Ontario

King Lear At The Stratford Festival Where’s Geoffrey Tennant when you need him? I really, really wanted to like the Stratford Festival’s King Lear by William Shakespeare currently playing at the Festival Theatre and I strove mightily to do so. But try as I might I couldn’t get past Kimberly Rampersad’s inept direction and the […]

Casey And Diana At The Stratford Festival A small miracle is unfolding at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre where the world premiere of Casey and Diana by Nick Green is receiving a splendid – and far too brief – production under the assured direction of Andrew Kushnir. Casey and Diana weaves a tale of courage, […]

Rent At The Stratford Festival The Stratford Festival is trying to attract a younger audience and they seem to be succeeding, at least for their full-throttle production of the musical Rent. The packed houses at the Festival Theatre are reminiscent of the “youthquake” Froghammer produced for New Burbage in season two of Slings and Arrows.* […]

Spamalot At The Stratford Festival Eric Idle’s Spamalot, now holding forth at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre, is surely up for some sort of ecological award. After all, everything in it is recycled. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Whether you’ll enjoy this Spamalot will depend to a great extent on your level of […]

Prince Caspian at the Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival continues its exploration of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia novels with Prince Caspian, now enjoying its world premiere at the Royal George Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It’s another substantial entry in Shaw’s list of plays for young audiences. (The earlier outings in the series were The Magician’s Nephew […]

Gypsy at the Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival has seemingly always played second fiddle to the Stratford Festival when it comes to musicals. No longer. Their current production of Gypsy, the legendary 1959 Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne musical with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is an unalloyed triumph. Much of the credit for that goes to […]

On The Razzle At The Shaw Festival If you are one of those people who subscribe to the mistaken notion that Tom Stoppard plays are dense, philosophically abstruse, and difficult to follow, you can check your apprehensions at the entrance to the Royal George Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake and simply enjoy the Feydeau-esque farce that is […]

The Prom At Drayton The slight but sprightly musical comedy The Prom, a modest succès d’estime on Broadway in 2018, rests on an odd premise. Dee Dee Allen (Blythe Wilson) and Barry Glickman (Andrew Scanlon), two stars with solid Broadway cred (two Tonys and a Drama Desk Award) are headlining a musical based on Eleanor […]

Mahabharata At The Shaw Festival Mahabharata, a joint production of the Shaw Festival and Toronto’s Why Not Theatre, has major event written all over it. A sumptuous physical production, spell-binding original music, a splendid operatic interlude, a feverish dance number by an actor representing Shiva, the god of destruction, a five-and-a-half-hour running time (divided into […]

The Gig at Theatre Aquarius, Hamilton Playwright Mark Crawford has always mixed social commentary with his deceptively light comedies. Bed and Breakfast explored changing attitudes toward the love that dare not speak its name in the strange, straight world outside Toronto; The New Canadian Curling Club dealt with anti-immigrant prejudice. His latest play, The Gig, […]

Peter’s Final Flight at the Elgin Theatre Ross Petty is a Canadian institution, and for devotees of the theatrical form known, somewhat inaccurately, as pantomime, his production of Peter’s Final Flight at Toronto’s magnificent Elgin Theatre is not to be missed. (Canadian readers can take a break here, as the next several paragraphs are for […]

Elf, The Musical at the Grand Theatre I kinda liked Elf, the 2003 film starring Will Ferrell, but I absolutely loved Elf, the Musical, now receiving a perfectly delightful production at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, under the masterful direction of artistic director Dennis Garnhum. Elf, for those who don’t know, tells the tale […]

White Christmas at the Shaw Festival Did someone walk into a staff meeting at the Shaw Festival and say, “Hey, here’s an idea: What say we sink all our money into tap dancing lessons?” If so, the investment has paid off handsomely. Kate Hennig’s tap-alicious production of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas is a knockout and […]

Grand Ghosts at The Grand Theatre Grand Ghosts, now premiering at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, was a grand notion. Too bad it didn’t work out. The idea behind Grand Ghosts, as I understand it, was to celebrate the reopening of the renovated theatre with a fun frolic of a show about the ghosts […]

Driving Miss Daisy at St Jacobs Country Playhouse I wonder if Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, a minor classic of late twentieth century American theatre, is weathering the test of time, or like its title character becoming progressively weaker. The play is receiving a respectful, low key revival at Drayton Entertainment’s comfy St Jacobs Country […]

The Shark Is Broken At The Royal Alexandra The Shark Is Broken, Ian Shaw’s heartfelt homage to the memory of a father he hardly knew, is receiving a sterling production at Mirvish’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. Shaw and co-writer Joseph Nixon imagine the frictions and frustrations experienced by actors Robert Shaw (Ian Shaw), Roy […]

Singin’ In The Rain at The Princess of Wales No, the Mirvish production of Singin’ in the Rain, currently packing them in at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre does not come close to matching the razzle dazzle of the 1952 MGM screen classic starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. But I don’t think […]

Hamlet-911 at The Stratford Festival If you’re not feeling sufficiently woke, hie thee to Hamlet-911, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s cheerfully anarchic mishmash of a play now receiving it’s much-delayed world premiere at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre. Hamlet-911 is a satiric comedy about white male privilege in the theatre, specifically the Stratford Festival, and the exclusion of […]

Uncle Vanya At Crow’s Theatre The astonishment of Artistic Director Chris Abraham’s electrifying production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre begins with the set and lighting. Co-designers of set and props Julie Fox and Josh Quinlan have transformed the Crow’s capacious Guloien Theatre into one of the most impressive sets I’ve seen […]

1939 at The Stratford Festival In a canny bit of programming at the Studio Theatre, the Stratford Festival has paired its production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well with 1939, a masterful and moving play about Canada’s residential schools, by Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan. The residential school system was created to turn the […]