Verdi’s brilliant 3-act opera is given a beautiful if sometimes silly staging at The Canadian Opera Company this fall. Tenor David Lomeli was my favourite of the very capable company of singers, performing the role of the lascivious Duke with aplomb and a cold, delivering a memorable vocal performance throughout, specifically in the painfully famous […]
Sonus Stage Company’s Sondheim revue Side by Side just opened at the Walmer Center Theatre. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to enjoy excerpts from Acting Up Stage’s Both Sides Now, a revue of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell songs. Sonus’ production, a less polished restaging of a pre-existing cabaret has none of the […]
Theatre Smash’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s dystopic one act The Ugly One is a whole lot of funny and whole whack of unsettling all wrapped into a tiny 1 hour package. Director Ashlie Corcoran and designer Camellia Koo pair to stage Maja Zade’s superb translation of the excellent play in a unique and effective […]
Ranking: #2 My first tears of the 2011 Stratford Festival Season came in the Studio Theatre one afternoon as I took in a play about which I knew nothing. John Mighton’s original work The Little Years was the surprise delight of the season, a new play I loved so much that it usurped some of […]
Ranking: #3 A lot of people consider Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy trashy, vulgar, somehow incomplete and most certainly inferior (to the bard’s more “sophisticated” later works like Hamlet). But some of the smartest directors I’ve ever met are convinced there’s a certain darkly comic genius to it. That seems to be the trick with the grotesquely […]
Ranking: #4 After I read late Stratford artistic director Richard Monette’s beautiful memoir This Rough Magic, I couldn’t wait to buy a copy of the play that made him famous. But when I finally got to read great Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay’s groundbreaking 2-man play Hosanna, I was surprised by how much I didn’t like […]
Ranking: #5 Frank Galati’s stage adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath is incredibly demanding. With no fewer than 61 characters (not including “Travellers, Guards, Strikers, Citizens and Hoopermen”), an on-stage river, a rainstorm, ever-changing locales and a moving vehicle of remarkable size, it’s a wonder that any company would consider attempting a production. But if […]
Jesus Christ Superstar is inarguably the biggest hit The Stratford Festival has had in years. But that was fairly predictable. Current Artistic Director Des McAnuff is, at heart, a rock musical man and he’d been dreaming of JCS for quite some time. After the arrival of Josh Young in last year’s Evita and with the […]