The final piece in Filament Incubator’s 8-plays-in-8-months experiment, Caitie Graham’s Paradise Comics is the perfect strong finish to a rocky but rewarding exercise in ambition and opportunity creation, combining the best elements of everything that led up to it- the quick banter of Rowing, a lighthearted approach to darker issues like ‘Til Death, the brutal […]
The Angry Brigade by James Graham takes place in 1970s London, and as I walk into the theatre, I’m wondering what it might have to say to us in our current political climate. The stage floor is painted with a Union Jack: a colourful and intense symbol, and one which evokes a history of colonialism, […]
“Enter the space with brilliance, seeing every molecule floating…” so starts the beginning of each of three poems, written by Yvonne Ng to her dancers, providing each a score and map with which to develop a solo in their own movement voice. The three solos were then superimposed onto each other, encouraging the dancers into […]
Eat, Buy, Repeat (The Second City) This “Guide to the Holidays” from the Second City Touring Company is charming and fun if a little imbalanced in quality. We begin with a group song about coping in the hellfire that is 2016 but the fact that no one in this cast can sing becomes a problem […]
Bill Coleman and Gordon Monahan’s collaboratively conceived and performed Dollhouse played out like a Rube Goldberg machine, albeit one that wrought destruction on both the man and the set within minutes of the shows start time. The elaborately complex set which lay bare the accoutrements of the highly technical show, as well as Monahan’s interaction […]
“The world we live in today needs a good story”. The packed house at the Toronto opening of Come From Away had been standing for awhile when Claude Elliott, former mayor of the tiny Newfoundland town of Gander, said those brutally true words. We’d been standing since the second the lights went to black at […]
I love Seussical the Musical. I think it’s just about the cutest thing in the world, Ahrens & Flaherty’s songs are catchy beyond belief, and there’s more intellectual and emotional complexity in the storytelling than one might ever expect from such silliness. “A person’s a person no matter how small”, “tell yourself how lucky you […]
Original musicals are hard to develop and expensive to produce so you don’t see that many of them crop up in the Canadian theatre landscape. Chasse-Galerie (both its quality and its trajectory) is a reminder that it can be done and why it’s worth doing. James Smith’s music and lyrics are toe-tapping delights, many of which […]