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REVIEW: Eldritch’s Night at the Grand Guignol features spurting blood and severed eyes

The show hits the pulpy B-movie bullseye at which the indie company has long taken aim. Over the course of four playlets, a catalogue of deaths unfurls — shlockily! gorily! — in macabre locales.

REVIEW: At The Theatre Centre, Searching for Aimai renders inheritance visible without offering resolution

Playwright-performer Coleen Shirin MacPherson refers to herself as “colonized upon arrival,” born in Canada yet shaped by migrations and erasures that predate her birth. “I don’t have an ancient song or a lullaby that connects us across generations,” she tells her child. That absence — of song, language, and unbroken tradition — propels the Cahoots Theatre production.

REVIEW: Tennessee Williams deep cut Summer and Smoke warms up Crow’s Theatre

I wondered if further following the directive to push upward instead of outward, balancing the corporeal dark with a little more spiritual lightness, might have made this ambitious and heartfelt production spark just a little bit hotter.

REVIEW: Inventive choreography powers delightful Some Like It Hot at Mirvish

The gears of Casey Nicholaw’s production are well-oiled. Despite Art Deco set design and plenty of era-appropriate choreography, the show moves with contemporary fluidity.

REVIEW: Anusree Roy’s Through the Eyes of God is a fast-paced, one-woman thriller

This sequel to Pyaasa revisits the themes of motherhood and sacrifice in present-day India through the experience of Chaya, a lower caste Bengali woman.

REVIEW: Soulpepper’s Witch is thematically alluring but dramatically thin

Jen Silverman’s play aspires to communicate something substantive about the human condition — touching on loneliness, ostracization, misogyny, ageism, yearning, and ego — yet it never quite settles on a cohesive or definitive thesis. Lancaster’s production commits to heady visuals and clever idiosyncrasies to fill the gap, with mixed results.

Preparing to direct Slave Play: A travel guide to Richmond, Virginia

Since reading Slave Play, I’ve asked every romantic partner whether or not they experience a racial dynamic between us in the bedroom. No one has given the same answer. What is it that I am asking them to acknowledge in these scenarios? Who is it that I am asking them to hold? What does it mean to hold someone’s history?

At the 2025 Festival d’Avignon, politics were never far off

I’d performed and directed for festivals in Canada and elsewhere, but it wasn’t at all the same as being on the bum-in-seat side. There I was, in Avignon, rubbing shoulders with the umpteen visitors hungry for a good show. I came away feeling that here, theatre mattered. A lot. In the stony fields of Toronto, that can be easy to forget.

A story with no expiry date: Adapting Fall On Your Knees

At this critical political juncture, as so many forces in the world try to mute and silence women, our Canadian stories merit our advocacy and fervent attention.

Armchairs, tattoos, and an online theatre magazine

When I started at Intermission, my world was limited to the confines of an armchair. Arts journalism was a high it felt dangerously fruitless to chase. The life stretched ahead of me was amorphous and frightening, a chasm filled with hand sanitizer and immigration concerns. It was worth crying over a spilled kombucha and scrubbing at the stain.

Why should you go to the ballet?

My childhood memories of learning to dance were front and centre for me when I attended opening night of The Nutcracker, performed by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

Want to see a magic show about race? Wait, what?

You’d be forgiven for the double-take. It’s a fairly common reaction when I tell folks about my work as a magician.