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REVIEW: In Talk Is Free’s The Maids, reverence and rebellion share the same room

For all her impatience with the play, director Jillian Keiley chooses to stay rigorously within its terms, pushing its logic to an extreme and letting its contradictions show.

REVIEW: Shifting Ground Collective’s Amélie is vivid and endearingly earnest

There’s an overwhelming sincerity to this production that, at times, overwrites the offbeat sensibility of the original film — although, I suspect that Anglicization and a shift to musical theatre conventions have something to do with this tonal incongruity as well.

REVIEW: To a Flame turns the deficit lens back on power

I left the theatre overstimulated, my attention stretched and my body still keyed up. For audiences willing to be swept up in that rush of sensation, that overload is part of the reward.

REVIEW: A sparkling young cast buoys Soulpepper’s slick Spring Awakening

If knowledge is the best defence, the adults in Frank Wedekind’s 1906 play Spring Awakening hand their children suits of armour perforated with thousands of holes.

REVIEW: Icarus Theatre balances philosophical musings with richly shaded relationships in Walden at The Theatre Centre

Steeped in emotional and scenic intimacy, Icarus Theatre’s production probes the relationships we cultivate to duty, community, and progress in the face of climate crisis.

REVIEW: Coal Mine’s Pre-Existing Condition is an engaging but contradictory look at the after-effects of domestic violence

In an attempt to create an issue-based work with a central everywoman, the play sends the message that we shouldn’t allow domestic violence to define a person while simultaneously staging that definition.

Why you need to see more Alice Childress plays

Wine in the Wilderness will only receive its Canadian premiere this September, at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre. I’m directing the production, and I’d never heard of the play until I found it in the library. I wish I’d heard of it sooner. Somewhere there is a river of scripts that have been excluded from stages because they weren’t seen as the right colour.

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.