Written and performed by Laurel Brady, Surfacing is a story of a young woman telling her mother about her mental illness. In the programme notes, Brady confesses that the show was inspired by a monologue that she wrote about her own depression and anxiety. These are stories we are often afraid to tell other people, […]
Thurgood, by George Stevens, Jr., is a celebratory overview of the extraordinary life of a civic-minded litigator…
The Magic Hour, created and performed by Jess Dobkin, is nothing less than pure delight from beginning to end. The audience is ushered into the upstairs lobby, where we are invited to hang up our coats and remove our shoes. Dobkin enters, wearing a dress made out of a burlap bag, greeting the audience at […]
Patricia Cano slays Tomson Highway’s latest work, a cabaret-play hybrid that charts a typical afternoon in the life of a Métis post office worker in Northern Ontario. Featuring a full soundtrack’s worth of songs composed and played live onstage by himself on piano and Marcus Ali on saxophone, and sung entirely by Cano, The (Post) […]
This is a one (and a half) man show about the life and music of John Lennon. Part tribute, part investigation of a life, writer John Waters attempts to use Lennon’s music to investigate and highlight the emotional journey of one of the biggest musicians of the 20th century. The production features Daniel Taylor as […]
Nightwood Theatre defines itself as a feminist theatre company whose mandate includes providing an ‘essential home for the creation of extraordinary theatre by women.’ These two pieces, currently on stage at Buddies in Bad Times, certainly hit that mandate. Quiver Written and performed by Anna Chatterton, Quiver is a story about a mother and […]
Dead End (Theatre Lab) This light-hearted one-act from playwright Jonny Sun and director Michael Orlando is the perfect Halloween-themed diversion in Toronto’s current sea of self-serious theatre. Sun traps bantering high school pals Christian Smith and Chris Wilson* in a dead end hallway as they flee the zombie horde that’s taken over their school, inviting […]
A few years ago, Bletchley Park became a minor academic obsession of mine. After discovering the code-breaking history of this British installation, I read everything about Bletchley that I could get my hands on, from books about the history of Bletchley and its hard-working inhabitants to Alan Turing’s biography and his paper on computable numbers. […]