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iPhoto caption: The cast of 'Playground' at the 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival. Photo by Colleen Yates.
2025 Toronto Fringe Festival wraps with record revenue for artists
“Artists are taking home more than half-a-million dollars, and many have sold out their first shows as professional creators,” wrote Toronto Fringe executive director Rachel Kennedy in a press release. “We are proud of our staff, volunteers, and artists for this accomplishment.”
iPhoto caption: Sébastien Heins, Georgia Findlay, Isaiah Kolundzic, and Kiana Woo in The 39 Steps. Photo by Raph Nogal.
Kiana Woo clowns around in full-circle moment with Guild Festival Theatre
For Woo, coming back to the Guild for the first time in four years — after working at Shaw, Soulpepper, the Citadel Theatre, and Théâtre Français de Toronto — feels like a homecoming.
iPhoto caption: The cast of 'Playground' at the 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival. Photo by Colleen Yates.
2025 Toronto Fringe Festival wraps with record revenue for artists
“Artists are taking home more than half-a-million dollars, and many have sold out their first shows as professional creators,” wrote Toronto Fringe executive director Rachel Kennedy in a press release. “We are proud of our staff, volunteers, and artists for this accomplishment.”
iPhoto caption: Sébastien Heins, Georgia Findlay, Isaiah Kolundzic, and Kiana Woo in The 39 Steps. Photo by Raph Nogal.
Kiana Woo clowns around in full-circle moment with Guild Festival Theatre
For Woo, coming back to the Guild for the first time in four years — after working at Shaw, Soulpepper, the Citadel Theatre, and Théâtre Français de Toronto — feels like a homecoming.
iPhoto caption: "My Narrator" photo courtesy of the Lighthouse Festival.
Lighthouse Festival unearths rarely performed Norm Foster one-acts
“There’s not much time for character development, like there would be in a long play,” says Norm Foster of one-acts. “You have to… make it satisfying, and to have it come around to a plausible ending. It can’t just be a skit… So, it’s actually a little tougher to write.”
iPhoto caption: Marie Farsi for Intermission Magazine. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
“I’ve learned how truth is revealed in translation, and I feel like that’s my job as a director,” says Farsi. “I have to translate the piece from the page to the stage, and all the meanings that can be derived from that process of translation.”
Reviews
iPhoto caption: Adam Francis Proulx, Elm Reyes, Kay-Ann Ward in a Fringe promo photo by Joy Adeola.
REVIEWS: Toronto Fringe Festival 2025
This collection of Toronto Fringe Festival capsule reviews will be updated throughout the festival with writing from 20 different critics.
iPhoto caption: Masae Day, Landon Doak, and Michelle Fisk in 'The Wind Coming Over the Sea.' Photo by Lyon Smith.
REVIEW: A new Emma Donoghue musical takes root at the Blyth Festival
As a resident of southwestern Ontario, what struck me most is how deeply rooted in the region The Wind Coming Over the Sea feels. It's a lively reminder of the cultural inheritances that continue to shape the area today.
iPhoto caption: The cast of 'Major Barbara.' Photo by David Cooper.
REVIEW: Shaw Festival’s metatheatrical Major Barbara is sharp and subversive
Director Peter Hinton-Davis draws on a light smattering of Brechtian techniques — acknowledgements of artifice that enrich and vivify Major Barbara’s clash of morals.
iPhoto caption: The company of 'The Frogs.' Photo by Dahlia Katz.
Staged inches from the audience by director Griffin Hewitt, the show commendably captures the free-wheeling, anarchic spirit of the text. It’s a toad-ally great opportunity to see this rarity in the froggy flesh.
iPhoto caption: Jeff Lillico as Ralph with Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue in 'Forgiveness.' Photo by David Hou.
REVIEW: Stratford Festival’s Forgiveness tells a deeply personal story on a sprawling scale
Presented in an increasingly tense political moment, Forgiveness resonates on a level that is part reflection, part warning.
iPhoto caption: Photo courtesy of Luminato Festival.
REVIEW: Is Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree worth seeing twice at Luminato?
Crouch tests the limits of theatrical representation, improvisation, and authorship. While I’m usually a sucker for exactly those types of experiments, I ultimately found An Oak Tree a bit underwhelming.
Spotlight
iPhoto caption: Marie Farsi for Intermission Magazine. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
“I’ve learned how truth is revealed in translation, and I feel like that’s my job as a director,” says Farsi. “I have to translate the piece from the page to the stage, and all the meanings that can be derived from that process of translation.”
iPhoto caption: Photo by Blaire Russell.
The 40-year career of Alanis King began much the same way that so many careers in theatre do: in front of very small audiences. “The show must go on if you have the same amount of audience members as in the cast,” was King’s motto in the early days. But today, the multihyphenate Odawa artist has no difficulty finding people interested in her work.
iPhoto caption: Steven Gallagher for Intermission. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
A love of theatre runs so deeply through Gallagher’s bones that you’d think it was a path he began to follow as soon as he could walk and talk. But for a boy who came of age on a rustic farm in Quebec and favoured sports venues over stages in high school, an eventual career in theatre was hardly a given.
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Artist Perspectives
iPhoto caption: Set design by Camellia Koo,
Costume design by Judith Bowden,
Lighting design by Leigh Ann Vardy,
and photo by Dahlia Katz. Features Samantha Hill and Amaka Umeh.
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.
iPhoto caption: Production still from The Nutcracker courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada.
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.
iPhoto caption: Photo by Grace Mysak.
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.
Why I’m tired of cripface in Toronto theatre
Cripface is when an able-bodied, or able-passing, person performs a disabled experience that isn’t their own. Local theatre companies large and small, indie and established, have engaged in this practice.
iPhoto caption: Writer and theatre artist Sophie Rivers in Yellowknife, N.W.T.
What can Toronto theatre learn from Yellowknife?
Growing up in Toronto, the Northwest Territories were always a distant idea, a place I knew only from colouring in elementary school maps. But over the summer, I came to see Yellowknife in a different light.