With a rock opera-esque musical, you usually know the kind of thing you’re going to get: a focus on song over story, a tendency for melodrama over subtlety and a production design which more resembles a rock concert than a traditional stage; these quirks can succeed if the songs and performances are strong. Lizzie adheres […]
Of Human Bondage is back for its third staging at Soulpepper. Written by Vern Thiessen, and based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, the play traces the life of Philip Carey, an artist turned med student. Philip isn’t just just training to care for others but has himself a physical vulnerability – he has […]
As I waited in traffic on the highway leading to JFK airport, I skimmed the review requests filling my Inbox. Despite having a frenzied month at work and preparing to move overseas, as soon as I got word that the President had signed an executive order banning refugees and immigrants from traveling into the country […]
Joseph Moncure March’s initially controversial poem, The Wild Party, is subject to possibly one of the biggest coincidences in musical theatre history. Back in the 1999/2000 Broadway season, two totally separate musicals emerged, both using the exact same source material for their narrative—even more peculiar given the poem isn’t exactly the most obvious source material […]
Beau Brummell, if you aren’t acquainted with this name, was one of the first “celebrities”…
La Ronde is about sex. It’s about the anticipation, the aftermath and the desire of sexual acts. If you walk in without knowing this, even the most open minded of audience members will wonder why the actors always seem to be taking off their clothes ready to pounce on one another in bed. Written and […]
This is a big thing to say considering the consistently critically beloved status of Toronto’s Coal Mine Theatre since its bombastic debut with The Motherfucker with the Hat back in 2014 but I’m pretty confident that Superior Donuts is the best thing the Indie 2.2 company has ever produced. At least it’s my favourite. Tracy […]
Blue Remembered Hills (Good Old Neon) This dark, unpleasant, uncompromisingly strange piece of physical theatre is born out of a British teleplay in which a group of children play and torture each other, as children do. The children are meant to be played by adults but director Nicole Wilson has fully grown the characters up, […]