Drama is where the Stratford Festival tends to swing for the fences, doubling down on heavy hitting actors playing incredible tragedy on big stages through brutal runtimes. A sampling of the dramatic plays in the 2019 Stratford season reveals some of the festival’s greatest strengths even as the drama gets harder and harder to witness. […]
The Merry Wives of Windsor is an obtrusively fat play in many senses. With about 472 disparate characters and plot threads, it’s in desperate need of trimming. It also packs in more fat jokes than a fratty comic on twitter. It’s a gruesome, empty bit of silliness redeemable only by its surprisingly wily female characters […]
With the help of some of the best and brightest Shakespeare fans in the world, we’re diving deep into 38 plays in 35 episodes (Henrys IV & VI only get one episode a piece; sorry, Bill). In every episode of The Shakespeare Series, I’ll be joined by a different guest (or guests) to discuss a different play in the […]
The Canadian Opera Company’s production of Otello is passionate, bleak, dramatic, and nearly everything one could want from an opera. Based on Shakespeare’s tempestuous tragedy, it is far from a comedic opera one might imagine with giggling maids, young lovers, and sets dripping with brocade and jewels. The set is modern and stark, a creative […]
Theatre company Shakespeare BASH’d “is an actor initiative that… produces Shakespeare’s plays in social settings”, “with simple staging, clear and sympathetic language, and an emphasis on the text and actors telling the story”. (This is all cribbed from their program.) They stage their work in pubs and bars, in the round, and have progressively gotten […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Frank Cox-O’Connell is a multi-hyphenate theatre artist who came up through the Soulpepper Academy and has gone on to help create some of the most interesting work in the last decade of Toronto theatre. He’s […]
My favourite theatre fundraiser of the year is always Spur-of-the-Moment Shakespeare Collective’s Shakesbeers Showdown…
What does it mean for a performer to take on a role? Prince Hamlet, Ravi Jain’s radical reframing of the Shakespeare classic remounted here by Canadian Stage and Why Not Theatre, juggles contradictory answers to that question. Jain describes his mission as “challeng[ing] what stories are being told and who gets to tell them”, which […]