Last week’s spring-like departure from what has been the worst winter in the history of winters was a cruel ruse. Week two of the FRIGID festival was more aptly named as the bitter cold prompted audiences to stay bundled up during performances. However, the chill did not detract from the two enthralling productions that I […]
“Never start a story with a description of the weather. Nor end it with a marriage. The critics will kill you.” J.B. Heaps does neither in his compelling new one-act comedy Private Disclosures. There is a great deal of truth to that quote uttered by Preston Sherwood in Heaps’ play – the best plays are […]
The Toronto Laboratory Theatre and an English-Russian Theatre company named Théatrus have come together to produce a well-conceived play called The…Musician: An Etude. Three actors, Shelley Liebembuk, Clayton Gray and Kevin Kashani collaborate to play more than ten roles to the music of Art Babyants, who conceived and directed the project. Although I anticipated the […]
Venus in fur. Ven-us in fur. These words are purred by our gorgeous leading lady, Vanda, played by the seductive and mysterious Andrea Syglowski, with growing anticipation. Syglowski expertly casts a spell over Chris Kipiniak’s stuffy Thomas and audience alike during a spell-binding performance of David Ives’ Venus in Fur. David Ives, known for his […]
Increasingly, some of the most solid theatre on the Toronto scene has come from companies you could classify as “Indie 2.0” (technically an Equity term but one I’ve decided to allocate a bit more freely). These are companies that operate along indie lines, with small-ish budgets and casts, but use union artists. The effect is […]
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 […]