Venus in fur. Ven-us in fur. These words are purred by our gorgeous leading lady, Vanda, played by the seductive and mysterious Andrea Syglowski, with growing anticipation. Syglowski expertly casts a spell over Chris Kipiniak’s stuffy Thomas and audience alike during a spell-binding performance of David Ives’ Venus in Fur. David Ives, known for his […]
Increasingly, some of the most solid theatre on the Toronto scene has come from companies you could classify as “Indie 2.0” (technically an Equity term but one I’ve decided to allocate a bit more freely). These are companies that operate along indie lines, with small-ish budgets and casts, but use union artists. The effect is […]
The secret to successful entertainment in any form is conceptually simple: know your audience. I suspect that the producers of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall at 59E59 Theatre had an audience in mind when they chose to produce the show. I am also confident that I am not that audience. In a single word, I […]
I am a sucker for a good murder mystery. Or even a bad one, really. In a fantasy world where I could ignore work and personal obligations for an entire Saturday, I would spend the day playing Cluedo, browsing the bookshelves at the Mysterious Bookshop in Tribeca, and hosting a murder mystery dinner party (preferably […]
After seeing a total of seven productions at this years SummerWorks theatre festival in Toronto, I decided to grade my reactions on an ascending scale. This began with two shows that somehow either went over my head or never really near it at all: Show and Tell Alexander Bell and Entitlement in Part 1, followed […]
Both of CanStage’s current productions are contemporary one-act contemplations of female power as attained through sexuality (to put it as simplistically as I possibly could). In The Flood Thereafter, the mythological sirens are represented in the figure of Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster as a brash and modern young woman paid to unceremoniously remove her clothes once […]
Last week, two excellent productions opened in Toronto that each told the story of a fascinating musical theatre artist through songs they composed themselves. The first was On the Rocks, a limited engagement cabaret-style showcase of Canadian musical theatre great Louise Pitre. Accompanied by the superb Diane Leah at the piano, Pitre took to the […]
With the crazy summer theatre season finally coming to a close, many of Toronto’s smaller companies are taking the lull in big-ticket fare to kick off their seasons with intimate, impactful dramas. The first two plays I saw this week were two-act studies of modern life at polarized ends of the socio-economic scale, both written […]