Critic’s Note: The performance reviewed was the June 12th preview. Experimental writing and the plays that come with it is tough. The art of saying something while sometimes saying nothing. The art of nothing happening but saying a lot in that nothing. Samuel Beckett made a career of it; Seinfeld ran on it. It […]
A lack of professional polish hinders this ambitious but frustrating new work from By the Word Productions currently playing in the Crows Studio Theatre. In the tradition of Schiller’s Mary Stuart or Stetson’s The Meeting, playwright Franca Miraglia imagines a fictional meeting between non-fiction characters. The jumping off point is a passage from Arthur […]
Twelve years in the making, Susanna Fournier’s take rimbaud is heartfelt, engaging, thoughtful, entertaining, and continuously funny. The stage juts out into the centre of the room, with the audience kiddie corner along two walls. This means the action happens along two sides of the stage, and the result was more effective than I’d […]
A perfect blend of comedy and horror, cicadas leaves you laughing, guessing, tensing and thinking at every turn. The real estate market is tough and not just now but in 2032 when our story in cicadas takes place. Tough enough that our protagonist couple Janie (Monica Dottor) and Trim (Ryan Hollyman) end up picking […]
Anita La Selva has directed some of the best theatre I’ve ever seen- bold, creative, demanding work that left a lasting impact. That fact is the complicating, heartbreaking, contextualizing background to 12 Litres 8800 Steps, her autobiographical solo show currently on stage in the Factory mainspace. The play tells the devastating personal story that, presumably […]
Writer/director Andrew Kushnir’s latest self-referential verbatim project presents his signature style at its complex, emotional best. Docutheatre has a tendency to fall into reporterly coldness as the research-heavy genre often tells stories involving investigations and the dialogue is spoken exactly as originally uttered by the real life characters rather than translated through a playwright’s […]
It Could Still Happen is a company that grounds itself in such values as exploration, embodiment, and taking one’s time during a creative process. And so it’s not a surprise that The Herald still has a work-in-progress vibe as it begins with writer and director Jill Connell emerging, carrying their own podium amidst a fog […]
The National Ballet of Canada’s 2025/26 season is off to a strong start with a pair of contrasting productions that showcase the company’s range and up-and-coming stable of talent, though one is far more inspiring than the other. First at bat was what’s sure to be the season MVP (I saw it the night […]