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 […]
Onwards and upwards I go along the string of shows I encountered at this year’s SummerWorks theatre festival in Toronto. I’m now in the middle section of my crescendo of impressions on the seven different shows I witnessed. I certainly didn’t soft-pedal my thoughts about the plays that impressed the least, as featured in Part […]
There were 9 Shakespeare productions happening in and around Toronto this summer (that I know of). I missed only one of them (Mother Nature really didn’t want me to see The Taming of the Shrew, even though it was directed by one of my favourite theatre artists in town!). The best was Shakespeare Bash’d’s no-frills […]
How to Disappear Completely was the second best thing I saw at SummerWorks this year (after Wild Dogs on the Moscow Trains). I loved it. It was everything I wished some of the other shows had been- personal, truthful, and funny without losing its sense of tragedy. Itai Erdal is the rare theatre creator able […]
It comes as a relief to know that there is careful curation behind SummerWorks’ programming. Aside from modest ticket prices, it is even more encouraging to feel as though you’re in good hands. There is always something gambled when attending either Luminato or Fringe: your money with the former and your time with latter. Each […]
Joe Orton’s black comedy Entertaining Mr. Sloane is a strange but compelling piece of theatre. It slyly speaks (in a strong cockney accent) to the fragility of our moral character while presenting us with people who reach very extreme conclusions. There’s an absurdist bent to the dark realities within these flawed human beings but the […]