Shes-Not-Special-review

At Next Stage 2024, two shows complicate the meaning of a night out

Gemini, by Louise Casemore, and Prude, by Lou Campbell, explore the hospitality industry and bar culture from different perspectives.

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?

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.

Speaking in Draft: Byron Laviolette

“Right now, the creation-to-production process for a lot of people is from the Toronto Fringe to — hopefully — some theatre recommender grants, to a workshop production, to maybe an actual production,” says What The Festival co-founder Byron Laviolette. “But the realities of mounting a show at the Fringe don’t translate to a two-week run at the Extraspace at Tarragon. Peoples’ appetites are different. Yet we don’t train or support people to translate their shows into those different contexts."

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.

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.

REVIEW: Aportia Chryptych marks many firsts for Canadian opera

While representation is important, re-telling stories of Black Canadians comes with even greater responsibility.  Our stories are not monoliths, nor should they exist within a digestible social narrative. Imbued with...

REVIEW: The Legend of Daddy Hall feels like coming home

Home is not a place, it’s a feeling, and Come Home — The Legend of Daddy Hall feels like I came home. I was taken on a journey watching this play and came out honoured to be a witness to such an incredible story. I encourage you to do the same.

REVIEW: shaniqua in abstraction at Crow’s Theatre blends razor-sharp humour with biting cultural critique

This play is such a delight to watch, and I would definitely go again. I live for this quality of performance, and I’m looking forward to how this play will continue to inspire Black Canadian theatre to come.

REVIEW: Three Sisters weaves together joy, fear, and the Biafran Civil War

In this conversational review of Three Sisters, contributors Kemi King and Aisha Lesley Bentham reflect on a masterful production helmed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu.

REVIEW: In 3 Fingers Back, Donna-Michelle St. Bernard explores the extremes of war

3 Fingers Back ain't no regular play about war. We don't see or hear the destruction of the land or the cry of the people. Instead, Donna-Michelle (DM) St. Bernard's double bill of plays is more intimate, an inward crawl to what she calls the repetitive stress patterns that constitute the world.

REVIEW: speaking of sneaking and The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time reflect each other in palindromic layers

Think of both of these plays not side-by-side but instead facing each other and reflecting to us, the audience.