These are crazy times and we’ve all taken on a bunch of new projects as we socially isolate in order to help stop the spread of Covid-19. We’re donating where we can, we’re cleaning the pantry, we’re organizing the 2300+ title dvd library. We finished work on the Nominee Interview Series even though the live event for our […]
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 […]
There are a few key ways to judge a new artistic director taking over an established company. Some people who aren’t technically wrong but are awfully cynical might look to fundraising ability or at least PR prowess. Artists invariably talk about company leadership and setting the right tone in the rehearsal room, which makes sense. […]
In Tennessee Williams’ extensive canon, The Glass Menagerie stands out as the original “memory play”: the work is framed as the hazy recollections of the main character, whose reliability as a narrator is an open question. Williams uses this to issue an invitation to actors and directors to fill in and flesh out those memories as […]
Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical memory play about a regretful Southern Belle and the miserable adult children who’ve grown up on her repetitive tales of questionable glory days is one of the playwright’s greatest poetic achievements and the piece that made his name when it premiered in 1944. Tom Wingfield’s nostalgic monologues that frame the flashback action […]
There are similarities between this play and the school of naive art: both are flawed, though so conspicuously it must be intentional; yet, unfortunately (and often), this intention is to make a point so obvious the artist’s recourse to bad technique wastes the good. While I cannot speak for the naive artists, In the Bar […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2014 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. We love Kate Hennig. In Stratford, at the Shaw, with Mirvish, at Next Stage, in musicals, in dramas, in comedies, in musical dramedies, in pretty much everything- Kate Hennig is a marvel. As the fiercely kind and […]
I don’t think we talk about Kate Hennig enough (related note: I saw her understudy in both Stratford shows last year and was thus Hennig-starved in 2013), so let’s talk about Kate Hennig a bit, shall we? In the Shaw Festival’s lunchtime show, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, four musical theatre actresses take on […]