Ransacking Troy At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Ransacking Troy At The Stratford Festival In Ransacking Troy, a lengthy retelling of the tales told by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey, feminist playwright Erin Shields imagines the women of the ancient epic, frustrated by the ten-year war, taking matters into their own hands. Ransacking Troy begins with an enthusiastic Penelope (Maev Beaty) […]
Apples In Winter At Here For Now Theatre – A Review
Apples In Winter At Here For Now Theatre Apples in Winter, Jennifer Fawcett’s taut one-hour monologue now at Here For Now Theatre is not for the faint of heart. Miriam (Birgitte Solem) is making a pie for her son, Robert, which would seem to be a fairly jolly thing to be doing, until we learn […]
Radio Town At The Blyth Festival – A Review
Radio Town At The Blyth Festival Radio Town: The Doc Cruickshank Story by Nathan Howe, the last show of the Blyth Festival’s 2025 season, is a perfect example of what Blyth does best and what makes the place a Canadian national treasure. It was the dead of winter 1926 in Wingham, Ontario, just up the […]
Dangerous Liaisons At The Stratford Festival – A Review
Dangerous Liaisons At The Stratford Festival Dangerous Liaisons was a big hit for English playwright Christopher Hampton in 1985 (it won an Olivier). It has been revived regularly ever since, most recently at the Stratford Festival in 2010. Now Dangerous Liaisons once more graces the Festival Theatre stage in a somewhat uneven production under the […]
The Art Of War At The Stratford Festival – A Review
The Art Of War At The Stratford Festival SPOILER ALERT: The Art of War, the lyrical and elegiac new play by Yvette Nolan, has nothing to do with Sun Tzu. The Art of War, now playing at the Stratford Festival’s intimate Studio Theatre, is part art history lesson, part meditation on man’s inhumanity to man, […]
Blues For An Alabama Sky At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Blues For An Alabama Sky At The Shaw Festival With Blues For An Alabama Sky, now at the intimate Jackie Maxwell Studio, the Shaw Festival continues its run of solid revivals of the African-American theatrical canon. This 1995 melodrama by Pearl Cleage may not have the heft of The Amen Corner (2023) or Gem of […]
Murder-On-The-Lake At The Shaw Festival – A Review
Murder-On-The-Lake At The Shaw Festival Murder-on-the-Lake, the improvised mystery now gracing the stage at Shaw’s Royal George Theatre, presents a conundrum. How do you “review” a show that, by design, varies radically from performance to performance? The answer, I think, is that you don’t. Instead, I will attempt to describe this entertainment in such a […]
Mechanically Inclined At The Foster Festival – A Review
Mechanically Inclined At The Foster Festival Mechanically Inclined by Stratford Festival star Steve Ross (Chicago, La Cage Aux Folles) is part of the Foster Festival’s recent effort to foster (get it?) new Canadian plays. In a programme note director Jamie Williams, second in command at the Foster Festival, describes Mechanically Inclined as “a love letter […]
Complete List Of Plays By Norm Foster
Complete List Of Plays By Norm Foster I have become a huge fan of the plays of Norm Foster as regular readers of OntarioStage may have noticed. I am always eager to add to the number of Norm Foster plays that I have seen. Norm Foster is often described as Canada’s Neil Simon. It’s not […]
Pinkerton Comes To Prospect At Lighthouse Festival – A Review
Pinkerton Comes To Prospect At Lighthouse Theatre Pinkerton Comes To Prospect by Jamie Williams belongs to a genre (or perhaps sub-genre) of farce that plays fast and loose with the presumed conventions of the melodramas that flourished at the turn of the last century. These shows tend to feature frontier settings, outlandish plots, ludicrous coincidences, […]