The busiest non-Fringe theatre month of the year is finally over and we’ve got 30+ more reviews under our belt. As we welcome in the holiday season and start turning our attention to best-of lists and award nominations, here’s the final set of reviews of this year’s massive november crop. Comfort (Red Snow Collective) […]
Putting Voltaire on stage is a difficult task: it is easy to think of the philosopher’s work as too sophisticated for musical adaptation. Bernstein and Wheeler’s version of Candide attempts to make the timeless story more approachable—almost too much so. While it follows the original storyline very well, it sometimes fails to have the same […]
The final piece in Filament Incubator’s 8-plays-in-8-months experiment, Caitie Graham’s Paradise Comics is the perfect strong finish to a rocky but rewarding exercise in ambition and opportunity creation, combining the best elements of everything that led up to it- the quick banter of Rowing, a lighthearted approach to darker issues like ‘Til Death, the brutal […]
The Angry Brigade by James Graham takes place in 1970s London, and as I walk into the theatre, I’m wondering what it might have to say to us in our current political climate. The stage floor is painted with a Union Jack: a colourful and intense symbol, and one which evokes a history of colonialism, […]
“Enter the space with brilliance, seeing every molecule floating…” so starts the beginning of each of three poems, written by Yvonne Ng to her dancers, providing each a score and map with which to develop a solo in their own movement voice. The three solos were then superimposed onto each other, encouraging the dancers into […]
Eat, Buy, Repeat (The Second City) This “Guide to the Holidays” from the Second City Touring Company is charming and fun if a little imbalanced in quality. We begin with a group song about coping in the hellfire that is 2016 but the fact that no one in this cast can sing becomes a problem […]
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 […]