Bill Coleman and Gordon Monahan’s collaboratively conceived and performed Dollhouse played out like a Rube Goldberg machine, albeit one that wrought destruction on both the man and the set within minutes of the shows start time. The elaborately complex set which lay bare the accoutrements of the highly technical show, as well as Monahan’s interaction […]
“The world we live in today needs a good story”. The packed house at the Toronto opening of Come From Away had been standing for awhile when Claude Elliott, former mayor of the tiny Newfoundland town of Gander, said those brutally true words. We’d been standing since the second the lights went to black at […]
I love Seussical the Musical. I think it’s just about the cutest thing in the world, Ahrens & Flaherty’s songs are catchy beyond belief, and there’s more intellectual and emotional complexity in the storytelling than one might ever expect from such silliness. “A person’s a person no matter how small”, “tell yourself how lucky you […]
Original musicals are hard to develop and expensive to produce so you don’t see that many of them crop up in the Canadian theatre landscape. Chasse-Galerie (both its quality and its trajectory) is a reminder that it can be done and why it’s worth doing. James Smith’s music and lyrics are toe-tapping delights, many of which […]
I’ve seen a lot of theatre this November but nothing’s surprised me quite like Echo Productions’ Dog Sees God, a tiny, under-marketed labour of love with only one week left in The Second City’s John Candy Box Theatre around the corner and two flights up from the rowdy mainspace. The trappings read like student theatre- […]
Secrets of a Black Boy (Playing with Crayons/Theatre Passe Muraille) A constantly evolving mix of storytelling and narrative theatre, playwright Darren Anthony’s moving and evocative Secrets of a Black Boy brings five very different black men together for one last game of dominoes before their community centre closes. The play begins with a theatrical montage […]
What I loved most about Yell Rebel’s Agency is its originality. I’ve never experienced a story of this sort before. A young women, Hannah (Eva Barrie), shows up at a travel agency in a former East Berlin neighbourhood determined to learn what really happened to her father after her family fled to West Berlin. After having […]
Theatre Parallax’s KATA, could be qualified as a modern dance version of a psychological thriller. The piece elicits strong feelings, though they are mostly of apprehension, revulsion, awe, and fear. In regards that the goal of the show was to drive these feelings out of the audience, it was a resounding success. The programme and press […]