Slip (Circlesnake Productions) High expectations are a tricky business. They’re why you should never rewatch an Oscar Best Picture winner, why everyone took the 2013 Jays season so hard, and why Justin Trudeau might be a little bit doomed. After the effusive praise I heaped on their last production Dark Matter (winner of the 2014 […]
Byhalia, Mississippi (Cue6 Theatre) This excellent contemporary drama from Cue6 Theatre tells the story of flawed but defiantly happy couple Jim and Laurel whose simple lives in nowheresville Byhalia, Mississippi are thrown into turmoil when the birth of their son destabilizes everything from Laurel’s relationship with her mother (a wonderfully infuriating Kyra Harper) to Jim’s […]
There are six days left in The Toronto Fringe’s annual Next Stage Theatre Festival. See below for my thoughts on nine of the ten shows (the performance of Urban Myth I was scheduled to attend was cancelled because of a fire alarm) then Click Here to buy your pass and schedule your trip to the Factory […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2015 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Our first interview of the year is just in time for the Next Stage Theatre Festival where writer/director Chloé Hung’s play All Our Yesterdays is making its highly anticipated return after a successful run at the […]
Growing up in the ‘70s, I, like most kids, had my addictive television programs – Lost in Space and Star Trek among them – which made it very easy to relate to Maggie Day, the perky narrator of The Further Adventures of … as she illustrates the time she spent watching her favorite childhood program: […]
Both of Canadian Stage’s current offerings are about people sleeping with people they shouldn’t be sleeping with. Both remarkably self-satisfied domestic dramas purport to be about “so much more” but that’s really about it. In the one-act contemporary opera Julie, well-to-do scorned woman Julie (Lucia Cervoni) sleeps with her callous, manipulative, engaged servant Jean […]
Workshop productions aren’t really supposed to be reviewed, especially when they’re only playing for one weekend and the reviewer can’t make it on opening night. So, I suppose, you shouldn’t really call this a review. It’s more of a monologue about Holger Syme’s wonderful new adaptation of Ödön von Horváth’s Casimir and Caroline with The […]
Historically, operas that choose to focus on love tend to privilege sweeping romances, richly orchestrated melodrama, couples separated by social mores, and, more often than not, a gloriously tragic finale. If you’re going to have several dozen musicians thrumming beneath your story of romantic entanglement, then it seems more than fair for your performances to […]