What caught my attention for Tarragon Theatre’s performance of OLD STOCK: A Refugee Love Story was Ben Caplan. I read that he did the music for the show, and immediately knew I would give it a try. Caplan, a Halifax native, has been on my musical radar for years, ever since I heard “Stranger”, from […]
Manwatching is a one-man show written by a woman. That’s all I know about the author going in to see the show, because she remains anonymous. And each night a different male comedian sees her script for the first time, as he performs it. This was such a weird premise for a show that I […]
Blind Date (Tarragon Theatre) I’ve already reviewed this wonderful improvised clown show and its creator Rebecca Northan won the 2015 MyTheatre Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for her work alongside a random audience member who became her spontaneous date for the evening. After a succesful same-sex run at Buddies in Bad Times last year, this […]
With the weather warming up and city-dwellers coming out of hibernation, the Toronto theatre community is providing plenty of places for them to go. You could head down Yonge Street to see Once (starring the always likeable Ian Lake) or to The Annex for The LOT’s Hairspray (with the amazing Matt McKay as Seaweed) then […]
On Monday March 30th, the Toronto theatre community gathered together at The Great Hall on Queen West to celebrate all the amazing work that made it to the stage in 2014. They got their picture taken by Nick Pigeau Photography in front of our branded media wall, ate cupcakes and sushi provided by The Cupcake […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. We were already falling in love with Dr. Jerry Gordon on Remedy when a little show called Lungs showed up in the Tarragon Extra Space and solidified Brendan Gall as one of our new favourite actors (on […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Last year’s Best Actor winner (for Soulpepper’s Angels in America), Damien is one of Toronto’s most prolific performers. So much so that he played a key role in not one but two of this year’s nominated Best […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. The ensemble for Tarragon’s production of Sextet, the bittersweet new play by Morris Panych, was full of incredible talent including 3-time nominee Laura Condlln, 2-time nominee Jordan Pettle, last year’s Best Actor winner Damien Atkins and superstars […]
Two major Toronto companies are telling cancer stories right now. Nightwood’s HER2 is an ensemble of women participating in a drug trial to treat a deadly form of breast cancer known as HER2. Collecting the 7 women in a single treatment room over the course of many weeks, playwright Maja Ardal’s story looks at the […]
Sextet (Tarragon) This new theatrical dramedy from Morris Panych is a six-person character piece that plays out almost in real time between three motel rooms occupied by a string sextet on tour during a snow storm. It’s emotionally complex but conceptually simple, a combination that pretty much always reaps great rewards, particularly with a cast […]
The Bakelite Masterpiece (Tarragon Theatre) This new one-act by Kate Cayley tells the thematically rich (and fictionally embellished) story of Han van Meegeren (Georgie Johnson) whose sale of a Vermeer painting to a Nazi in occupied Holland put him on trial for treason at the end of the war. His life-saving argument that it was […]
Enemy of the People: an open forum Florian Borchmeyer’s modern adaptation of the Ibsen play An Enemy of the People (translated by Maria Milisavljevic) attempts to instill the 1882 play with new immediacy and contemporary commentary. We’re destroying the earth! Bureaucracy will kill us all! Everyone is corrupt! Resistance is futile! It all works fairly […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2013 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. In Tarragon’s Hannah Moscovitch double bill last March, Elisa Moolecherry stole our hearts with her complex and quiet turn as Sati, a live-in nanny navigating a new country and the politics of caring for Other People’s Children. All the […]
Admirers of the written word take note. Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs exhibits some of the best writing I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. He takes a seemingly simple question – would you want to bring a child into this chaotic world? – and uses the lives of a young couple as the basis […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2013 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Hannah Moscovitch’s Best New Work-nominated play This Is War takes on subject matter that few plays do. A rare portrait of Canadian troupes in Afghanistan, This is War highlights some grim realities not just for soldiers in general […]
Flesh and Other Fragments of Love is about a married couple, Simone (Maria del Mar) and Pierre (Blair Williams). They bicker and squabble and get in each other’s way while on vacation in Ireland. Enter a ghostly, dead woman who has been found washed up on the beach. Her name is Mary (Nicole Underhay). The […]
Tarragon’s current Extra Space offering is a sure-thing. They’re a Canadian playwright’s theatre and Hannah Moscovitch is a wonderfully talented, totally accessible, widely produced, generally beloved Canadian playwright who just happens to be Tarragon’s current playwright-in-residence, so a double bill of her newest one-acts is not only a smart decision artistically, it’s one perfectly in-brand […]
Hannah Moscovitch is such a solid playwright. Her works is so consistently good it’s beginning to border on predictable. It’s rare that I’m completely enraptured by a Moscovitch piece but I’m always impressed and effected. She chooses hard subjects and captures them vividly with sharp, realistic dialogue and rich characterizations. A Moscovitch play is the […]
I’d heard so many great things about Melody A. Johnson’s one-woman show Miss Caledonia that my expectations were sky-high. There’s something just so incredibly charming about a woman who grows up and ends up spending much of her writing and performing career paying tribute to her country-girl mother and the much-smaller dreams that led to […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2011 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present the My Theatre Nominee Interview Series. The first real Tarragon Theatre production I ever saw was Sarah Ruhl’s subversive and thoughtful period comedy, In the Next Room. The 2011 production was thoughtfully directed and beautifully designed but it was the […]
The newest play from Canada’s beloved playwright Hannah Moscovitch is a stirring and inspiring drama about groundbreaking Polish/Jewish educator Janusz Korczak, set in Warsaw in pre-ghetto 1939 (Act I) and oppressive and war-torn 1942 (Act II). Against Camellia Koo’s innovative set of destructible paper orphanage walls and directed with sublime understanding by Alisa Palmer, Moscovitch’s […]
I’ve been to many productions in the Tarragon theatre but until recently I had never been to a Tarragon Theatre production. Turns out it’s a remarkably capable company with strong production values and solid actors. In the hands of director Richard Rose, Sarah Ruhl’s clever play on modern medicine, domestic power and female sexuality is […]