My mother is a very nice woman. She’s lovely, really, and everyone who has ever met her in the history of her existence on earth likes her because she is very nice and very lovely and generally crafts her life in a way that will produce as much happiness as possible. My older brother is […]
*originally published on October 6, 2011* Ranking: #1 The most fun I’ve had at a Shakespeare play in a very long time was at Des McAnuff’s raucous celebration of anachronism: Twelfth Night, my favourite Stratford Production of 2011. I love anachronism as a concept. The universality of Shakespeare’s plays makes it okay for them to […]
Here’s the fun thing—I go to a lot of theater, but I’ve never been to the Opera. Not once. Which, if I was any other average 20-something, would not be weird at all. But I’m me, so it was sort of weird. So I was lucky enough to get to see the Boston Opera Collaborative’s […]
Walking into The Young Centre‘s Michael Young Theatre from the over-crowded lobby (on nights that feature Seeds alongside Long Day’s Journey Into Night in the Baillie, there’s an extreme claustrophobia leading up to the shows but, much more notably, during the simultaneous and thus wildly unpleasant intermissions), the set of the fantastically popular Montreal import […]
The NYC-set comedy about the struggles of traditional Jewish values in a modern dating world currently playing at the Toronto Centre for the Arts Studio Theatre has the sort of mild likability of a CBS sitcom- it’s funny sometimes, it’s charming most of the time and it’s not going on any best-of lists anytime soon, […]
Two days after the premiere of High Life, Soulpepper took its study of addiction back almost 100 years to Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Studying O’Neill’s very long 5-person (4, really, plus a tiny servant role) opus in University, I struggled withthe fact that it was so often dubbed a “masterpiece”, […]
Last week was the premieres of two new shows from Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company. One’s a Canadian 110 minute black comedy written in 1997, the other a 3 hour American drama from 1956 that’s largely considered the greatest North American play ever written. But they’re both, in some way, about morphine addiction– throughlines! First up […]
The latest indie theatre piece to crash down in Toronto’s Factory Studio Theatre is called The Big Smoke, a title which refers to its London setting, not its current location. The piece is essentially a weird solo acapella opera wherein Amy Nostbakken sings the story of aspiring artist Natalie using only an empty stage, some […]