A Tamaskan dog prowls on a deserted set adorned with toppled student desks – a “wolf” relishing the eerie atmosphere (and undoubtedly sensing the unease of the audience members who missed the warning sign by the Box Office notifying them of the dog’s non-wolf lineage). Anyone familiar with director Ivo Van Hove’s recent work in […]
I hate plays with fake accents. Unless your name is Oliver Dennis (or you work at the Shaw Festival), your British accent is not as good as you think it is and I’d really rather you just not use it. And a British accent (usually a posh one, sometimes cockney) is the accent most Canadian […]
Part of the mission statement for the Seventeenth Annual Midtown International Theatre Festival is to “offer a safe environment to develop innovative theatre.” Held at the WorkShop Theater’s Main Stage and Jewel Box Theaters, the festival featured over thirty performances. The productions are typically about a half hour, and many even shorter than that, which […]
A research base orbits Pluto. There has been no communication with Earth for three months, far longer than normal. A crew member is hallucinating and time is not as linear as it first appeared to be. Rather than ambitious, Alistair McDowall’s X is a misunderstanding of theatre’s capabilities. Although some Beckett exists—the characters’ defining action […]
It is impossible to love war in the 21st century, so it is a marvel there is empathy in a play so bellicose as Henry V. Performed in the regal Middle Temple Hall, home of Twelfth Night’s inaugural staging, Antic Disposition’s production receives the benefit of intelligent framing and casting. Shakespeare’s history tells us of […]
A woman stands in front of us, a smile “made of granite” plastered on her face, and she tells us her mother is “living with,” not suffering from, Alzheimer’s disease and the related dementia. If this were a real-world encounter, if we were not blessed with the anonymity of sitting in an audience, we all […]
The Crackwalker is now on stage at Toronto’s Factory Theatre, directed by its own playwright, Judith Thompson. Originally written in 1979, the story takes place in Kingston, Ontario, in a town that is no particular town but could be any town (well, except Oshawa). The character of the Crackwalker (Waawaate Fobister) initiates the play with […]
Surprisingly perceptive, Greg Wohead’s work is an overall tender analysis of a cynical moment in pop history. This tenderness is crucial, as what Comeback Special could so easily be—and does slip into sporadically—is a easy deconstruction of low-hanging fruit. Elvis Presley’s ‘68 Comeback Special was a TV performance of the fabled singer’s greatest hits, orchestrated […]