Though indie theatre is still scrambling to exist, Toronto’s mid-tier theatre scene finally feels well and truly alive again. This April was the first time since early 2020 that there were so many openings that critics had to pick and choose and I’m thrilled to report that I haven’t seen a bad thing all season. […]

Touting an 8+ year development process, countless participating artists, and the longest list of donors and grants I’ve ever heard, the Shaw Festival’s long-awaited presentation of Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata premiered yesterday with a double header of its two parts: Karma and Dharma.    Everything about the way Mahabharata is being presented feels like the […]

There is something special about experimentation. The willingness, the joy in playing with technology to deliver a performance experience and artistic experience that takes a concept done to death but aspire to do something different with it. The concept of identity is both broad and an easy target for artistic exploration. This critic has seen […]

 

To help cope with isolation during COVID-19 quarantines, we brought together a group of theatre lovers to perform cold readings of some of our favourite scripts over Zoom. We began with the complete works of Shakespeare then expanded, eventually tackling nearly 100 different texts over the course of two years. Corona Cold Reads, along with […]

At about the fifteen minute mark of seeing this show, a thought crossed my mind that whined, “Oh (insert expletive) me, is this gonna be art with a capital (insert expletive) A?” But what I found myself instead was a state of deep intimacy, emotional connection and an environmental love. From the theatre performance group […]

The libretto (Hedwig Lachmann) to Richard Strauss’ Salome is loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name. The iconic artists added their own exceptional flair to a barebones bible story where we don’t even have a name for the girl known only as the daughter of King Herod and Herodias. Early historians would […]

To help cope with isolation during COVID-19 quarantines, we brought together a group of theatre lovers to perform cold readings of some of our favourite scripts over Zoom. We began with the complete works of Shakespeare then expanded, eventually tackling nearly 100 different texts over the course of two years. Corona Cold Reads, along with […]

It’s the new year so we’re trying something new.   Usually January sees us announcing the nominees for our annual Critics’ Pick Awards but, since the pandemic, we’ve shifted our focus to cover more areas of entertainment and the result is that we no longer review enough theatre in any given city to responsibly choose […]