The Toronto Fringe Festival runs June 30-July 12 at locations throughout the city.   We’ll be on site reviewing as much as we possibly can, so be sure to bookmark our Fringe Homepage to read all our reviews as they’re published.   In the meantime, we asked the artists to send us their best show pitch […]

The Toronto Fringe Festival runs June 30-July 12 at locations throughout the city.   We’ll be on site reviewing as much as we possibly can, so be sure to bookmark our Fringe Homepage to read all our reviews as they’re published.   In the meantime, we asked the artists to send us their best show pitch […]

Prolific Toronto musical theatre writer Andrew Seok has a signature style- all heart, total sincerity, soaring ballads with big ensemble harmonies. Your mileage may vary. The unrelenting prettiness of his work is a pro for me, though it can get repetitive, so it’s nice to see him stretch a bit with his latest piece.   […]

The latest from Toronto drag icon Pearle Harbour is a sad, wild, itty bitty little tragicomedy staged in a hidden bar in the swanky Royal York hotel that is barely big enough to walk through. It’s surreal, it’s uncomfortable, it’s wacky, it’s depressing. It may be a masterpiece.   Justin Miller’s alter ego is so […]

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 […]