True Blue (Bad Dog Theatre Company- improv) I lied (“everybody lies” says the poster for this show). The title of this post is Comedy Tonight but the first piece I’m talking about is not a comedy. It’s full of people you’re used to seeing in comedies- Bad Dog regulars and funny people borrowed from VideoCab, […]
John Steinbeck’s novella is such a staple of middle and high school reading lists that it may be easy (in my experience, at least) for it to blend into a series of vaguely recalled Western frontier archetypes typical of The American Novel, ranches and all. Unit 102’s intimately staged production of the author’s self-penned stage […]
Scarberia (Young People’s Theatre) As the lights dimmed on Evan Placey’s coast-jumping, Shakespeare-referencing, mind-bending one-act about two sets of teenage boys tied together by a young woman who goes missing in Scarborough, Ontario and shows up in Scarborough, England, the early-high school audience began muttering that it was “too complicated” and “confusing”. It is really […]
The Archivist as a title for a performance piece suggests an exploration of a reserved, organized and knowledgeable figure. It can also suggest someone with a degree of detachment from the material they are curating; when I think of archivists, I think of slightly senior employees who labour away in the bowels of an institution, […]
I have only 4 rules when it comes to great theatre: – make it coherent – make it honest – make it mean something – limit blackout set changes That’s it. That’s all I ask. The following three companies refuse to adhere to this final point with their current productions and it’s perhaps telling […]
We Three is a collaborative new work by Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman with a clever title inspired by the Henry V speech a character passes off as “a poem she wrote”; a speech about brotherhood forged in shared experience and unshakeable as years pass. If only the bonds between modern women were as simple as those between Shakespeare’s soldiers, […]
I hate plays with fake accents. Unless your name is Oliver Dennis (or you work at the Shaw Festival), your British accent is not as good as you think it is and I’d really rather you just not use it. And a British accent (usually a posh one, sometimes cockney) is the accent most Canadian […]
On March 21st, nearly 300 members of the Toronto theatre community gathered at The Great Hall to celebrate the sixth annual MyTheatre Awards. Last year’s winners, MyTheatre staff writers, and hilarious hosts Kat Letwin & Ryan G. Hinds presented 40 awards in three divisions to more than 35 different companies from the most independent […]