Stratford’s big flagship production this year is Chicago, promising programming for its darkness and modernity compared to the festival’s usual musical fare. With two leading female characters and a few great supporting ones, the musical also presented a great opportunity for the festival to highlight some overlooked talent and maybe even recruit some new stars. […]
Onstage at Oshawa’s Regent Theatre for four days only, this thrice-postponed iteration of a homegrown cult hit is a shaky attempt at commercial theatre production with community theatre limitations. I admire Mansfield Entertainment’s concept of bringing large-format theatre to a community that could use a serious arts infusion and the professional designation should mean that […]
We’ve been waiting for this one. The young Shakespeare enthusiasts who came up watching Slings & Arrows only to graduate into a decade of shy Shakespeare from the festival we were indoctrinated to adore, this is the production we’ve been waiting for. We wanted new blood, we wanted new ideas, we wanted someone under the […]
Gaslight The 1938 play that inspired the idiom “gaslighting” has dipped briefly into the public domain, allowing the Shaw Festival to commission Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson to adapt the story into this new version. It’s a clever thought, giving audiences the backstory behind such a ubiquitous concept (one that is very much not self-explanatory) […]
The landing page for all of our Shaw & Stratford Festival reviews from the 2022 season. Stay tuned as this page will update throughout the summer.
After a 2 year hiatus from writing reviews due to the pandemic, I was welcomed back by Driftwood Theatre’s Bard’s Bus Tour opening performance of King Henry Five. In keeping with the past few years, it was fitting that the show did not go off without a hitch. Due to weather conditions, the performance was forced […]
Every second of this vibrant new staging of Adler & Ross’ 1955 musical comedy about a team in need of a win is packed with delight. From stage magic that rivals anything in The Cursed Child to the thrill of rooting for a new star, The Shaw Festival’s Damn Yankees is the most fun I’ve […]
Everybody is the dream. If you ever hear someone question the goal of modernizing and diversifying the country’s biggest and most entrenched theatres, tell that person about Everybody. This production is why that forever and always struggle is important. Beyond just issues of fairness and the importance of representation, it’s important because real success means […]
Click Here for a full list of our 2022 Toronto Fringe reviews. At the Table with Keith Brown (A) I hate to be tricked but I love hyper-specific skills that can only be mastered with good old fashioned decades of practice. So magicians often present a bit of a problem for me. What works […]
Click Here for a full list of our 2022 Toronto Fringe reviews. Clip Show (A-) Jon Blair is one of the most creative minds in Canadian comedy. His joyful, thoughtful, outlandish style is so uniquely his own that his solo shows have begun to take on an almost auteurish quality. Building out this latest […]
Click Here for a full list of our 2022 Toronto Fringe reviews. 2 Robs, 1 Cup: What Happens When You’re Done Eating Shit? (A) I was grateful for Fringe’s masking policy when I saw this atrociously named solo show from the ever-inspiring Vikki Velenosi. The true story opens with a voicemail so shocking that […]
Click Here for a full list of our 2022 Toronto Fringe reviews. Unmatched (A) This clever piece presents itself at first like a pretty standard storytelling show wherein a comedian regales us with true tales of their less-than-stellar dating history. Caity Smyck is a compelling performer who connects with the audience instantly so I […]
Click Here for a full list of our 2022 Toronto Fringe reviews. Gay for Pay with Blake & Clay (A-) In Gay for Pay, noted gay actors Daniel Krolik & Jonathan Wilson play less noted gay actors Blake and Clay who are teaching a seminar to straight actors aspiring to play gay roles. It’s […]
More reviews from the Toronto Fringe Festival! Featuring Sketch T-Rex,
The term “jukebox musical” is used to describe two completely different types of productions. It’s a general label thrown onto anything that uses pre-existing songs instead of original music and is thus very often misapplied to biographical musical plays like Jersey Boys or Beautiful where all the music is diegetic. In this context, I completely […]
Click Here for a full list of our 2022 Toronto Fringe reviews. There are, generally speaking, two types of truly great Fringe productions. The first is a perfectly executed version of something designed for a Fringe setting- really impactful solo shows, hyper-timely parody, brilliant sketch, that particular type of indie new work that thrives […]
Click Here for a full list of our 2022 Toronto Fringe reviews. Sleeping, Tucked in the lonely Purple (B+) Conceived and choreographed by Yvonne Ng, this tender three-hander is a lovely inquiry into what we don’t hear when we stop listening. The choreography is simple but evocative, performed beautifully by a trio whose dance […]
The return of the in-person Toronto Fringe Festival is something I’ve been looking forward to pretty much every day for the past two years. Over the course of 8 days, I reviewed 40 shows. Click the titles below for the full reviews. In Alphabetical Order: 2 Robs, 1 Cup: What Happens When You’re […]
Likeable but slight, Love Quirks at AMT Theatre is little more than a tease. Despite spirited performances and several successful numbers, Love Quirks frustrates due to an under-baked plot and inconsistent vision. Love Quirks is the story of four thirty-somethings who live (mostly) together in New York City, navigating heartbreak, sex, and the nuances […]
Nearly three full hours, consisting of very little plot yet somehow lots of plot contrivance and noted mainly for its extended bursts of tiresome moralizing, Too True to be Good is quintessentially Shavian in a way I find hard to love. It’s so typical that there’s almost a strange comfort in its inclusion in this, […]
Robert & Willie Reale’s musical adaptation of Arnold Lobel’s Frog & Toad books is so deliriously pleasant that I nearly got heatstroke sitting in the uncovered section of its outdoor audience at the Shaw Festival and barely noticed. My cheeks hurt from smiling and I cried so much that it’s better measured by time than […]
Is the Harry Potter theatrical sequel worth seeing? Our review of the latest from Mirvish Productions.
Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt’s 2 Pianos 4 Hands is considered one of the great success stories of Canadian theatre. Spinning a tale about parallel adolescences tied together by classical piano training, this elegantly simple two-man production balances a double life as crowd-pleasing goofball act punctuated by well-played concertos and a darkly funny memory play […]
Théâtre français de Toronto’s Singulières (co-presented by Crow’s Theatre) is the sort of show that can be either revelatory or evocatively familiar. If you’re a woman who’s spent a good portion of your life single, the true stories told in Maxime Beauregard-Martin’s thoughtful docu-play will likely ring true in that way that good true theatre […]
The city’s longest running opera company offers a really lovely blend of young professional artist support and community-based involvement. Their latest production, Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (which ran June 2-5 for three performances only at the Harbourfront Centre’s Fleck Dance Theatre) perfectly illustrates that two-pronged approach to opera for everyone. It’s hard to explain […]
Justin Miller’s beautiful drag clown Pearle Harbour lives simultaneously in the past and the future, a wise fool with a sharp wit and a big beautiful heart that’s too often broken. In Distant Early Warning, her new dystopian solo show at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, she’s alone and in love, totally helpless and […]