Before we announce the winners of the 2019 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Nominated for her third Critics’ Pick Award, the versatile and engrossing Vivien Endicott-Douglas joins the Nominee Interview Series to discuss her multi-character Outstanding Leading Performance in a Play-nominated turn in Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman‘s stunning prison drama Guarded Girls, […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2019 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. I’m not sure what there is to say about Kat Sandler that I haven’t said a hundred times before. She’s charming and witty and prolific and writes fast-paced, enjoyable plays that sneak up on you with […]
Now the fact I was wearing a heavy sweater probably added to this, but I exited out of The Runner (Human Cargo Productions, written by Christopher Morris) just absolutely sweating. I was exhausted by this play, but I would see it again and again. Directed by Daniel Brooks and the sole role of Jacob played by […]
Ellie Moon’s This Was the World, now playing at The Tarragon Theatre, Extra Space, endeavours to take on the notions of white privilege and white fragility, and does so unapologetically. It is a study of Professor John Taylor (R. H. Thompson). John is not your overtly racist uncle (or aunt/brother/cousin) that makes family dinners awkward. […]
Clowning is an art. A wise woman who has spent most of her adult life performing as a both a theatre and a circus clown once told me that clowning is an impossible art to perfect because a true clown must be able to balance wearing a variety of hats all while acting the fool. […]
Tarragon Theatre has set up a wonderfully witchy opening to its autumn season. Leaves are turning, the air is cooling, and the fall season of theatre has begun. Onstage from September 17-October 27, Yaga is the perfect play to get those autumnal feelings flowing. We’re talking witches, murder, and powerful females, not pumpkin spice. Written […]
Tarragon’s new prison-set one-act from Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman thrives on the shoulders of an incredibly strong quartet of women and a compellingly twisty structure that races ahead and forces the audience to chase it. Corbeil-Coleman’s dialogue is quick, cutting, and refreshingly funny even as her play is pitch black. Director Richard Rose keeps the pace up […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. 2018 was the year of the young woman in Toronto theatre. All over town, emerging female artists finally got the showcases they deserve as too-often-overlooked female stories were finally being told. Tarragon Theatre’s Girls Like That is maybe […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. 2018 was the year of the young woman in Toronto theatre. All over town, emerging female artists finally got the showcases they deserve as too-often-overlooked female stories were finally being told. Tarragon Theatre’s Girls Like That is maybe […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. 2018 was the year of the young woman in Toronto theatre. All over town, emerging female artists finally got the showcases they deserve as too-often-overlooked female stories were finally being told. Tarragon Theatre’s Girls Like That is maybe […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. 2018 was the year of the young woman in Toronto theatre. All over town, emerging female artists finally got the showcases they deserve as too-often-overlooked female stories were finally being told. Tarragon Theatre’s Girls Like That is maybe […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Evan Placey’s Girls Like That was one of the most surprisingly polarizing pieces of theatre mounted in Toronto last year. It prompted reviews that ran the gamut from 0.5-star to total raves (mine was more certainly […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. 2018 was the year of the young woman in Toronto theatre. All over town, emerging female artists finally got the showcases they deserve as too-often-overlooked female stories were finally being told. Tarragon Theatre’s Girls Like That […]
That’s right, I’m talking about Mirvish’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical and Tarragon’s Marshall McLuhan one-act in one article. They’re both terrible- dull, simplistic, varying degrees of ridiculous- and they’re playing in Toronto at the same time, but the two have more in common than just ruining my Wednesday nights. In Jason Sherman’s The […]
Norman Yeung’s Theory is an ambitious meditation on thorny and topical issues, from free speech in academia and society to race and representation in media. Isabelle, a proudly progressive film professor, sets up an anonymous and self-moderated discussion board for her radical new syllabus. Students flood the forum with vicious comments and a campaign of […]
Given the heated discourse on race relations today – on and off stage – I am not sure if my title’s statement is positive or negative. One thing is for sure: we can never escape our history. This is the position which Sybil (Virgilia Griffith) maintains and will fight to the death to honour in […]
Girls Like That (Tarragon Theatre) The more I think about this fantastic ensemble piece about teenage girls dealing with the age of slut-shaming gone viral, the more shocked I am that it was written by a man. Playwright Evan Placey captures the complexities and contradictions and crushing, inescapable pressures of girlhood with such painful authenticity […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Most people know Noah Reid as a screen actor. He scored his first film credit in 1996 and has shown up in pretty much every major Canadian television show in the last two decades (and a […]
Rarely am I so entirely delighted with almost every moment of a production as I was with Hannah Moscovitch’s new play Bunny, on at the Tarragon until April 1st. In the playwright’s note, Moscovitch explains that writing this play was a vehicle for processing her relationship to the Victorian novels she loved so much as […]
Death and marriage are all the rage on Toronto stages at the moment with four current productions totally preoccupied with one or both. The most prominent is Groundling Theatre Company’s Lear, the young company’s best-to-date by miles. The press release for director Graham Abbey‘s well-focused production claimed that the company was presenting “Lear with a […]
I went back and forth on the title of this On Stage in TO roundup, the options being “small to big” and “best to worst” because both descriptions apply to the shows I’m about to discuss in the order in which I’m going to discuss them. Read into the pattern what you will- perhaps small, […]
Inspired by the true story of an opera singer and a French diplomat, Mr. Shi and His Lover is a semi-operatic play currently on Tarragon’s mainstage. The narrative traces a story in which the two fall in love, and proceed to have a twenty year relationship, during which time Mr. Shi believed his lover to […]
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Hart House Theatre) The saga of Hart House musicals is full of high highs and low lows as their success fluctuates wildly depending mostly, it seems, on the popularity of their chosen show. They don’t pay their performers so, in order to lure the right talent, they have to offer […]
Leaving the Tarragon Theatre after Midsummer, I realized that the play had brought me through a full spectrum of emotions. Happiness, sadness, despair, joy, anxiety, envy, pity, and all of this unusually done, for the most part, through comedy. At its heart, Midsummer is a play about desperation, albeit hidden in the package of a […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Soulpepper Academy alum and Howland Company founding member Paolo Santalucia is our reigning Outstanding Actor winner in the medium division for his extraordinary performance in Driftwood Theatre’s new cut of Hamlet in 2015. For the 2016 season, he’s […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Theatre Brouhaha Artistic Director Kat Sandler wrote three different plays that are nominated for MyTheatre Awards this year. Tarragon’s imaginary friend comedy Mustard– Outstanding Production, Actor (Anand Rajaram), Supporting Actress (Sarah Dodd) & Ensemble; thought-provoking alien abduction allegory Bright […]