Ontario

12 Dinners At Here For Now Theatre Longtime Stratford Festival star Steve Ross, now wowing audiences as Albin in La Cage Aux Folles, has reunited with director Jan Alexandra Smith to bring us 12 Dinners at Here For Now Theatre’s intimate tent at the back of the Stratford Perth Museum. When I saw his beautifully…

Halfway There At Drayton Entertainment Drayton Entertainment is doing southwestern Ontario a favour this summer by mounting two of Norm Foster’s best plays, Doris and Ivy in the Home at St Jacobs and now Halfway There at their eponymous playhouse in tiny Drayton, Ontario. Halfway There is Foster at his best. If you are an…

The Golden Anniversaries At The Blyth Festival Following up on Saving Graceland, the Blyth Festival has another hit on its hands with Mark Crawford’s dark – very dark – comedy, The Golden Anniversaries. Crawford seems to go from strength to strength. The Golden Anniversaries may be his most accomplished work yet, blending as it does…

Those Movies At The Foster Festival Those Movies, the latest Norm Foster play, is receiving its world premiere at the Foster Festival’s spiffy new venue at Ridley College in St. Catherines. It is Foster in a distinctly minor key. Foster has hung this short on laughs comedy on the slender conceit that we are all…

The Last Timbit At The Elgin Theatre Toronto Happy Birthday Tim Hortons! Tim Hortons, Canada’s phenomenally successful home-grown donut and coffee chain, is 60 years old. What will their future look like? Well, Hortons’ senior management must have seen Something Rotten because they decided that the future is MYOO-sicals! Specifically a musical called The Last…

Twelfth Night At The Stratford Festival Seana McKenna, one of the Stratford Festival’s great leading ladies, is directing her first play by William Shakespeare on the Festival’s formidable main stage. Her stripped down production of Twelfth Night dispenses with the visual distractions that directors frequently slather on so she can concentrate on the text. The…

Paul And Linda Plan A Threesome At Here For Now Theatre Once again, Here For Now Theatre is performing in an outdoor tent at the rear of the Stratford-Perth Museum, and once again it is opening its season (its fifth) with an uproarious comedy. This year it’s the world premiere of the incredibly sexy Paul…

The House That Will Not Stand At The Shaw Festival The House That Will Not Stand, an ambitious work by Marcus Gardley, now receiving a sturdy production at the Shaw Festival’s Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, opens a fascinating window on a little-known period of American history. In the early decades of the nineteenth century New…

Saving Graceland At The Blyth Festival Artistic director Gil Garratt’s new play, Saving Graceland, is a quiet triumph for the Blyth Festival, a perfect example what Blyth does best – tell stories about real people that have not just relevance but resonance with its audience. On the surface, Saving Graceland is a downbeat tale of…

The Secret Garden At The Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival’s production of The Secret Garden is often lovely to look at. It boasts some arresting stage pictures, beautiful fantasy costumes (Judith Bowden), and inventive stagecraft. It has a clever set (Beyata Hackborn), effective lighting (Kevin Lamotte), and a solid cast. Yet, for me at least,…

One Man, Two Guvnors At The Shaw Festival In 2012, One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean’s anarchic adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 1746 Servant of Two Masters, a British import, exploded on Broadway, took New York by storm, and made an international star of James Corden. Now director Chris Abraham has done the seemingly impossible –…

The Orphan Of Chao At The Shaw Festival This season the Shaw Festival’s morning one-act offering at the Royal George Theatre is Michael Man’s adaptation of Ji Junxiang’s The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Chao. Written in the thirteenth century but based on a much earlier story, The Orphan of Chao tells the epic…

Doris And Ivy In The Home At Drayton Entertainment Doris and Ivy in the Home by Norm Foster is destined to be one of Drayton Entertainment’s biggest hits this season if the reaction of the packed house at the St. Jacobs Country Playhouse is anything to go by. If you saw Foster’s 2015 piece, Jonas…

Wendy And Peter Pan At The Stratford Festival “Female-forward” is one of the sillier neologisms of our new theatrical dispensation, but it is an apt descriptor for Wendy and Peter Pan, now being presented at Stratford’s Avon Theatre as part of the ongoing series of Schulich Children’s Plays. As the title suggests, English playwright (the…

The Farm Show: Then & Now At The Blyth Festival The Blyth Festival is celebrating its 50th anniversary season by going back to its origins with The Farm Show: Then & Now, a lively bit of meta theatre directed by artistic director Gil Garratt, with additional dialog by members of the cast. The show is…

La Cage Aux Folles At The Stratford Festival I was such a devotee of the 1978 French film, La Cage Aux Folles, that I assiduously avoided all of its various American stage and film adaptations. Until now. I’m glad I waited to break this particular fast with the glorious production of La Cage starring the…

Cymbeline At The Stratford Festival William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which is receiving a disappointing production at the Tom Patterson Theatre, is the most problematical of the Bard’s so-called “problem plays.” Critics from Dr. Johnson to Harold Bloom have wrestled with explicating the play with middling success and I am not foolish enough to try. Cymbeline is…

Beehive At Drayton Entertainment Beehive: The 60s Musical is an innocuous bit of fluff cobbled together by Larry Gallagher from the discographies of 1960s-era girl groups and female soloists. It is getting a suitably bouncy production from Drayton Entertainment courtesy of director/choreographer David Connolly. There’s no real “book” to this musical. It’s simply a succession…

Romeo And Juliet At The Stratford Festival There are a number of refreshing aspects to Sam White’s production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, now playing to shamefully small houses on the Stratford Festival’s main stage. For starters, she has stripped the legendary “Tanya stage” almost to its essence, providing an opportunity to more fully…

Something Rotten At The Stratford Festival When I saw Something Rotten on Broadway in 2015, I knew it was destined for the Stratford Festival. Not everyone at Stratford was as keen on the idea as I was, or at least so I was told. Fortunately, saner (or at least less stuffy) minds prevailed and Something…