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 […]
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 […]
Béla Bartók’s intense, atmospheric one-act Bluebeard’s Castle returns to the COC this spring full of tonal dissonance, all-time-great lighting design, and, of course, the horrors. Béla Baláz’s libretto (based on a French folk tale) is dark as pitch, a cautionary tale where the red flags start in the first minute (dude is insecure about the […]
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 […]
Théâtre Motus’ Tree is a beautiful introduction to live performance designed for the enjoyment of six-months to three-year-olds with a special eye to accessibility for neurodivergent children. I brought my nine-month-old to the show for his first experience as a live theatre audience member (thanks to Cineplex’s Stars & Strollers program, he’s well versed with the […]
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, to deal with isolation and lack of live theatre, we started gathering some of our favourite people every Tuesday & Saturday night to read scripts over Zoom. We read all 38 Shakespeare plays in six months. Then we kept going. We decided to create mini-seasons featuring highlights from the canons of […]
Shrek the Musical (Young People’s Theatre) Young People’s Theatre’s production of Shrek the Musical is lean, green, and utterly joyful. It’s one of the biggest productions in the company’s 60-year history and that investment pays off with a strong ensemble, William Layton’s vibrant set design, and an overall high standard of production that could easily […]