A lack of professional polish hinders this ambitious but frustrating new work from By the Word Productions currently playing in the Crows Studio Theatre. In the tradition of Schiller’s Mary Stuart or Stetson’s The Meeting, playwright Franca Miraglia imagines a fictional meeting between non-fiction characters. The jumping off point is a passage from Arthur […]
Next to Normal is a polarizing show that beautifully humanizes and trickily simplifies mental illness. Tom Kitt’s rock score demands big vocals and complex harmonies with extremely careful dynamic calibration as the characters lash out and collapse inward. These thematic musical extremeties lead to some really distracting sound balance issues in the intimate Aki Studio […]
The National Ballet of Canada’s summer double bill is a perfect contrast of modern athletic flair and romantic narrative tradition. The much-lauded Emma Bovary is the evening’s main attraction with its elegant design and beautiful corps work. The title character was played on opening night by first soloist Jenna Savella, one of the ballet’s […]
The Author Spotlight Series shines a light on writers creating heartfelt and original work across genres, giving them an opportunity to talk about their books and why they do what they do. Click Here to follow the series as it progresses. To submit an author for consideration, email editors@myentertainmentworld.ca. … “Peter Thomas McKay / Galksi […]
A clear feeling of community joy permeated the packed lobby of Toronto’s historic Elgin Theatre this week as the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company’s latest production opened with great fanfare. The ambitious undertaking is a transplant of National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s hit New York staging using a Yiddish translation of Fiddler on the Roof that […]
Béla Bartók’s intense, atmospheric one-act Bluebeard’s Castle returns to the COC this spring full of tonal dissonance, all-time-great lighting design, and, of course, the horrors. Béla Baláz’s libretto (based on a French folk tale) is dark as pitch, a cautionary tale where the red flags start in the first minute (dude is insecure about the […]
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, to deal with isolation and lack of live theatre, we started gathering some of our favourite people every Tuesday & Saturday night to read scripts over Zoom. We read all 38 Shakespeare plays in six months. Then we kept going. We decided to create mini-seasons featuring highlights from the canons of […]
Anita La Selva has directed some of the best theatre I’ve ever seen- bold, creative, demanding work that left a lasting impact. That fact is the complicating, heartbreaking, contextualizing background to 12 Litres 8800 Steps, her autobiographical solo show currently on stage in the Factory mainspace. The play tells the devastating personal story that, presumably […]