The secret to successful entertainment in any form is conceptually simple: know your audience. I suspect that the producers of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall at 59E59 Theatre had an audience in mind when they chose to produce the show. I am also confident that I am not that audience. In a single word, I […]
I am a sucker for a good murder mystery. Or even a bad one, really. In a fantasy world where I could ignore work and personal obligations for an entire Saturday, I would spend the day playing Cluedo, browsing the bookshelves at the Mysterious Bookshop in Tribeca, and hosting a murder mystery dinner party (preferably […]
After seeing a total of seven productions at this years SummerWorks theatre festival in Toronto, I decided to grade my reactions on an ascending scale. This began with two shows that somehow either went over my head or never really near it at all: Show and Tell Alexander Bell and Entitlement in Part 1, followed […]
Both of CanStage’s current productions are contemporary one-act contemplations of female power as attained through sexuality (to put it as simplistically as I possibly could). In The Flood Thereafter, the mythological sirens are represented in the figure of Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster as a brash and modern young woman paid to unceremoniously remove her clothes once […]
Last week, two excellent productions opened in Toronto that each told the story of a fascinating musical theatre artist through songs they composed themselves. The first was On the Rocks, a limited engagement cabaret-style showcase of Canadian musical theatre great Louise Pitre. Accompanied by the superb Diane Leah at the piano, Pitre took to […]
With the crazy summer theatre season finally coming to a close, many of Toronto’s smaller companies are taking the lull in big-ticket fare to kick off their seasons with intimate, impactful dramas. The first two plays I saw this week were two-act studies of modern life at polarized ends of the socio-economic scale, both written […]
Onwards and upwards I go along the string of shows I encountered at this year’s SummerWorks theatre festival in Toronto. I’m now in the middle section of my crescendo of impressions on the seven different shows I witnessed. I certainly didn’t soft-pedal my thoughts about the plays that impressed the least, as featured in Part […]
How to Disappear Completely was the second best thing I saw at SummerWorks this year (after Wild Dogs on the Moscow Trains). I loved it. It was everything I wished some of the other shows had been- personal, truthful, and funny without losing its sense of tragedy. Itai Erdal is the rare theatre creator able […]