The 2017 Dance: made in / fait au Canada Festival was a four day biennial repertory celebration of Canadian dance, presenting a cross-section of contemporary dance makers from across the country. This year’s event featured three curated main stage series of three works each, an art installation series that included digital and virtual reality projects, […]
Athena Reich’s #ARTBIRTH was so unexpected, such a witty and subversive spectacle. Reich, as her pregnant Lady Gaga alter ego, drops a line early in the show warning us that this experience will transcend everything we think we know about music, theatre, and performance art… and it’s true. #ARTBIRTH is a parody, but it is […]
Party Today (Panic Tomorrow) is an apt name for The Second City Toronto’s silliest and least political mainstage show in a few cycles. There are moments when the bold political humour that made the last revue so impactful shows back up (Brandon Hackett makes a police brutality joke out of nowhere and its lack of […]
Follies is, in one way, exactly what you might expect from a 1971 work by the noted musical dramatist Stephen Sondheim, in that it’s a true spectacle, with lyrics that bounce effortlessly off its superb score, and huge, colourful and bombastic set-pieces that leave the audience in awe. On the other hand, the latest revival […]
Sarah Marchand and Matt Jones have collaborated to write and create a theatre ASMR experience: the show incorporates elements of ASMR (in both performance and social media) while telling the story of a young woman battling insomnia and anxiety. If you haven’t heard of it, ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It’s the soothing […]
I was really hard on the Stratford productions I didn’t like this year but it was actually a pretty strong season and the things that were good were Really good. This is them. Tartuffe Director Chris Abraham’s instinct to present classic texts in a contemporary setting is one of my top five favourite Chris […]
This was not my favourite season at The Shaw Festival. They had fewer bad productions than Stratford but they didn’t have as many great ones either. The best production of their season was a one-act playing sporadically at different venues, the second best a very limited run in the small studio space, then there’s a […]
In a really pretty strong Stratford season, these mostly good productions fell to the middle of the pack because other things were better, not because they were bad at all. These were Stratford’s mixed bag productions of the year- some polarizing (Bakkhai), some just generally medium (Romeo & Juliet) and the best recommendation I can […]