Bassett is a duo made up of multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Josh Bassett, and bassist Tak Ozaki. Josh brings along a background in orchestral percussion and jazz guitar along with years spent as a session player in L.A. A native of Kobe, Japan, Tak spent some time in Ireland and toured Europe with another band […]
“Enter the space with brilliance, seeing every molecule floating…” so starts the beginning of each of three poems, written by Yvonne Ng to her dancers, providing each a score and map with which to develop a solo in their own movement voice. The three solos were then superimposed onto each other, encouraging the dancers into […]
Eat, Buy, Repeat (The Second City) This “Guide to the Holidays” from the Second City Touring Company is charming and fun if a little imbalanced in quality. We begin with a group song about coping in the hellfire that is 2016 but the fact that no one in this cast can sing becomes a problem […]
Bill Coleman and Gordon Monahan’s collaboratively conceived and performed Dollhouse played out like a Rube Goldberg machine, albeit one that wrought destruction on both the man and the set within minutes of the shows start time. The elaborately complex set which lay bare the accoutrements of the highly technical show, as well as Monahan’s interaction […]
“The world we live in today needs a good story”. The packed house at the Toronto opening of Come From Away had been standing for awhile when Claude Elliott, former mayor of the tiny Newfoundland town of Gander, said those brutally true words. We’d been standing since the second the lights went to black at […]
I love Seussical the Musical. I think it’s just about the cutest thing in the world, Ahrens & Flaherty’s songs are catchy beyond belief, and there’s more intellectual and emotional complexity in the storytelling than one might ever expect from such silliness. “A person’s a person no matter how small”, “tell yourself how lucky you […]
The Handmaiden is a tautly executed new thriller from Park Chan-wook.* Set in Japanese-occupied Korea, it tells the story of Sook-hee, a young woman who is hired to serve Lady Hideko, a woman who lives with her eccentric uncle in an isolated manor. But all is not what it seems; Sook-hee is secretly working with […]
Original musicals are hard to develop and expensive to produce so you don’t see that many of them crop up in the Canadian theatre landscape. Chasse-Galerie (both its quality and its trajectory) is a reminder that it can be done and why it’s worth doing. James Smith’s music and lyrics are toe-tapping delights, many of which […]