Katy Perry’s music is very theatrical and generally rooted in storytelling, two qualities that pretty much guarantee that one day we will see her songbook turned into a Broadway show. That Broadway show will be a commercial blockbuster production and she will be paid millions of dollars for the rights to the hit songs around […]
Broadway’s golden boy will be taking the Roy Thompson Hall stage tomorrow night to sing Stephen Schwartz songs alongside the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Fresh off his pre-Broadway run in the new Finding Neverland musical and a movie star turn as Jamie in the Last Five Years film adaptation, Tony-nominated (and My Theatre Award-winning!) Newsies star/Smash saviour […]
Bedroom Farce Soulpepper isn’t trying to hide the fact that this is their “something nice and easy for the subscribers” show of the year. Artistic director Albert Schultz all but called it exactly that in an interview earlier last month. Is it depressing as hell to see something this trivial pack the house while Accidental […]
M’dea Undone (Tapestry Opera) This world premiere one-act opera from Tapestry is smart and character-driven with a cleverly modern libretto by Marjorie Chan and superb performances from its 7-person cast, including Jacqueline Woodley as a refreshingly savvy and complex Dahlia and the brilliant Lauren Segal in the title role of the scorned wife of aspirational […]
Claudia Dey’s well lauded but suspiciously neat backwoods fairytale is an intriguing but flawed examination of co-dependence on its own but director Daniel Pagett does something directors rarely do with fairly new texts in the current production by new indie company Severely Jazzed Productions- he messes with it and, in doing so, he makes it […]
The use of white makeup as a base for exaggerated features has become a fairly standard practice in productions with a sense of heightened reality. This month in Toronto there are three shows all making use of the convention, albeit in wildly different ways. Trudeau & Levesque Their distinctive makeup is arguably the most […]
Created by Why Not Theatre, The RISER Project is a new initiative that pairs established companies with emerging artists to share resources and make producing indie theatre just a little bit easier. The inaugural RISER season is taking place at The Theatre Centre with two shows already wrapped and another two currently on stage. […]
As I walked out of Ballad of the Burning Star Tuesday night at the Theatre Centre, I ran into a friend walking into another show (Burnish, I believe). When he asked what Ballad was about, I said, with a kind of syncopated energy: “well, it’s a devised theatre piece, but it’s also very movement based, like […]