Canada’s most famous theatre town is famous for the company that bears its name. To “go to Stratford” means to attend a play at the Stratford Festival, North America’s most prestigious classical institution. But the real lifeblood of a theatrical landscape is not the most established, wildly well-funded companies with their bus stop advertisements and […]

A disclaimer accompanies Michael Healey’s latest political drama The Master Plan: the following is a work of fiction. A work of fiction about events not very long ago (2017-2020) in a land not very far away (a 10 minute drive from Crow’s Theatre where the play has been extended until October 8). A work of […]

The 2023 Stratford season was our first full summer back at Canada’s biggest repertory company since 2018. After the bittersweet strangeness of the 2021 outdoor season and missing a bunch of last year’s late openers, it was a pleasure to return to a full Stratford schedule no matter how the productions themselves shaped up. So […]

  Kelly Bedard

Prince Edward County is known as one of the most beautiful places in Ontario, a prime spot for well-to-do cottagers and family beach-goers alike. It’s also one of Ontario’s transit failures, a place so completely reliant on car access that, despite years of interest, I’d never stepped foot in the area until this summer. In […]

  Kelly Bedard

2023 isn’t the Shaw Festival’s strongest season but the floor is really high out in Niagara-on-the-Lake and even a so-so season that’s getting a bit eclipsed by Stratford’s best work in years is still full of some really great theatre.   CLICK HERE to read about the shows in the Spiegeltent & Outdoors at the […]

  Kelly Bedard

This week at Kew Gardens Park, Toronto Shakespeare fans said farewell to one of the city’s summer theatre institutions. Technically ending tonight with their tour’s final stop in Burlington, Driftwood Theatre’s “Final Bard’s Bus Tour” features not their usual adaptation of a Shakespeare text but an original 90-minute one-man-show wherein the company’s founder tells his […]

  Kelly Bedard

When the Court House Theatre closed in 2017 and the Shaw Festival downgraded to just three formal venues, the easy assumption was that the festival would accordingly shrink. On the contrary, the expansion of programming in the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre has kept the average mainstage number around 10 or 11 every summer while current […]

Click Here to follow along on our Ontario Theatre Tour as we explore the communities and companies outside of the city that we’ve never encountered before.   One of the great discoveries so far on our Ontario Theatre Tour has been the Foster Festival. We caught the company at the Mandeville Theatre at Ridley College, […]