dialect coaching (there’s a clarity […]
The latest productions from Coal Mine and Safeword share a common goal: to leave you shaken. They share some other things too (small casts, hip tones, interesting spaces) but it’s that shared goal that stands out. That’s not what all theatre artists are doing; most want to entertain you, to move you, maybe even inspire […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Flashpoint star Sergio di Zio made a massive splash on stage in 2014 in the first major production at the new Coal Mine Theatre on the Danforth, the Canadian premiere of The Motherfucker with the Hat. As […]