I find opera very hard to connect to most of the time. The outrageous plots, the technicality of the music, the stiffness of the acting, the surtitles- it all works out to a medium that rarely holds my attention the way I want it to. That’s why Peter Grimes is proving such a refreshing change […]
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 […]
Every once in a while, in the middle of writing a review, we’ll be overcome with a feeling of déjà vu. Whether it’s the Sorkin loyalty on our TV branch or My Cinema’s longstanding affection for Soderbergh, sometimes we find ourselves praising a single artist so much that we start to worry about sounding objective. […]
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 […]
This is the second year in a row that My Theatre’s Emerging Artist Award has gone to someone who serves as the face of their theatre company (this year’s Honorary Award did too). The reason for that is fairly simple- the regular My Theatre Awards have a ton of acting categories, one for playwrights and […]
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 […]
In live theatre, you know that anything can happen – props don’t work, actors skip a couple of lines, or segue into ad libs. It is what makes it exciting and fresh. When the live theatre is outdoors, the elements of chance are higher, from planes overhead drowning out lines to picnicking (drunken) audience members […]