Critic’s Note: The performance reviewed was the June 12th preview. Experimental writing and the plays that come with it is tough. The art of saying something while sometimes saying nothing. The art of nothing happening but saying a lot in that nothing. Samuel Beckett made a career of it; Seinfeld ran on it. It […]
A lack of professional polish hinders this ambitious but frustrating new work from By the Word Productions currently playing in the Crows Studio Theatre. In the tradition of Schiller’s Mary Stuart or Stetson’s The Meeting, playwright Franca Miraglia imagines a fictional meeting between non-fiction characters. The jumping off point is a passage from Arthur […]
Next to Normal is a polarizing show that beautifully humanizes and trickily simplifies mental illness. Tom Kitt’s rock score demands big vocals and complex harmonies with extremely careful dynamic calibration as the characters lash out and collapse inward. These thematic musical extremeties lead to some really distracting sound balance issues in the intimate Aki Studio […]
A clear feeling of community joy permeated the packed lobby of Toronto’s historic Elgin Theatre this week as the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company’s latest production opened with great fanfare. The ambitious undertaking is a transplant of  National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s hit New York staging using a Yiddish translation of Fiddler on the Roof that […]
Twelve years in the making, Susanna Fournier’s take rimbaud is heartfelt, engaging, thoughtful, entertaining, and continuously funny. The stage juts out into the centre of the room, with the audience kiddie corner along two walls. This means the action happens along two sides of the stage, and the result was more effective than I’d […]
A perfect blend of comedy and horror, cicadas leaves you laughing, guessing, tensing and thinking at every turn. The real estate market is tough and not just now but in 2032 when our story in cicadas takes place. Tough enough that our protagonist couple Janie (Monica Dottor) and Trim (Ryan Hollyman) end up picking […]
Anita La Selva has directed some of the best theatre I’ve ever seen- bold, creative, demanding work that left a lasting impact. That fact is the complicating, heartbreaking, contextualizing background to 12 Litres 8800 Steps, her autobiographical solo show currently on stage in the Factory mainspace. The play tells the devastating personal story that, presumably […]
Writer/director Andrew Kushnir’s latest self-referential verbatim project presents his signature style at its complex, emotional best. Docutheatre has a tendency to fall into reporterly coldness as the research-heavy genre often tells stories involving investigations and the dialogue is spoken exactly as originally uttered by the real life characters rather than translated through a playwright’s […]