Toronto kicked off its 2024/2025 season with a stellar month of opera performance this October. Beginning with Verdi’s lush and complex Nabucco and topped with a bold new production of Charles Gounod’s Faust, the Canadian Opera Company is currently having their best rep season in years. Led by a sublime Mary Elizabeth Williams who […]
Medea (Canadian Opera Company) Set to a broody and demanding score by Luigi Cherubini with Carlo Zangarini’s Italian libretto translation, the COC’s ambitious new co-pro mines Euripides’ iconic tragedy for every ounce of its delicious melodrama and winningly rejects pressure to impose important modern meaning upon the disturbing tale. A twist ending that sees the […]
Beethoven only wrote one opera, refusing to return to the medium after the self-described torturous process of getting Fidelio to the stage. Upon finally seeing the much-anticipated production at the Canadian Opera Company (their first since 2009), it’s not difficult to see the fault lines where creative conflict surely stepped in. The opera’s premise […]
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 […]
Click Here to read the rest of our reviews from Toronto Fringe 2023. Frankenstein(esque) (A) Many reimaginings of an iconic work coast on the original’s charm while their own contribution droops off the text, just happy to be there. Silent Protagonist Theatre’s Frankenstein(esque) is a worthy homage to Mary Shelley’s classic but also so much […]
The libretto (Hedwig Lachmann) to Richard Strauss’ Salome is loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name. The iconic artists added their own exceptional flair to a barebones bible story where we don’t even have a name for the girl known only as the daughter of King Herod and Herodias. Early historians would […]
The city’s longest running opera company offers a really lovely blend of young professional artist support and community-based involvement. Their latest production, Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (which ran June 2-5 for three performances only at the Harbourfront Centre’s Fleck Dance Theatre) perfectly illustrates that two-pronged approach to opera for everyone. It’s hard to explain […]
After two years of cancellations, a series of tentative theatre-ish offerings, and more than a few false starts, Toronto’s theatre companies are coming back. The journey towards a normal theatrical experience has taken place a little bit then seemingly all at once as my once-bare calendar suddenly doesn’t have a night off for weeks. Of […]