Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Danny Ghantous was asked to play one of the least likeable characters in Shakespeare’s canon when Shakespeare in the Ruff took on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Withrow Park last summer. Faced with the question of […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Playwright Julie Foster’s The Tenth Muse features one of the most intriguingly complex lead characters we saw all year. Telling the story of ancient Greek poet Sappho through the lens of history’s unreliability and society’s judgemental eye, […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. There’s a magic to indie theatre that the big houses just don’t have, a sense of possibility, the ever-present promise that you might make a new discovery. Seeing Olivia Croft as Sappho in Filament Incubator’s production […]
I went back and forth on the title of this On Stage in TO roundup, the options being “small to big” and “best to worst” because both descriptions apply to the shows I’m about to discuss in the order in which I’m going to discuss them. Read into the pattern what you will- perhaps small, […]
Rouvan Silogix is angry about the state of the world, and very understandably so. And what better way to channel that anger than to create a farce about the contemporary political landscape? Silogix’s answer to that question is to create a surrealist vaudeville farce, gloriously entitled Grab ‘Em By the Pussy: Or How To Stop […]
Described as “A Surrealist Vaudeville Farce”, the fabulously titled “Grab ‘Em By the Pussy” or How to Stop Worrying & Love the Bomb is the troll-baiting, expectation-defying, ground-breaking new work currently taking over the TPM Backspace. We caught up with writer/director Rouvan Silogix to get a sense of what to expect from this second show in the […]
Bathroom intimacy is a key part of any romantic relationship. Worst opening sentence ever? I stand by it only because Filament Incubator’s production of Becky Tanton’s How to Drown Gracefully is often just as upfront (if more elegant) about its characters’ entwined romantic and physical sufferings, and it sets the whole thing, even in scenes […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Sarah Naomi Campbell stood out in two very different new works in 2016- Cue6’s collectively created issue play We Three and Caitie Graham’s family dramedy Paradise Comics, the final play in Filament Incubator’s ambitious 8-plays-in-8-months inaugural season. The latter […]
The final piece in Filament Incubator’s 8-plays-in-8-months experiment, Caitie Graham’s Paradise Comics is the perfect strong finish to a rocky but rewarding exercise in ambition and opportunity creation, combining the best elements of everything that led up to it- the quick banter of Rowing, a lighthearted approach to darker issues like ‘Til Death, the brutal […]
‘Til Death (Do Us Part), the penultimate play of the Filament Incubator’s ambitious inaugural season, is a sketch/improv/collaborative-scripted-project hybrid that’s part romantic comedy, part practical feminism manifesto, part dystopian horror story, part searing societal allegory. With its bar setting (the Monarch Tavern), intermittent improv, random dance breaks and generally casual vibe, ‘Til Death is the […]
A few years back, November was a pretty quiet month theatre-wise in Toronto, but it seems that everybody figured that out at the same time and decided to do something about it… at the same time. So now November is insane. According to the Canadian Theatre Opening Night Directory, there are 30 new shows opening […]
Unless you are blessed from an early age with extreme self-awareness, patience, and unshakeable self-confidence, then your adolescence was (or is going to be) probably very fraught. It’s a period of time that upends the life you’ve lived up to that point: everything becomes more complicated, less secure, and a little more threatening. You simultaneously […]
Filament Incubator is presenting 8 plays in 8 months, creating opportunities for young playwrights to get their work on its feet and in front of an audience. The ambition of that is remarkable and, no matter the merit of any particular production in said slate, it’s an overall extremely impressive feat. It therefore pains me […]
In the month or so leading up to Fringe, there isn’t much going on in the indie Toronto theatre scene but two Canadian-written…