For all its traumas and sadnesses, the pandemic was, at the very least, an immensely clarifying experience. With our lives irreparably disrupted and access to so many things denied, it very quickly became obvious how I truly felt about the things in my life that had become routine. My character-defining love of television stood firm […]
In Tennessee Williams’ extensive canon, The Glass Menagerie stands out as the original “memory play”: the work is framed as the hazy recollections of the main character, whose reliability as a narrator is an open question. Williams uses this to issue an invitation to actors and directors to fill in and flesh out those memories as […]
If staging the perfect murder is hard enough, staging a good murder mystery has its own challenges. With all the mischievousness of its main characters, Patrick Hamilton’s Rope dodges those responsibilities by flipping the script: the murder is made in front of us and the motive is the mystery. It’s been a while since thrillers […]
After I saw Brigadoon, the Shaw Festival’s magical staging of a reimagined classic musical, I right away sat down to write about the experience. At least for me, the night I saw it, the mood I was in, Brigadoon was a fully contained theatrical moment about which I had plenty to say. Another staff writer […]
This show hit me straight in the heart. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to say that about a Shaw musical and I’m grinning ear to ear to be able to say it now (also because I literally just left the theatre so the post-musical glow has yet to wear off). Loewe’s love […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Sarena Parmar wrote Outstanding New Play nominee The Orchard (After Chekhov) based in part on her experience growing up on an orchard in British Columbia. The Cherry Orchard adaptation had its world premiere at the Shaw Festival […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Outstanding Supporting Performance in a Play nominee Shawn Ahmed was so good in The Orchard (After Chekhov) that I couldn’t wait until the end of the play to tell as many people as possible; I tweeted about him […]
This Crow’s remount of the 2017 Shaw production of Will Eno’s Middletown, is the story of a generic town, equidistant from its neighbouring towns, with a stable population, elevation, not too big, not too small. This is, not surprisingly, a kind of metaphor, and the play is less about a grand narrative than it is an […]
Artistic Director Tim Carroll programmed the 2018 Shaw season with a throughline of war stories, mostly World War I stories. The theme is so pervasive that it seems to divide the season pretty much down the middle, so that’s how I’ve decided to group the plays together- War & Peace. Read about the season’s civilian stories […]
Artistic Director Tim Carroll programmed the 2018 Shaw season with a throughline of war stories, mostly World War I stories. The theme is so pervasive that it seems to divide the season pretty much down the middle, so that’s how I’ve decided to group the plays together for review- War & Peace. Read about life […]
Arguably the greatest challenge faced by a festival with as strict a mandate as The Shaw Festival’s “plays by Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, and plays about the period of Shaw’s lifetime” is the issue of relevance, or perhaps freshness is a more accurate word for the issue since I honestly believe you can find […]
Before we announce the winners…
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards…
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee…
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Sanjay Talwar returned to the Shaw Festival in 2017 to play Joe Clark in one of two premiere productions of Michael Healey’s delightful political one-act 1979. A principled, glamourless, centrist conservative whose administration lasted less than a […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. For the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve consistently called the Shaw Festival my favourite acting company in Canada. Former artistic director Jackie Maxwell spent her years at the helm assembling an unparalleled stable of talent […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Claudio Vena’s original compositions…
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. The charming and candid Marion Day gave a lively, versatile slew of performances in The Shaw Festival’s awesome production of Micheal Healey’s new political comedy 1979, a short, tense, hilarious fictionalization of one key night in Canadian […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Me and My Girl was the big hit of the Shaw Festival last season. A silly fish-out-of-water romp about a happy working class couple tossed into judgemental high society, Ashlie Corcoran’s production was fun, frothy and […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. When I reviewed The Shaw Festival’s stunning production of Middletown last summer, I finished by saying that “I’d love to see this one remounted for a Toronto run”. Well- Good News, Everybody!– Crow’s Theatre just announced […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. The remarkable Michael Gianfrancesco is one of the most prolific theatre designers in the country, nominated for a fifth time for Outstanding Set & Costume Design. Known for his versatility and detail, this year it was his work […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. I used to say that Kelly Wong was one of my favourite musical theatre performers in Canada (I complained in almost every Shaw Festival musical review that he didn’t have a bigger role) but in 2017 […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. One of the most indelible performances of the year came from a Canadian theatre legend who gave new (literal) meaning to the term “she can do it with her eyes closed”. In The Company Theatre’s sublime […]
This was not my favourite season at The Shaw Festival. They had fewer bad productions than Stratford but they didn’t have as many great ones either. The best production of their season was a one-act playing sporadically at different venues, the second best a very limited run in the small studio space, then there’s a […]
The thing to understand about the so-so list for The Shaw Festival this year is that they’re all pretty good productions; they mostly didn’t make the cut to be must-sees on account of the expectations game. All the over-promoted stuff of the year is on this list, the things that promised to be (had the […]
Though little stood too far above the pack this year at the Shaw Festival (“so-so” really carried the season over there), it’s remarkable that there’s only one show I think you ought to skip if you can. 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt This dully written and even more dully directed Canadian history play is a true […]