What I Call Her is a new play written by Ellie Moon and performed in partnership with Crow’s Theatre. Opening night was a great success, filled with the thrill and jitter of any new performance. Audience members greeted each other, proud parents beamed, and we all admired the wonderfully designed set. I don’t think I’ve […]
This Crow’s remount of the 2017 Shaw production of Will Eno’s Middletown, is the story of a generic town, equidistant from its neighbouring towns, with a stable population, elevation, not too big, not too small. This is, not surprisingly, a kind of metaphor, and the play is less about a grand narrative than it is an […]
That’s right, I’m talking about Mirvish’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical and Tarragon’s Marshall McLuhan one-act in one article. They’re both terrible- dull, simplistic, varying degrees of ridiculous- and they’re playing in Toronto at the same time, but the two have more in common than just ruining my Wednesday nights. In Jason Sherman’s The […]
Scorch, Stacey Gregg’s award-winning play about one teen’s struggle with gender identity and the legal system, is ‘based on a true story’. Beneath that lifeless description Scorch’s real power is in telling the true stories of a larger family of people, who find their right to write their own story under attack, without claiming to […]
“Why should I fight the white man’s war, when men like you take everything away from me and my people?” This incredulous question strikes at the heart of Gods Like Us, a deep resonating expression of the complete disconnect between the priorities of two men from very different backgrounds. The undercurrents of racial divide and […]
I am an elementary school teacher. I have participated in hundreds of parent-teacher interviews, but I’ve never had an experience like the one portrayed in Jordi Mand’s Between the Sheets! Oh sure, when I walked into the Small World Centre at Artscape Youngplace, I was transported into what could have been any elementary classroom anywhere […]
Writer/director Bobby Del Rio’s ambitious attempt to take on the ever-relevant themes of rape and trauma is an admirable undertaking with an uneven execution. Del Rio points out in the programme that you might assume this piece was written in response to #MeToo. In fact, he wrote the first draft six years ago. The script […]
Two small, run-down apartments are the settings for two new George F. Walker plays, which taken together complete his Parkdale Palace Trilogy (begun with last year’s The Chance, which I must confess to not having seen), which are being staged at the Assembly Theatre in a double bill. Put on by Low Rise Productions and […]