A storm was supposed to be coming. Said forecast moved Desiderata Theatre Co’s production of Lot and His God from the Citizenry Cafe patio to its limited indoor space for one night only. Citizenry is too nice to really pass for the dilapidated Sodom cafe described in the text but, trapped inside with too many […]
Claudia Dey’s well lauded but suspiciously neat backwoods fairytale is an intriguing but flawed examination of co-dependence on its own but director Daniel Pagett does something directors rarely do with fairly new texts in the current production by new indie company Severely Jazzed Productions- he messes with it and, in doing so, he makes it […]
The use of white makeup as a base for exaggerated features has become a fairly standard practice in productions with a sense of heightened reality. This month in Toronto there are three shows all making use of the convention, albeit in wildly different ways. Trudeau & Levesque Their distinctive makeup is arguably the most […]
The latest indie company to take the stage at the Storefront Theatre is the excellently named Severely Jazzed, headed by improvisers Tess Degenstein and Hannah Spear. We spoke to Tess and Hannah about their inaugural production Trout Stanley which hits Bloor West this Thursday. Tell us about Severely Jazzed Productions and how the company got […]
Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis’ bold dismantling of the betrayal of Jesus envisions a purgatorial world known as “Hope” where even the most easily damnable deserve consideration and possibly even salvation. It’s a hugely ambitious play with a massive cast of characters- gods and saints and devils, icons and angels and people- an anachronistic allegory that […]
For 7 performances May 20-24, the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse will play host to the inaugural presentation from Martha Rose Productions Inc., the latest addition to Toronto’s indie theatre community. The chosen text- the Canadian premiere of Neil LaBute’s Miss Julie, an adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1888 naturalistic masterpiece relocated to Long Island in the […]
Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle was considered controversial when it was first written in 1976. Much has changed in the past 40 years, and yet this is still a controversial play in terms of its depiction of sexual violence and the performance of disability. As such, the question why stage this play was at the […]
Creditors (Coal Mine Theatre) The final piece in Coal Mine Theatre’s fantastically successful inaugural season is a dark domestic drama from August Stringberg set in a 19th century world of rampant misogyny and even more rampant psychotic jealousy. The solid production benefits greatly from director Rae Ellen Bodie’s background in dialect coaching (there’s a clarity […]