Sigh. It’s never a good sign when I sigh. I really wanted to love this production. Hell, I wanted to love it. I am a huge fan of the movie, having found it one day while surfing channels in my young adolescence. However, the play produced by the joint efforts of Happy Medium Theatre and […]

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 […]

I am not a Tennessee Williams fan. I just cannot appreciate his style or his place in the American theatre canon. Perhaps I think he’s a tad too fixated (as part of his times) on gender and sexuality binaries. That said, I knew that I had to catch Wax Wings Productions’ A Streetcar Named Desire. […]

 

Be sure to read about my pick for the Must-See production of SummerWorks ’13 as well as Part 1 of everything else. I was warned that Murderers Confess At Christmastime is incredibly disturbing. And it is. But it’s far more accessible than I was expecting. Generally with boundary-pushing theatre I find that you can be […]

 

CLICK HERE to read my review of the one Must-See production I’ve identified so far this SummerWorks, Wild Dogs on the Moscow Trains. Wild Dogs aside, my first few days at Summerworks ’13 have been a mixed bag. I started off with the crazy surrealist black comedy Holy Mothers that is, as someone I know […]

The image of a totally nude young dancer prancing around the stage at the Betty Oliphant Theatre (fondly referred to as the Betty O) to “You’re So Vain” bleating from a heavy boombox is a sight that one gets used to surprisingly easily. Ben Kamino opened the dance: made in canada festival on Wednesday night with an excerpt from […]

In my opinion, Parade, as a text, is a grand achievement in musical theatre. The fact that it is only Jason Robert Brown’s second (arguably third) best work is therefore astounding but we’re not here to discuss the composer or Alfred Uhry’s book (again). StageWorks Toronto was coming off of Urinetown when they chose Parade and […]

 

I went to see Wild Dogs on the Moscow Trains because I really enjoyed Anthony MacMahon’s script for The Frenzy of Queen Maeve at last year’s festival and was looking forward to seeing My Theatre Award nominee Ewa Wolniczek perform another of his pieces. To my surprise and delight, I found that Wild Dogs is […]