Directed by Joel Ivany in his mainstage debut with the Canadian Opera Company and designed by Michael Yeargan (set) and Francois St-Aubin (costumes), the COC’s current production of Carmen (onstage at the Four Seasons Centre until May 15) is very clean. The stage, the blocking and everything else is neat and tidy with precisely delineated […]
It starts weak and ends strong. For a play about a physically-disabled protagonist, it pays to have the action centre on how he cares for others rather than himself. Despite a heap of flaws, Chips Hardy’s decade-old play achieves something resembling poignant, even if it takes an hour to get there. Wheelchair-bound veteran Moss (Darren […]
It may seem strange to think of an all-male cast in 2016 where some of the actors put on feminine voices to portray the female characters. Is it too strange? Is it too controversial not to allow women to portray the roles that were written for them? In this production of H.M.S. Pinafore, written by […]
True Blue (Bad Dog Theatre Company- improv) I lied (“everybody lies” says the poster for this show). The title of this post is Comedy Tonight but the first piece I’m talking about is not a comedy. It’s full of people you’re used to seeing in comedies- Bad Dog regulars and funny people borrowed from VideoCab, […]
John Steinbeck’s novella is such a staple of middle and high school reading lists that it may be easy (in my experience, at least) for it to blend into a series of vaguely recalled Western frontier archetypes typical of The American Novel, ranches and all. Unit 102’s intimately staged production of the author’s self-penned stage […]
Scarberia (Young People’s Theatre) As the lights dimmed on Evan Placey’s coast-jumping, Shakespeare-referencing, mind-bending one-act about two sets of teenage boys tied together by a young woman who goes missing in Scarborough, Ontario and shows up in Scarborough, England, the early-high school audience began muttering that it was “too complicated” and “confusing”. It is really […]
Theatre is an art but it is also a medium through which one can express his or her opinions about certain societal realities that are oftentimes not talked about. Tonight I’ll be April does exactly that. The play brings to the stage mental health struggles and physical abuse towards men—two problems left in the dark. […]
The Archivist as a title for a performance piece suggests an exploration of a reserved, organized and knowledgeable figure. It can also suggest someone with a degree of detachment from the material they are curating; when I think of archivists, I think of slightly senior employees who labour away in the bowels of an institution, […]