In tiny spaces just off Queen West last week, two tiny plays took my breath away. One in the more metaphorical sense that it left me speechless and contemplative and moved but uncomfortable with said moving. The other in the literal sense that I was crying so hard I had trouble catching my breath. […]
Dystopia is all the rage these days, as any of the recent hits in YA fiction/blockbuster film adaptations will indicate (The Hunger Games; Ender’s Game; The Giver, etc.). The Boston fringe theatre scene is no exception, and companies can choose to either stage new works (e.g. Flat Earth Theatre’s What Once We Felt) or give […]
The history of Shakespeare Bash’d, up to and including their current production of Macbeth at the Monarch Tavern, reveals a pattern of wonderful comedy and middling tragedy. Some of this has to do with the Fringe Festival comedies being shorter and more fun, enlivened by the festival environment. But, mostly, I think it comes down […]
At our My Theatre Awards party back in April, there was an extremely loud table in the back corner, which the inhabitants called the “Single Safe Soup” table (a mashup of Single Thread, safeword, and Soup Can Theatre). In a theatrical landscape with limited resources from money to playing space to really great actors, one […]
I know I said that the Tony Awards ended my 2014 theatre award season, but I lied. Sorry. Forgive my categorically untrue statement. This week, I attended the 2014 New York Innovative Theatre Awards, which honors the best shows, actors, designers, and technicians off off-Broadway (but, you know, still in New York City). Some call […]
I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now. At first I really didn’t like playwright Philip Ridley’s take on the dystopian future, and that prevented me from particularly liking Seven Siblings’ production of the text, currently playing at Unit 102 Theatre. When Cameron Laurie’s Elliot enters with his goofy brother Darren (Andrew Markowiak) […]
For their inaugural production, socially conscious Clock Tower Theatre chose a contemporary Canadian play limited neither by its time nor its place. Rather, The Harrowing is one of those no-frills political thrillers that could just as easily be about Jesus as about Maziar Bahari or a dystopian hero of the future. Designer/AD Justin Büyüközer embraces […]
As you likely already know (because we talk about it All The Time), earlier this month we hosted Toronto’s inaugural My Theatre Awards ceremony. The awards have been around since 2010, but this was the first party. Because it was the first party, it took a ton of planning. In the process of all said […]