The 2023 Stratford season was our first full summer back at Canada’s biggest repertory company since 2018. After the bittersweet strangeness of the 2021 outdoor season and missing a bunch of last year’s late openers, it was a pleasure to return to a full Stratford schedule no matter how the productions themselves shaped up. So […]

Prince Edward County is known as one of the most beautiful places in Ontario, a prime spot for well-to-do cottagers and family beach-goers alike. It’s also one of Ontario’s transit failures, a place so completely reliant on car access that, despite years of interest, I’d never stepped foot in the area until this summer. In […]

This week at Kew Gardens Park, Toronto Shakespeare fans said farewell to one of the city’s summer theatre institutions. Technically ending tonight with their tour’s final stop in Burlington, Driftwood Theatre’s “Final Bard’s Bus Tour” features not their usual adaptation of a Shakespeare text but an original 90-minute one-man-show wherein the company’s founder tells his […]

When the Court House Theatre closed in 2017 and the Shaw Festival downgraded to just three formal venues, the easy assumption was that the festival would accordingly shrink. On the contrary, the expansion of programming in the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre has kept the average mainstage number around 10 or 11 every summer while current […]

 

For many years, the SummerWorks Festival was one of the two pillars of Toronto summer theatre. In July, the Fringe offers up two weeks of scrappy indie shows, their blind lottery system resulting in a wild range of quality and style. Then, in August:  SummerWorks, a much more heavily curated festival that upped the polish […]

This year’s Shaw Festival lunchtime one-act, a swift Shavian delight called Village Wooing, is a successful participant in a favourite gimmick of today’s theatre, and a seeming particular favourite of the current festival leadership with both Game of Love and Chance and last season’s Everybody also taking part. Though an on-stage mechanism for selection isn’t […]

 

Click Here to read the rest of our reviews from Toronto Fringe 2023.    Our Little Secret: The 23&Me Musical (A) This solo musical tells the true story of Noam Tomaschoff’s discovery that his parents used a sperm donor and he has 35 secret siblings. It’s an amazing story almost too wild to believe but Tomaschoff’s […]

 

Click Here to read the rest of our reviews from Toronto Fringe 2023.    Hullaboo And The End of Everything (A) Andrew Wade has written a special show with Hullaboo And The End of Everything. It is a beautiful piece that Wade and fellow cast mate, Bonnie Duff do a great job bringing to life. Their […]