Ontario

Octet at Crow’s Theatre Octet, the a capella musical by Dave Malloy, now at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto under Chris Abraham’s direction, has received ecstatic reviews from all the critics. So why do I find myself neither shaken nor stirred? Octet is set in your typical church basement (nicely evoked by set designer Joshua Quinlan),…

Misery At St Jacobs Country Playhouse I once described the fare offered by Drayton Entertainment as a welcome palate cleanser to the hoity-toity fare served up by august institutions like the Shaw and Stratford Festivals. Misery by William Goldman, adapting Steven King’s novel and movie of the same name, is the perfect case in point.…

Tell Tale Harbour At The Royal Alexandra I think it’s fair to say that many people in Canada hoped that Tell Tale Harbour, the new musical featuring songs by Alan Doyle, co-founder and lead singer of the Newfoundland folk-rock group Great Big Sea would prove to be the next Come From Away. Sorry to be…

Here On The Flight Path At The Lighthouse Festival The Lighthouse Festival in Port Dover has another hit on its hands with the revival of Norm Foster’s 1997 comedy, Here on the Flight Path. John Cummings (Reid Janisse), a 40-something divorcé who writes a newspaper column called “Cummings and Goings,” lives on the top floor…

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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…

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,…

Powers and Gloria At The Blyth Festival Powers and Gloria by Keith Roulston, which premiered at the Blyth Festival in 2005, is receiving a powerful revival under the deft direction of Peter Hinton-Davis. The Powers of the title is Edward Powers (Randy Hughson), the 73-year-old head of a thriving furniture business in a small, unnamed…

Screwball Comedy At The Foster Festival Norm Foster built his reputation as a comic playwright by being a keen observer of the foibles and follies of Canada’s suburban middle class. In his 2017 Screwball Comedy, currently at the Foster Festival in St Catherines, he ventures into a world where he is on somewhat less familiar…

Hidden Treasures at the Lighthouse Festival, Port Dover Hidden Treasures is the umbrella title for two extremely funny one-act plays by Norm Foster being presented by the Lighthouse Festival in Port Dover, Ontario. The plays in question are My Narrator and The Death of Me and they are well worth a trip to the shores…

Gnit At The Shaw Festival Perhaps if you are familiar with Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 verse play Peer Gynt you will like Will Eno’s Gnit (pronounced guh-NIT) at the Shaw Festival more than I did. Perhaps if you are familiar with Ibsens Peer Gynt, you will dislike Gnit more than I did. Gnit is described as…

Wait Until Dark At The Shaw Festival Frederick Knott’s 1966 Broadway hit Wait Until Dark is something of an American classic and it is a truth universally acknowledged that every classic is in desperate need of getting a new adaptation. So it is that the Shaw Festival is presenting Jeffrey Hatcher’s 2013 revision of the…

A Woman’s Love List At The Orillia Opera House With A Woman’s Love List, now receiving its world premiere in the small, 105-seat Studio Theatre at the Orillia Opera House, Norm Foster ventures into the realm of fantasy – or is it magical realism? – and finds it filled with laughter. Carly (Kristen Da Silva)…

Humour Me At Here For Now Theatre Humour Me by Beverley Cooper, the amiable bit of fluff currently at Here For Now Theatre, works yet another variation on the time worn theme of two damaged souls who slowly discover they were meant for each other. For me, at least, it didn’t quite work. Evalyn (Martha…