Ontario

Ruby And The Reindeer At Here For Now Theatre Ruby and the Reindeer by Mark Crawford, Here For Now Theatre’s holiday gift to Stratford, is flat out terrific. Heartfelt, warm, effortlessly charming, and with a sweetly powerful feminist message, it is destined to become a Christmas classic. Ruby and the Reindeer is a memory play…

Rogers v Rogers At Crow’s Theatre After seeing Michael Healey’s brilliant (and brilliantly funny) The Master Plan at Crow’s Theatre not even the dreaded Canadian winter could keep me from coming to Toronto to see his Rogers v Rogers. The fact that Tom Rooney was playing all fifteen characters was icing on the cake. Rogers…

A Huron County Christmas Carol At The Blyth Festival This year’s production of A Huron County Christmas Carol is the third iteration of Blyth’s inspired adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic. I enjoyed its previous outings in 2019  and 2023 and it just seems to get better every time it’s revived. The adaptation by Blyth…

A Niagara Christmas Carol At The Foster Festival It’s become quite the thing for regional theatre companies to create bespoke variations of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” The Foster Festival’s entry in the growing list, A Niagara Christmas Carol moves the action to the Niagara region during the construction of the Welland Canal in 1840,…

Goblin:Oedipus At The Stratford Festival           There once was a king named Oedipus Rex.           You may have heard about his odd complex.           His name appears in Freud’s index           ’Cause he looooved his mother. The late Tom…

Bright Star At CAA Theatre Bright Star, the Steve Martin/Edie Brickell musical, was apparently not a hit on Broadway in 2016, running a mere 109 performances. In the hands of Garner Theatre Productions and their co-producers it is a substantial success at the Mirvish Company’s CAA theatre. Unfortunately, as part of Mirvish’s subscription season, it…

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…