The past few weeks in Toronto theatre featured a range of works that at their core all touched on similar themes despite their vast superficial differences. In tense, inflationary times, these four pieces examined how financial pressures can bring out the best and worst in all of us. Most explicit on this topic was […]
Hannah Moscovitch’s Secret Life of a Mother is a raw and compelling portrait of the darker side of motherhood – one rarely acknowledged in polite conversation, forcing the arts to shoulder the burden of challenging these long-standing taboos. Moscovitch herself is the titular mother but the lead in this one-woman (but many-women) show is Maev […]
After having some time to digest 1991, I don’t think it would be right to say I enjoyed it. Instead, I will say I was affected by it, moved by it and am haunted by it. 1991, is Cole Lewis’ brutally honest coming of age story. There are many intense subjects that this show deals […]
A periodic cry, almost a scream, penetrated the performance space as the audience arrived and settled into their seats. It was unsettling, but mostly ignored. Choreographer Daina Ashbee’s Pour– presented by TO Live in association with Native Earth Performing Arts and The Theatre Centre- seemed to begin when a figure (dancer/interpreter Paige Culley) began pacing across the front of the stage, still […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2017 MyEntWorld Critics’ Pick Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. Playwright Steven Elliott Jackson’s Outstanding New Work-nominated play The Seat Next to the King was the big runaway hit of the 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival. The intimate two-hander about two men navigating an illegal romance in […]
MDLSX, produced by Italian theatre company Motus, bravely opened the Progress Festival at Toronto’s Theatre Centre. It certainly lives up to the festival’s intentions. Just like Progress brings together theatre collectives with a contemporary focus from across the world, MDLSX itself has been developed in collaboration with many European collectives and festivals, extending from Paris […]
Adam Lazarus’s play Daughter is about masculinity. Or rather: it is a play about toxic masculinity. Or, even more accurately: it is a play about the ways in which the patriarchy molds men into defective moral agents. This is a very intellectual description for a theatre review, and of a very visceral experience. So let me […]
Two Birds One Stone “Some of this is true and some of it is not” Natasha Greenblatt says to openTwo Birds One Stone, which premiered as part of the Why Not Theatre’s Riser Project, Thursday night. But co-star and creator Rimah Jabr, disagrees. It’s all true, she tells us. What unfolds is an aptly named […]