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iPhoto caption: The Lehman Trilogy production still by Trudie Lee.
REVIEW: Canadian theatre has a thing for The Lehman Trilogy. Does it work at Theatre Calgary?
The real drivers of Theatre Calgary’s production are its three performers. And boy, do they ever drive. Each performance pulses with unmatched and unrelenting vivacity, made all the more impressive by the stamina required from the ambitious three-and-a-half-hour runtime.
iPhoto caption: Production stills from Faust and Nabucco courtesy of the Canadian Opera Company.
REVIEW: Excellent singing elevates lacklustre productions in Faust and Nabucco
Both operas in the Canadian Opera Company’s current fall repertoire, Faust and Nabucco, include stellar performances from world-class singers in productions featuring directorial and design choices that abandon historical accuracy and realistic mise-en-scène to varying degrees of success.
iPhoto caption: The Lehman Trilogy production still by Trudie Lee.
REVIEW: Canadian theatre has a thing for The Lehman Trilogy. Does it work at Theatre Calgary?
The real drivers of Theatre Calgary’s production are its three performers. And boy, do they ever drive. Each performance pulses with unmatched and unrelenting vivacity, made all the more impressive by the stamina required from the ambitious three-and-a-half-hour runtime.
iPhoto caption: Production stills from Faust and Nabucco courtesy of the Canadian Opera Company.
REVIEW: Excellent singing elevates lacklustre productions in Faust and Nabucco
Both operas in the Canadian Opera Company’s current fall repertoire, Faust and Nabucco, include stellar performances from world-class singers in productions featuring directorial and design choices that abandon historical accuracy and realistic mise-en-scène to varying degrees of success.
Cake, commuting, and conversation: Here’s what Canadian audiences value when they go to the theatre
This past spring, we invited a group of scholars, artists, and students to gather at the University of Toronto Mississauga to figure out what Canadian audiences want and need from their hosts.
UnCovered returns to Musical Stage Company with U2 and the Rolling Stones
“What you see in the audience is really the tip of a very long collaborative iceberg,” says Wong, artistic associate at Musical Stage Company and arranger, orchestrator, and music supervisor for UnCovered. “It’s a really diverse cast of voices and styles, and they’re all bringing their A-game. It’s starting to get really exciting in the room.”
Reviews
iPhoto caption: The Lehman Trilogy production still by Trudie Lee.
REVIEW: Canadian theatre has a thing for The Lehman Trilogy. Does it work at Theatre Calgary?
The real drivers of Theatre Calgary’s production are its three performers. And boy, do they ever drive. Each performance pulses with unmatched and unrelenting vivacity, made all the more impressive by the stamina required from the ambitious three-and-a-half-hour runtime.
iPhoto caption: Production stills from Faust and Nabucco courtesy of the Canadian Opera Company.
REVIEW: Excellent singing elevates lacklustre productions in Faust and Nabucco
Both operas in the Canadian Opera Company’s current fall repertoire, Faust and Nabucco, include stellar performances from world-class singers in productions featuring directorial and design choices that abandon historical accuracy and realistic mise-en-scène to varying degrees of success.
iPhoto caption: Photo by Ian Jackson
REVIEW: In Ronnie Burkett’s darkly intelligent Wonderful Joe, gentrification hits like a meteor
When Siminovitch-winning puppet virtuoso Ronnie Burkett chose the focus of his latest play, was he thinking of TO Live’s $421-million plan to redevelop its St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts?
iPhoto caption: 13 Plays About ADHD All At The Same Time graphic courtesy of Circlesnake Productions.
REVIEW: 13 Plays About ADHD All At The Same Time is true to its title
While the play’s structure may occasionally leave you feeling as scattered as its protagonists, its heart, humour, and raw honesty will keep your thoughts churning well into the night.
iPhoto caption: Goblin:Macbeth production still by Jae Yang.
REVIEW: Goblin:Macbeth might just leave you gobsmacked
While most of the entertainment comes from the goblins’ antics whenever the Shakespearean text is paused or subverted for comic effect, the secret sauce to this whole endeavour is that it really is an honest-to-goodness staging of that text, designed to showcase the performers’ near-virtuosic mastery of the material.
iPhoto caption: Photo by Dahlia Katz.
REVIEW: The Thanksgiving Play wriggles in performative wokeness
In 2024, is there a way to produce an engaging, culturally sensitive play about the first American Thanksgiving for elementary schoolers? The Thanksgiving Play, penned by Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse and now playing at Mirvish’s CAA Theatre, poses that question in its first five minutes, then throws the query out with the cranberry sauce in its madcap exploration of a devised theatre piece at an unnamed primary school.
Spotlight
iPhoto caption: Norm Foster in an undated headshot.
“I'm really proud that people want to see my work and want to see my new stuff,” says Foster, whose new play "Lakefront" plays at Lighthouse Festival Theatre through the end of the summer. “That makes me want to keep writing. Whenever I think, ‘Oh, maybe I’ve written my last play,’ I go, ‘No, I think I've got a few more in me. Let's keep going.’”
iPhoto caption: Vanessa Sears for Intermission Magazine. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
“If I want to be the most expansive, detailed, versatile artist I can be, the only way to do that is to keep learning, questioning, exploring, and working,” says Sears, currently starring as Juliet in the Stratford Festival’s production of Romeo and Juliet. “If that’s not where the open doors are, then I will go elsewhere.”
iPhoto caption: Philip Akin at home. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
“I don't know why it is being placed on Black people to change minds,” says Akin. “I ain't here to pick your intellectual cotton.”
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Artist Perspectives
Cake, commuting, and conversation: Here’s what Canadian audiences value when they go to the theatre
This past spring, we invited a group of scholars, artists, and students to gather at the University of Toronto Mississauga to figure out what Canadian audiences want and need from their hosts.
George Bernard Shaw, Dungeons & Dragons, and me
I love George Bernard Shaw. This is my 11th season as an actor at his namesake festival. I think so much of what Shaw wrote could have been written yesterday. But some people aren’t interested in hearing what Shaw has to say to them 74 years after his death.
iPhoto caption: Kailin Brown in the Broadway National Tour of Chicago. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.
I’m not a woman, I just play one
“As a performer, my job is to play a character, and if that character is right for me it doesn’t matter what gender they are,” writes non-binary actor Kailin Brown. “What matters is that I can make a difference in someone’s life who can relate to the character, or to me as the actor.”
iPhoto caption: Photo by Robert Motum
Why would anyone do a PhD in theatre?
In an industry where stagnant government funding and tuition freezes have contributed to increasingly rigorous competition for fewer full-time positions, I’ve found myself reflecting: why do a PhD in theatre today?
Will female stories ever have a place in Canadian theatre?
A season of less than 50 per cent female playwrights, directors, and actors means the female-identifying population is not being fully represented. Programming becomes a question of this play or that play, as opposed to this and that, resulting in some narratives receiving short shrift.
The spectacle of suffering: Toronto theatre’s addiction to trauma porn
Trauma is everywhere in Toronto — on the streets, subway, and stage — and maybe that’s why I’m so bored by it.