In the month or so leading up to Fringe, there isn’t much going on in the indie Toronto theatre scene but two Canadian-written…
The Testament of Mary A Nancy Palk solo showcase with beautiful lighting (Lorenzo Savoini) and stirring sound (Richard Feren), this solemn one act tells the Jesus narrative from his mother’s perspective, stretching from his preaching in the temple to his death on the cross. It’s predictably a strong performance from Palk, her Mother of God […]
Scarberia (Young People’s Theatre) As the lights dimmed on Evan Placey’s coast-jumping, Shakespeare-referencing, mind-bending one-act about two sets of teenage boys tied together by a young woman who goes missing in Scarborough, Ontario and shows up in Scarborough, England, the early-high school audience began muttering that it was “too complicated” and “confusing”. It is really […]
The Archivist as a title for a performance piece suggests an exploration of a reserved, organized and knowledgeable figure. It can also suggest someone with a degree of detachment from the material they are curating; when I think of archivists, I think of slightly senior employees who labour away in the bowels of an institution, […]
Heather Litteer is not a stripper or a prostitute or a junky who will go to any length to score a fix – but, as she explains at the beginning of her new play Lemonade, she plays one on television and in films. Litteer’s autobiographical play explores her disappointing type-casted acting career as a sexualized […]
We Three is a collaborative new work by Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman with a clever title inspired by the Henry V speech a character passes off as “a poem she wrote”; a speech about brotherhood forged in shared experience and unshakeable as years pass. If only the bonds between modern women were as simple as those between Shakespeare’s soldiers, […]
I hate plays with fake accents. Unless your name is Oliver Dennis (or you work at the Shaw Festival), your British accent is not as good as you think it is and I’d really rather you just not use it. And a British accent (usually a posh one, sometimes cockney) is the accent most Canadian […]
Part of the mission statement for the Seventeenth Annual Midtown International Theatre Festival is to “offer a safe environment to develop innovative theatre.” Held at the WorkShop Theater’s Main Stage and Jewel Box Theaters, the festival featured over thirty performances. The productions are typically about a half hour, and many even shorter than that, which […]