With a disarming amount of charm, South African performance artist Steven Cohen brought his infamous Chandelier to the final week of the Canadian Stage Spotlight on South Africa festival. We hear him before we see him, the sound of glass pieces jingling together fills the theatre moments before he enters slowly and deliberating from the […]
“I wanted to write about obsession, about creativity, about risk-taking, about love and loss,” playwright Carolyn Smart writes about Hooked, now playing at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace. Certainly all of these elements and more are present in this intimate montage of the lives of 7 women. This eclectic one-woman show exemplifies not only the […]
Ale House Theatre is Toronto’s indie original practices producer, a purist mandate of which I was very wary before I finally saw their excellent Othello. It turns out that, despite what recent Stratford seasons have taught us, original practices actually can showcase Shakespeare at its best (though I still don’t agree that they come inherently […]
There is one thing that struck me immediately about the new musical Fun Home: the audience, which was unique. The lesbian couple to my left had never been to a Broadway show before (a point that they stressed repeatedly while we chatted before curtain), and the older gentleman to my right was a seasoned theatre […]
Hatched begins with an iconic image, Mamela Nyamza, topless and back to the audience in a long clothespin tutu, strong and statuesque, beautifully silhouetted by the artistry of lighting designer David Hlatshwayo. The dance begins with Nyamza couruing en point across the stage, her back still to the audience and still beautifully silhouetted, her clothes […]
Written by Jane Taylor, directed by William Kentridge, and produced by the Handspring Puppet Theatre (War Horse), Ubu and the Truth Commission is a large scale production created by some of South Africa’s biggest names. Revived for the 2014 Grahamstown National Arts Festival in celebration of South Africa’s 20 years of democracy, Ubu and the […]
Created by Why Not Theatre, The RISER Project is a new initiative that pairs established companies with emerging artists to share resources and make producing indie theatre just a little bit easier. The inaugural RISER season is taking place at The Theatre Centre with two shows currently on stage (closing May 3rd) and another two […]
Fresh Ink Theatre staged an intriguing spin on the Oresteia and Iphigenia plays of Aeschylus and Euripides at the Hale Chapel in First Church Boston. Agamemnon (Robert Cope), the leader of the Greeks in their decade-long war against Troy, paid a terrible price to enable his fleets to arrive on the shores of Ilium; his […]