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, […]

  Kelly Bedard

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 treats on the Ontario Theatre Tour thus far has been visiting the Blyth Festival. Not only is their outdoor venue one of the most beautiful […]

  Kelly Bedard

For many years, the SummerWorks Festival was one of the two pillars of Toronto summer theatre. In July, the Fringe offers up two weeks of scrappy indie shows, their blind lottery system resulting in a wild range of quality and style. Then, in August:  SummerWorks, a much more heavily curated festival that upped the polish […]

  Kelly Bedard

This year’s Shaw Festival lunchtime one-act, a swift Shavian delight called Village Wooing, is a successful participant in a favourite gimmick of today’s theatre, and a seeming particular favourite of the current festival leadership with both Game of Love and Chance and last season’s Everybody also taking part. Though an on-stage mechanism for selection isn’t […]

  Kelly Bedard

Lately we’ve been hitting the road to feature Ontario theatre companies we’ve never visited before. As we go along, we’ll be updating this page with new content from across the province, reviewing shows and restaurants, reporting on the theatre-going experience outside of the city and the area’s usual arts hubs.   Click the links below […]