Edmond (The Storefront Arts Initiative) In David Mamet’s bleak one-act Edmond, nearly every actor plays multiple roles. Director Benjamin Blais has his large, diverse cast nearly omnipresent and in perpetual motion, creating a swirling, oppressive crowd through which Tim Walker’s frantic Edmond has to constantly fight to make his way to each of the 23 […]
The Immigrant (Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company) You know Mark Harelik, or at least you know his face. He has a recurring role on The Big Bang Theory; he was Topanga’s dad on Boy Meets World; he’s in an episode of Breaking Bad! The reason Mark Harelik is here to be a familiar face in […]
Written by Caryl Churchill in the 1970s, Objections to Sex and Violence was Chruchill’s first production on a mainstage. Currently downtown at the Artscape Sandbox, it is a surprisingly relevant play, set against the political background of the 1970’s: the sexual revolution, and the global protest movement. But Churchill’s play invokes the political in a […]
Age of Arousal (Factory Theatre) The best thing I’ve seen at the Factory Theatre in ages, Linda Griffiths’ Age of Arousal is funny and sad and executed with plenty of pathos to balance its slight lecturing vibe. As the lone man in the play, Sam Kalilieh is the exact kind of charming that leaves you […]
Frankenstein Live opened last weekend at the Walmer Centre Theatre in the Annex. The script was written by Warren MacDonald, and is a stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There is no dialogue in the book, and so MacDonald notes in a recent interview that his biggest challenge was to imagine the dialogue realistically while […]
A Mamet play is all about the language. Everything you need to know is right there in the half sentences and blustering speeches, the interruptions, the curses, that strange combination of grandiosity and hyper-realism. In the slice-of-life one-act Lakeboat– with the exception of Stephen Macdonald, whose leading performance as a sensitive recruit is marked far more […]
Oh, Giuseppe Verdi, how I adore your dedication to stories worth telling. You are, of course, a splendid composer whose soaring melodies and lush orchestrations fly beautifully from the mouths of the COC’s chorus and the bows of its spectacular orchestra (here under the capable baton of Marco Guidarini) but the real reason I love […]
They Say He Fell is a fascinating experiment, both aesthetically and narratively. Based on the stories of Toronto-based photographer Nir Baraket (who unfortunately passed away earlier this year), the play is a rumination on memory; how we remember facts versus our embellishments, and does it really matter which is which? The play circles around a […]