It has been asked, “Will this increasingly digital & virtual age lead to the ultimate death of live performance?” It’s a “video killed the radio star” kind of question, and the insatiable rise of streamable content implicitly makes theater (or concerts, sporting events, or any live performance for that matter) look increasingly antiquated. The survival […]

Rarely am I so entirely delighted with almost every moment of a production as I was with Hannah Moscovitch’s new play Bunny, on at the Tarragon until April 1st. In the playwright’s note, Moscovitch explains that writing this play was a vehicle for processing her relationship to the Victorian novels she loved so much as […]

 

Little League: A Smart Play Little League, written by Jack Spagnola, is a quirky play that mostly takes place in the stands of a little league field.  It is a lighthearted exploration of the lives of four protagonists whose problems do not extend too far beyond childhood pet emergencies or pre-college breakups.  But it is a touching […]

Toronto theatre is navigating tricky times by making great art this winter. It’s a boom of full-throttle theatre-making, reflected most acutely in midsized-to-large companies taking on the sort of challenging, headline-making contemporary work that brings people to the theatre and inspires them to come back. It’s not all great, but it is all ambitious and […]

 

Homewrecker, a new two-hander play by Daniel Pagett, raises questions about who is to blame for the end of a marriage; Is it the husband who cheated, the other woman who knows he is married and sleeps with him anyway, or some combination of the two? Recently divorced Craig (Blue Bigwood-Mallin) lures Veronica (Susannah Mackay), […]

 

The Chekhov Collective’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is a delightfully entertaining escape from the brutal winter weather into a different kind of natural disorder, and while fairly brief (running time is 2 hours), is rarely tedious.   Elizabeth Saunders is charming as Puck, drawing me completely into the story every time she was onstage. Her fawning, […]

 

A Case For Magic Robert Malissa has heard the skeptics and the critics. He knows that there are people who come to his shows determined to confirm him in their minds as a fraud and dismiss “magic” as both frivolous & dishonest. Mr. Malissa knows that many people scoff at the idea of magic as […]

 

What does it take to get someone to show you their most vulnerable parts, to get them to reveal them not just to you, but to themselves? George F. Walker’s new play, Fierce, gives us one kind of answer to that question. It’s also one of the best theatre experiences I’ve had in a while. […]