Dead End (Theatre Lab) This light-hearted one-act from playwright Jonny Sun and director Michael Orlando is the perfect Halloween-themed diversion in Toronto’s current sea of self-serious theatre. Sun traps bantering high school pals Christian Smith and Chris Wilson* in a dead end hallway as they flee the zombie horde that’s taken over their school, inviting […]
The opening monologue, performed off-stage and possibly prerecorded, brews the promise of a ‘neo-noir fever dream’ into a disgustingly tactical succession of phrase. Its programme says the show ‘changed from a fiction wrapped in a concert to a concert sprinkled with words.’ That’s true. There are now only two worded segments among a relentless soundscape, […]
Theatre about TV, created by theatre producers, produced by TV creators, staged like theatre on a TV stage, shot like TV to be seen as theatre- this is the contradiction that is Late Night, the latest from writer/director Kat Sandler and her indie hit-making company Theatre Brouhaha (executive produced by ZoomerLive’s Moses Znaimer). Sandler’s […]
Written by Jordan Tannahill, directed by Eric Brubacher and Cara Spooner, Concord Floral is currently opening Canadian Stage’s 2016-2017 season. To top it all off, just a few days ago, the play earned Tannahill a nomination for a Governor General’s Award. The play centres around Concord Floral, an old abandoned greenhouse in Vaughn nesting within […]
If it takes seven people to tell a story, you hope it’s a good story. Luckily, The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas is a good story and a gripping performance. At the start of the production, the audience is tremendously confused. There is a guy named George who had bad luck in love and in life, but […]
Noises Off Did we need another 70s-set backstage theatre farce mere months after Jitters? No. But Soulpepper’s production of Noises Off made me laugh louder and with more obnoxious uncontainable shrieks than anything else I’ve seen this year so I’ll welcome the repetition. Simon Fon’s fight and stunt work was still too careful and a […]
Adapting a novel for the stage is certainly no easy feat. Sacrifices and changes must be made to slim down what can be a lengthy and detailed narrative into a coherent, streamlined and more visual medium. The risk lies in the impact this conversion can have on the end-product, specifically whether what works on the […]
There are, or at least have currently been presented, two ways of tackling autism on a London stage, and this probably goes for other mental illnesses as well: a subjective and an objective approach. The subjective integrates symptoms into a play’s form; the objective doesn’t. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is […]