The National Ballet of Canada’s 2024/25 season is off to a strong start with a varied and ambitious mixed bill that showcases the strength and diversity of the company’s up and coming talent while honouring the legacy of their iconic leading man as he enters his final season.   The evening kicks off with Body […]

 

Interior Design (Tarragon Theatre) The first play in this week’s roundup features the most complicated exploration of the myriad ways we terrorize each other as it centers on a quartet of friends who presumably (reportedly, ultimately) do love each other. Rosa Laborde’s script about four old friends fighting (or not) to stay friends is a […]

Conceived, adapted, and directed by Daryl Cloran originally for Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, this joyful and zany adaptation of As You Like It uses the Beatles’ sprawling songbook to sculpt Shakespeare’s “play with music” into a full tilt musical. Currently onstage at the Grand Theatre in London, the imperfect but polished production is a […]

 

Toronto kicked off its 2024/2025 season with a stellar month of opera performance this October.   Beginning with Verdi’s lush and complex Nabucco and topped with a bold new production of Charles Gounod’s Faust, the Canadian Opera Company is currently having their best rep season in years. Led by a sublime Mary Elizabeth Williams who […]

The closing performance of Nick Green’s Dinner with the Duchess on September 28th was a major moment for Stratford’s small but mighty Here For Now Theatre. In front of an audience quietly packed with some of Canadian theatre’s biggest stars, the low-key company closed out their 2024 season with a truly superb performance of a […]

Coming off the exceptional one-two punch of August’s Mary’s Wedding/Murder for Two, I was excited to return to Gananoque’s Thousand Islands Playhouse for a second set of shows as they close out their 2024 season. Unfortunately the combination of Jesus Christ Superstar and Arun Lakra’s Sequence proved less of a slam dunk than what I’ve […]

Despite the Assembly Theatre’s proscenium setup and the show’s relatively conservative (though definitely present, fair warning) use of audience participation, 13 Plays About ADHD All At the Same Time is an immersive experience. The first work in a long time from one of the city’s most interesting creative minds, 13 Plays is writer/director Alec Toller’s […]

I loved Verne Thiessen & Yvette Nolan’s adaptation of the Margaret Laurence novel The Diviners, creatively and energetically directed by Krista Jackson with Geneviève Pelletier, but the rest of the straight plays in the 2024 Stratford season left me somewhere on a sliding scale of cold.   The remaining plays (meaning not Shakespeare, not musicals, […]