“It’s so simple: I need to know you’re listening…” It’s not just a plea to an assailant: it’s a message to audiences at The Assembly Theatre and society at large. The toughest conversations around sexual assault occur behind closed doors, too late to spare one party. By dramatising these so vividly, playwright Amy Lee Lavoie […]
Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning play turned BBC film, directed here at Soulpepper by Katrina Darychuk, tackles world-historical events – the development and use of the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, and the Second World War – through the intimate lens of the relationship between brilliant scientists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr: friends, colleagues, rivals, and opponents […]
Awkward silences are your fault. They’re their fault too. A group – or an entire pair – with expired imaginations aching to pretend to be someones with something to say. If you could all shut up for a moment you might enjoy the thought that you’re in a Pinter piece where silence is not an […]
What does it mean for a performer to take on a role? Prince Hamlet, Ravi Jain’s radical reframing of the Shakespeare classic remounted here by Canadian Stage and Why Not Theatre, juggles contradictory answers to that question. Jain describes his mission as “challeng[ing] what stories are being told and who gets to tell them”, which […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. It’s hard to stage a production of a timeless classic that keeps what makes it great while still seeming completely original. Outstanding Direction nominee Sarah Thorpe and her team did that with A Christmas Carol, in a […]
Opera is sustainable when you can enjoy it without fully understanding it or taking it seriously. Few works rely on this more than Così fan tutte, which continues to entertain really-rather-refined audiences who would blanch at its antediluvian gender politics in a modern work. The official title translates as “all [women] do it”, and it’s […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2018 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Thomas Gough is a staple of Toronto theatre, and a veteran of many shows at Campbell House, who has worked extensively with Outstanding Direction nominee Sarah Thorpe. In Soup Can Theatre/Three Ships Collective’s site-specific reimagining […]
Oslo’s very existence is remarkable. Staging a full-length work about the most incendiary issue in foreign policy is already a major diplomatic achievement. Turning that into an award-winning Broadway hit? The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded for less. It’s no surprise that playwright JT Rogers embraces that challenge, having already brought a theatrical perspective to […]