Tom at the Farm (Buddies in Bad Times) This gorgeous and disturbing piece of personal theatre from Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard is one of the first truly great productions I’ve seen this year. Making its English language debut through Linda Gaboriau’s poetic and honest translation, Tom at the Farm is staged with searing insight […]
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 […]
“I wanted to write about obsession, about creativity, about risk-taking, about love and loss,” playwright Carolyn Smart writes about Hooked, now playing at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace. Certainly all of these elements and more are present in this intimate montage of the lives of 7 women. This eclectic one-woman show exemplifies not only the […]
There is one thing that struck me immediately about the new musical Fun Home: the audience, which was unique. The lesbian couple to my left had never been to a Broadway show before (a point that they stressed repeatedly while we chatted before curtain), and the older gentleman to my right was a seasoned theatre […]
Brantwood (Sheridan College) It’s a shame that this immersive, site-specific, multi-narrative, multi-genre theatrical experience will be closing on May 3rd so that the century-old school in which it’s housed can do what it’s prophesied to do in the show (be turned into condos) and the cast can do as their characters do in the final […]
Created by Why Not Theatre, The RISER Project is a new initiative that pairs established companies with emerging artists to share resources and make producing indie theatre just a little bit easier. The inaugural RISER season is taking place at The Theatre Centre with two shows currently on stage (closing May 3rd) and another two […]
A large paper scroll leads us up the stairs to the Berkeley Theatre. On the landing Mamela Nyamza is crouched on the floor, scrawling over and over “I must not have a big bum,” “I must not have a big bum”. As we continue up the stairs we can see how line-by-line the written form […]
With the weather warming up and city-dwellers coming out of hibernation, the Toronto theatre community is providing plenty of places for them to go. You could head down Yonge Street to see Once (starring the always likeable Ian Lake) or to The Annex for The LOT’s Hairspray (with the amazing Matt McKay as Seaweed) then […]