If you have ever taken public transportation, congratulations, you have shared a common life experience with a handful of complete strangers. For a brief moment, your lives collided in transit. Like a good New Yorker, I generally live in my own headphone-generated musical bubble on the subway, but, unlike most New Yorkers, I do not […]
Okay, everybody, I have something to say and to be honest, I am a little nervous about it. I am a member of the independent theatre community in Toronto and I am very proud to say so. I have been living in the city for almost four years and, in that time, have met some […]
Two very different productions of two of Shakespeare’s most popular plays are currently gracing Toronto stages. One, a clever inside-baseball exploration of Twelfth Night, best suited to the sort of audience who has already seen the melancholy comedy too many times. The other a faithful bare-bones rendering of the bard’s most enduring tragedy, Romeo & […]
It may be widely known that I don’t like original shows. I feel they’re often underrehearsed, poorly cast, and underrealized. That includes a script for which the playwright needs a few more rewrites. However, I was blown away by the Boston Playwright Theatre’s production of “Burning” by Ginger Lazarus. I can’t quite understand why everything […]
The secret to successful entertainment in any form is conceptually simple: know your audience. I suspect that the producers of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall at 59E59 Theatre had an audience in mind when they chose to produce the show. I am also confident that I am not that audience. In a single word, I […]
Sometimes in life we experience a tragic event and try hard to conceal it from the ones we love. But sometimes the ugly truth forces us to divulge what is hidden deep in our hearts. Rich Ryan just happens to be one of those individuals. Rich experienced a terrible moment in his life that many […]
There are a large number of suspicious deaths occurring at the Walter Kerr Theatre, and, strangely enough, all of the victims bear striking resemblances to one another – and to Jefferson Mays, the gifted actor who portrays every doomed D’Ysquith family member in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Gentleman’s Guide is an artistically […]
The Empty Room’s current production of RC Sherriff’s World War I drama Journey’s End is so much better than it seems on first reflection. When broken down for parts, 98% of it is in fine, working order. Some of that 98% I would even call excellent (Joshua Stodart’s steel-nerved scamp of a Mason, for example, not […]