Vaches-review

Siranoush and Songs by a Wannabe arrive at Toronto Fringe Festival as part of reimagined Next Stage Series

“It feels lovely to be in this curated window of [the festival],” says Siranoush writer-performer Lara Arabian. "We are excited to have a conversation with the Fringe audience.”

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.

REVIEW: Documenting seven Toronto indie shows, from Factory Theatre to the Tranzac Club and beyond

I’ve started writing brief reviews of Toronto productions Intermission isn’t otherwise covering, and stowing them away until I collect enough to publish in a batch. And now here I am, with seven.

Three actors juggle 17 roles in Lighthouse Festival’s The Hound of the Baskervilles

“[I’ll] be taking off a full tweed suit and putting on a Victorian dress,” says actor Andrew Scanlon. “There will be a lot of coordination that needs to go on.”

REVIEW: Two site-specific Luminato concerts explore the significance of daily ritual

Grounded in a heightened sense of time and place, both Dawn Chorus and Queen of the Night Communion express curiosity about how art can disrupt patterns of living.

REVIEW: For a show about death, Beetlejuice is impressively full of life

It's a thoroughly entertaining musical that even improves on the original film, adding a far more cohesive storyline, clearer character motivations, and an updated sense of humour.

REVIEW: Feu Mr. Feydeau! takes charming liberties with a famous playwright’s life 

Feu Mr. Feydeau! is an effortlessly enjoyable historical fantasy that takes on death, the creative act, and life's bittersweet disappointments.

REVIEW: Samca is a disturbing, unique production that explores folklore and womanhood

The feminist folklore play, written by and starring Natalia Bushnik and Kathleen Welch, is an engrossing and sometimes frightening experience, perfect to kick off the scary season.

REVIEW: Mononk Jules is a powerful exploration of Indigenous Canadian history that asks more questions than it answers

This is a powerful, deeply-felt performance about the treacherous but necessary work of tracing personal and political histories.

REVIEW: Filles du Roi is an entertaining, thoughtful reappraisal of French Canadian history

Sébastien Bertrand takes these women out of the symbolic realm, giving them fully formed identities.

REVIEW: Convictions thoughtfully explores myth in the modern world

Lara Arabian and Théâtre français de Toronto have created a provocative, timely new work that intelligently explores the contradictions of immigration, family, and faith

REVIEW: asses.masses is an endurance performance that takes boredom as its subject

By the sixth or seventh hour, I indeed felt like a worker at the factory of cultural production. I began to ask myself if the demands of the job were too high, if the compensation was fair, and if I felt fulfilled or alienated from working for the proverbial man.