The newest play from Canada’s beloved playwright Hannah Moscovitch is a stirring and inspiring drama about groundbreaking Polish/Jewish educator Janusz Korczak, set in Warsaw in pre-ghetto 1939 (Act I) and oppressive and war-torn 1942 (Act II). Against Camellia Koo’s innovative set of destructible paper orphanage walls and directed with sublime understanding by Alisa Palmer, Moscovitch’s […]
I went to University in Boston. Don’t ask me why but I had it in my head that I had to leave home after highschool, live in another city (another country, as it turned out), get some space from the town where my parents live, where I’d spent all of highschool and lived since I […]
Ross Petty’s annual Christmas Pantomime has been a beloved event in Toronto for 16 years. I can remember going as a kid and getting to see Canadian legends like Mr. Dressup (Ernie Coombs), Fred Penner, Kurt Browning, Rex Harrington and Karen Kain onstage as absurd twisted fairy tale creatures. It was the thrill of the […]
Ranking: #2 My first tears of the 2011 Stratford Festival Season came in the Studio Theatre one afternoon as I took in a play about which I knew nothing. John Mighton’s original work The Little Years was the surprise delight of the season, a new play I loved so much that it usurped some […]
Ranking: #5 The new musical from Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli brings something very new to the Shaw, even if the plot is nothing new for musical theatre. Essentially a mashup of Carmen’s tropes and Aida’s plot, Maria Severa tells the story of a young Portugese prostitute (the titular Maria) who falls for a man […]
In our first year covering Toronto’s Summerworks Festival we saw a total of 10 vastly different productions. From the beloved to the despised; from uber professional to pathetically amateur; pretentious to earnest; new works, established favourites, ensemble projects, two person vignettes, musicals, absurdist parables, dance pieces, hits, bombs, comedies, dramas and every possible thing in […]
I’m a little bit in love with Argos Productions. With a charismatic artistic director and a mandate to perform original works with the writer involved in the development, Argos is the latest company after my heart. Their inaugural production, however, is a little shaky. Junkie, a new work by John Shea, takes the form of […]