A woman stands in front of us, a smile “made of granite” plastered on her face, and she tells us her mother is “living with,” not suffering from, Alzheimer’s disease and the related dementia. If this were a real-world encounter, if we were not blessed with the anonymity of sitting in an audience, we all […]
The Crackwalker is now on stage at Toronto’s Factory Theatre, directed by its own playwright, Judith Thompson. Originally written in 1979, the story takes place in Kingston, Ontario, in a town that is no particular town but could be any town (well, except Oshawa). The character of the Crackwalker (Waawaate Fobister) initiates the play with […]
Surprisingly perceptive, Greg Wohead’s work is an overall tender analysis of a cynical moment in pop history. This tenderness is crucial, as what Comeback Special could so easily be—and does slip into sporadically—is a easy deconstruction of low-hanging fruit. Elvis Presley’s ‘68 Comeback Special was a TV performance of the fabled singer’s greatest hits, orchestrated […]
The first few months of the new year are the best. The temperature drops below -40°, the ice makes dog walking nearly impossible, and the best holiday is again almost a full year away, but it’s all good because it’s the Best TV Season. For 13 or so weeks in the dead of winter, my […]
The current rep season at Soulpepper is a perfectly balanced mixture of well-produced pieces. There are no marquee hits in the bunch- no Angels in America, no Of Human Bondage– but the group works as a whole in a way I can’t remember happening in the company’s recent history. There’s a one act (Federico […]
For those who wish to escape the present time and return to the Elizabethan era, Scena Mundi Theatre Company’s performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the French Protestant…
It seems counterintuitive to suggest that a musical can be both overly simplistic and overly ambitious, yet Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s new show Bright Star has somehow managed to achieve both distinctions. Laced with lulling bluegrass melodies, Bright Star layers platitudes and time-worn themes to create a narrative, which is not inherently bad (many […]
The songs are conventional, the punchlines predictable, and the plot utterly bonkers, but there is something about Miss Atomic Bomb that ticked with me, making it quite an enjoyable, if not flawed, new musical. The show certainly has its problems and is unlikely to stand the test of time, but its charm and almost innocent […]