Hannah Moscovitch’s Secret Life of a Mother is a raw and compelling portrait of the darker side of motherhood – one rarely acknowledged in polite conversation, forcing the arts to shoulder the burden of challenging these long-standing taboos. Moscovitch herself is the titular mother but the lead in this one-woman (but many-women) show is Maev […]
I think I have a new Christmas tradition. I’ve always known the story of A Christmas Carol, but it’s never been a big part of my life. It’s the one with the crotchety old man? Bill Murray was in the movie? In The Three Ships Collective production, however, there are no low blows, and it […]
Both the best and worst thing about theatre, and indie theatre especially, is its ephemerality. Productions close so fast that you never have the time you need to tell every person you’ve ever met, and some you haven’t, that they have to see the show you just saw. And in the Toronto independent theatre landscape, […]
The Resistance Continues. That’s the sub-title of The Second City’s latest run of their feminist sketch phenom She The People. And there are a lot of things to resist: those who are against vaccinating their children, men telling women what they can and can’t do, or double standards that women have to deal with. Carly […]
Initially staged at SummerWorks in 2015, Erin Shields’ Beautiful Man features Jennifer, Sophie, and Pam (Ashley Bottling, Mayko Nguyen, and Sophía Rodríguez), who perch on stools facing the audience. They chat about their favourite show featuring a woman detective who investigates violent crimes targeting beautiful young men. They gush over her darker side – she’s […]
In the play OUT, first produced at the 2016 Toronto Fringe Festival, writer-performer Greg Campbell takes us on a personal walk in 1977 Montreal, channelling his autobiography through Glen as he slowly comes out, amidst the unfolding gay liberation movements across North America. It’s captivating to see a story rooted in a time when “gay” […]
Two shows that had smaller stage runs when they first debuted are back in Toronto, with more room to breathe. At Factory Theatre, Bears is back, after a far too brief run (just ten shows) at the Theatre Centre last spring. Created out west by Aboriginal Performing Arts and Punctuate! Theatre (whose Matthew MacKenzie both […]
This Crow’s remount of the 2017 Shaw production of Will Eno’s Middletown, is the story of a generic town, equidistant from its neighbouring towns, with a stable population, elevation, not too big, not too small. This is, not surprisingly, a kind of metaphor, and the play is less about a grand narrative than it is an […]