The Casting In Acting Up Stage/Obsidian’s current production of Michael John LaChiusa & George C Wolfe’s gin-soaked narrative poem The Wild Party, two principal roles always or often played by white actors are being played by black actors. This one choice has dominated the majority of the conversation around the distant but moodily effective […]
An evening spent discussing quantum physics might not sound like your cup of tea. But this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, and Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, about the fateful 1941 meeting of two famous physicists in Nazi-occupied Denmark, strikes a very relevant note. Porpentine Players performed this challenging and timely play, […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Though we lament that he may have ruined bananas for us forever, Alexander Plouffe’s indelible and intimate performance in Brandon Crone’s gorgeous one-act portrait of modern marriage Maypole Rose (as part of Circle Jerk) was one of […]
The two one-act plays that make up Spiel Players’ double bill- currently playing as part of Fraser Studios’ 2015 indie season- are both new adaptations of strange, challenging work from radical French playwright Marguerite Duras. They both revel in meandering, poetic language and the pointed vagueness of their character portraits but that is where their similarities […]
There really are not enough wonderful things to say about The Object Lesson, part of the World Stage series at Harbourfront Centre. I have not seen such an enchanting piece of theatre in a long time. It’s truly a shame that its run is so short as it would offer many, I feel, the chance […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Generally a festival production features a fairly simple set (or a non-existent one), something cheap to construct and easy to strike. Antigonick at SummerWorks didn’t feel at all like a festival production. It felt like a larger […]
All it takes is one well-placed, often shocking line to permanently cement a show in my mind. In Necessary Monsters, John Kuntz’s new play, I ran into that line about halfway through the two hour performance, at the pit of this nested, Russian-doll-of-a-show. An upper crust, philanthropic socialite (actually a performer in drag (Thomas Derrah) […]
I thought I was being clever when, as I tripped and scraped and picked my way over the frozen tundra that used to be the sidewalk along Arsenal Street, I said to myself: “I’ll begin the review with some joke comparing the show to the Snowmaggedon that has plagued Boston this month.” After stepping out […]