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- […]
“That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Uncle Walt’s verse gets renewed life on stage in the millennial classic Dead Poets Society – an ode to nonconformity and self-expression in a world that vows to stamp out individualism in favor of conservative practicality. Despite its flaws, the film remains one […]
The first half, and probably two-thirds, of The Sewing Group is excruciatingly oblique. It opens on two women, clad in black mantles, sitting on bare wooden stools in a bare wooden room and sewing. These people are, according to the script, A (Jane Hazelgrove) and B (Sarah Niles). They sew and continue to, but before […]
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 […]
Recounting the short but significant life of Charles Hamilton Sorley, a Scottish poet of World War One, It is Easy to Be Dead is a sombre take on the brutality of war. Told through a collection of letters and poetry, the play follows Sorley from his time at Cambridge to his studies in Germany before […]
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 […]