The antechamber shows are short, 30 mins pieces, and some of my favourite Next Stage offerings. This year brought two high-energy clown pieces. Leila Live A self-described “real life Persian Princess,” Leila Live (pronounced with a short /i/), offers a 30 min clown/drag cabaret, with singing, puppetry, original song writing, rapping, and of course, lots of laughs. A […]
The Harold Experience This Assembly Improv show invokes the Harold Technique of audience participation to get suggestions from the crowd on which the theme of the show is based. The night I went, actors came down and bantered with the crowd, asking questions and making fast and funny connections between audience members until finally one […]
Jonno Another topical Next Stage piece, Jonno, offers a fictional account of a powerful, well-known radio host sexually assault women in Toronto. Most Canadians will recongnize the play as a thinly veiled fictional reworking of Jian Ghomeshi’s ‘alleged’ of sexual assault and hassment. In the first few moments, actor Jason Deline, playing the title character, starts his […]
The ever-ambitious Seven Siblings Theatre is mounting their biggest project yet- a two week festival of new work from Toronto playwrights working in the company’s chosen realm of Fantastic Realism. We caught up with Artistic Producer Madryn McCabe to get the low-down on the Future Theatre Festival before the action kicks off TONIGHT at The […]
Vikki Velenosi and Kasey Dunn are the co-founders of Brick and Mortar, an artist-run company that owns and operates three independent theatre spaces in Toronto- The Box, The Attic, and, their latest addition, The Commons. All year round, those spaces are filled with indie artists mounting new, creative, challenging work. But for 5 days in […]
As a long-time Midnight Madness viewer at TIFF, I’m always surprised to find a horror film screening in the main festival (under Contemporary World Cinema) but given the tremendous cinematography and complex, if somewhat under-utilized, psychological study underlying Paco Plaza’s supernatural thriller, it makes sense that Verónica was deemed fit for a wider audience. If […]
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 […]