In his director’s note for The Alchemist, Stratford Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino makes a preemptive strike against the argument that he should have set the early seventeenth century play in “our own era”, saying that it adds “a needless layer of complexity to an already challenging text”. Intriguing defensiveness aside, the problem with this statement […]
I have a theory about the (arguably, I guess) three most important theatre companies in Ontario. In any given season, if one of the three companies is under-performing (as one inevitably is), the others raise their game (to compensate? compete? rub it in their face? who knows). They seem to rotate- in a superb Soulpepper […]
An odd, rarely produced adventure at sea that many Shakespeare fans have never seen, Pericles is the only one of the four Shakespeare plays currently at the Stratford Festival to be relegated to one of the smaller theatres. Dreary Hamlet, overly traditional Shrew and uneven Love’s Labours are all playing on that famous festival stage […]
Of the many “just do the play” attempts at Shakespeare this season on the Stratford mainstage, director John Caird comes closest to presenting an incarnation of true interest. Patrick Clark’s overly pretty design traps the actors and distracts the audience and a few casting missteps drag the affair down but, armed with arguably the most […]
Two moderate highpoints of the 2015 Stratford season, Possible Worlds & The Physicists are both works of thematic ambition with refreshing visual flair. Strong casts and well-paced direction help both pieces stand out though neither stirs the heart nearly as much as it attempts to challenge the mind. In John Mighton’s Possible Worlds, a somewhat […]
Thank god for Kate Hennig. In a Stratford season where women are both underrepresented and terribly misused, she’s offered us a heroine ten times as complex as Pericles and two of the most compelling supporting female characters of the season to boot. In a season of dull period pieces and literal interpretation, she’s bent history […]
It’s difficult with a play like this to separate the effectiveness of a production from one’s emotional reaction to the story being told. It’s Anne Frank- dark and devastating, punctuated by heartbreaking moments of lightness, romance and even joy. Anne’s words, structured by playwrights Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (adapted by Wendy Kesselman), are so […]
Gord Rand is new to Stratford; he did one studio production back in 2002 but Oedipus really feels like a brand new introduction. Like with Maev Beaty last season, this is a strange reality that gets people talking about a well-established and highly respected performer as if they are just now being discovered. In the […]
One of the principal conceits of this 18th century farce is that one would obviously treat an innkeeper and a bar maid with far less respect and basic human decency than one would their peers, not to mention their betters. This accepted, appalling behaviour is the source of much of the conflict and most of […]
When I was six years old, I fell madly in love with The Sound of Music. And I mean madly, as in I went absolutely mad. My poor parents and older brother were subjected to an endless stream of six-year-old Julie Andrews imitation on an 8-hour drive to Montreal. 8 hours, nothing but “do-mi-mi-mi-so-so-re-fa-fa-la-ti-ti!” (see, […]
There’s a reason my precocious 14-year-old cousin Reagan rolls her eyes when I try to tell her about her badass Shakespearean namesake. Shakespeare’s boring, people. It’s dated (in the case of Taming of the Shrew, offensively so) and irrelevant and sort of hard to follow. Why would I go see Hamlet when I can see […]
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 love Kate Hennig. In Stratford, at the Shaw, with Mirvish, at Next Stage, in musicals, in dramas, in comedies, in musical dramedies, in pretty much everything- Kate Hennig is a marvel. As the fiercely kind and […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. The last time we interviewed Gord Rand for the Nominee Interview Series, it was 2013 and he’d been nominated for a zero-budget workshop production staged in an abandoned office building. This time around the engrossing actor is […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. We are not exaggerating when we say that Seana McKenna is the iconic leading lady of her generation in North American classical theatre. She’s unmatched in both status and scope of career and no Canadian performer has […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. The gorgeously versatile Maev Beaty is the one and only artist in this year’s My Theatre Awards nominated in two different individual performance categories. Whether she was completely redefining King Lear with her deeply human portrayal of […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. One of the best young actors currently with the Stratford Festival, Antoine Yared has proven in only two years (with scene-stealing performance after scene-stealing performance) that he’s here to stay. As the heartbreakingly simple and sweet Swiss […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. When resident Stratford musical starlet Chilina Kennedy had to drop out of the new Gershwin musical Crazy for You, the leading role of ingenue Polly went to the indefatigably sweet young triple threat Natalie Daradich. With stellar […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Bretta Gerecke literally created Wonderland onstage at the Avon Theatre in Stratford last summer- an oversized, brightly coloured universe where flowers talk, jelly beans rain from the sky, and Tom McCamus wears a little blue dress. We […]
A few of the many many many reasons I didn’t like this production: – Geraint Wyn Davies is one of the least vulnerable actors I’ve ever seen. He reminds me so much of Henry Breedlove (his Slings & Arrows character) when all I want is for Macbeth to be played by Oliver Dennis (not literally; […]
This was an interesting Stratford season because, overall, it felt like one of the weakest in awhile (three dull Shakespeare productions, a dud musical and a handful of uninspiring plays- something went seriously wrong this year). But it also contained my favourite production to come out of the festival since 2011 (Chris Abraham’s joy of […]
The first thing you need to know is that I saw a very different King John than the rest of you will. Arriving at the theatre, I opened my program to discover, with utter heartbreak, that the wonderful Graham Abbey was out for the evening and would be replaced by his understudy in the show-shaping […]
Hay Fever is sort of like watching a Shaw Festival production starring Lucy Peacock (a Stratford staple if ever there was one). But not one of the marvelous Shaw Festival productions that showcases the festival’s eye for young talent, a dull production designed entirely to show off the set budget and give ageing character actors […]
Fiddler on the Roof aside (because I maintain that it is a great musical even if people like to laugh at it), the Stratford Festival is having some content curation problems when it comes to musicals lately. There are hundreds of decent musicals out there but the festival keeps coming back to outdated, kitschy pieces […]
It’d been 5 years since I last saw my favourite Shakespeare play live, and many years since I’d seen it done well. So I was more than excited to see Stratford’s current production, despite my whole-hearted belief that the company’s chosen leading man was at least 20 years too young (and a sprightly man to […]
Occasionally (and I mean very occasionally, sadly) I see a Shakespeare play that makes me deliriously happy. This was one of those plays; the first at Stratford since Des McAnuff’s glorious 2011 Twelfth Night. I got a little bored in Act 5 (Act 5 of Midsummer being one of my least favourite things ever) and […]