This is a big thing to say considering the consistently critically beloved status of Toronto’s Coal Mine Theatre since its bombastic debut with The Motherfucker with the Hat back in 2014 but I’m pretty confident that Superior Donuts is the best thing the Indie 2.2 company has ever produced. At least it’s my favourite. Tracy […]
Blue Remembered Hills (Good Old Neon) This dark, unpleasant, uncompromisingly strange piece of physical theatre is born out of a British teleplay in which a group of children play and torture each other, as children do. The children are meant to be played by adults but director Nicole Wilson has fully grown the characters up, […]
At this point, Kim’s Convenience hardly needs an introduction. Having toured nationally, with multiple remounts, and having been turned into a CBC series (it’s just been renewed for a second season), this summer Ins Choi’s play will head to New York City for its U. S. Premiere. But for now, it’s back at Soulpepper. The […]
Currently on tour, Taking Flight is a selection of three plays, chosen as the winners of a competition that aimed to produce pieces by first-time playwrights from within the British East Asian, South Asian, and Southeast Asian communities. Obviously, the politics of the aim can’t be ignored: that there is something particular about British-Asian (or […]
This is not a review. The Company Theatre’s production of John– a dense, complex, hilarious personal epic by celebrated playwright Annie Baker- is extraordinary on a hundred different levels and every single person who has seen it (or certainly written about it) has said pretty much the same thing. I’m usually skeptical of consensus but […]
Written and performed by Laurel Brady, Surfacing is a story of a young woman telling her mother about her mental illness. In the programme notes, Brady confesses that the show was inspired by a monologue that she wrote about her own depression and anxiety. These are stories we are often afraid to tell other people, […]
#neverlookback You see the above hashtag for a second of Sh!t Theatre’s hour-long show. It’s in footage of Manor House, the duo’s local area, on a billboard apparently for an E-cig company called Vivid; I thought it was from Nike (of ‘Just Do It’ fame), because both sentiments suggest a vaguely life-affirming yet thoughtless life […]
Liv Stein at Canadian Stage manages to achieve the strange combination of beautiful mediocrity. Nino Haratischwili’s play is about a couple, Liv and Emil, their angst over the loss of their son, and that aftermath of that grief. Liv (Leslie Hope) is a pianist, someone once renowned for her interpretations and performances of Rachmaninov but […]