Soulpepper’s 12-play 2012 season officially began last week with the January 19th opening of Kim’s Convenience. The heartfelt, hilarious and supremely Torontonian play is an essentially unchanged remount of the same production from last summer’s Toronto Fringe Festival. The set is a little bigger- now a fully-dressed convenience store on the Michael Young Stage, oddly […]
Argos Productions‘ second excursion in Boston theater, Wandaleria, written by David Valdes Greenwood and directed by Brett Marks, was an exceptional presentation of a wonderfully written, funny play. The script itself is new. The Author, a former Boston Globe columnist and accomplished playwright, creates a piece that is not only exceedingly clever, but well structured. The story […]
Walking into Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is always an entirely new experience. One of the more versatile spaces Toronto has to offer, the Buddies stage played host to two massively different productions in the past few months, both of which had something big to say. In October I had the distinct pleasure of […]
“Why did I come to Copenhagen?” one of the characters asks, late into the second act of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen. I asked myself the same question after seeing Flat Earth Theatre’s production last weekend. I am a huge Noises Off fan, another play by Michael Frayn, but his two scripts are nothing alike. Copenhagen […]
The Next Stage Festival is the fascinating bridge between a show’s Fringe Festival run and its life beyond the circuit. It’s an inspired idea and a chance for some truly splendid indie theatre to get a little more attention than it did/would amidst hundreds of Fringe offerings in the summer. There are 12 shows this […]
I don’t remember the last time I saw a Mirvish production that really wowed me. The Toronto titans of entertainment are known for big budget musicals and star-powered productions, but it seems like lately their light just isn’t as bright as it was in the pre-Sars heyday of The Lion King and Mamma Mia. The […]
The newest play from Canada’s beloved playwright Hannah Moscovitch is a stirring and inspiring drama about groundbreaking Polish/Jewish educator Janusz Korczak, set in Warsaw in pre-ghetto 1939 (Act I) and oppressive and war-torn 1942 (Act II). Against Camellia Koo’s innovative set of destructible paper orphanage walls and directed with sublime understanding by Alisa Palmer, Moscovitch’s […]
In my University writing classes I always wanted to write inside baseball stories about how Shakespeare people talk about Shakespeare. Every professor I ever had (playwriting, screenwriting, tv writing- all of them) told me I wasn’t allowed. They said the audience would tune the characters out because they didn’t understand, that everything had to be […]