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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.

Wendy and Peter Pan explores the power of love — and grief

“Part of what gets me through the very emotionally tumultuous ending of the story is remembering that Wendy has to live for the family members who are still there,” says Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks, who plays Wendy in the Stratford Festival’s production of Wendy and Peter Pan. “I just think that that's such a beautiful part of this adaptation.”

REVIEW: Ottawa’s undercurrents festival explores a vast sea of emotions and styles

Curated by Ottawa Fringe, the 14th rendition of undercurrents festival has concluded, having brought fresh, fiery theatre productions to audiences in Canada's capital.

REVIEW: Prison Dancer at the NAC is a rehabilitating tale of humanity

Carmen Leilani De Jesus, Romeo Candido, and Nina Lee Aquino have created a contemporary classic with Prison Dancer.

REVIEW: Hairspray in Ottawa is a sugar-sweet song and dance down memory lane

Did someone order some Hairspray? Well, it’s arrived at the National Arts Centre, and it’s more than ready to win your heart over.

REVIEW: The Supine Cobbler is a hilarious, deeply intimate trip to the abortion clinic at GCTC

The play is strange, which is a loving compliment to Connell’s playwriting, but also entirely familiar; the space used feels endless, a testament to how malleable the play is and the strength of Pearlman’s direction.

Truth, Survival & Creation: In Conversation with Sizwe Banzi is Dead ’s Amaka Umeh and Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu

“I was thinking about which histories we actively remember, we choose to remember, and which ones we choose to forget and how important that is.”