AN INTERVENTION: This Show Needs One
For me, sitting through this mounting of Mike Bartlett’s An Intervention was an endurance test. I started checking my watch half an hour into its 80-minute running time, and my chair got very hard. My primary beef is with the script, but I also suspect the direction...
JADE CIRCLE: Lovely, Incomplete
Playwright and performer Jasmine Chen’s Jade Circle is a delicate, stylish, sometimes resonant piece of work that could use more concrete storytelling. Jade Circle is about reclaiming the language of one’s origin. In Chen’s autobiographical script, she shares the...
SUNRISE BETTIES: Blood will have blood
Writing about Sunrise Betties is depressing, not because of the content, which includes drug dealing, police corruption, and a ridiculous amount of gore — but because it’s all such a mindless waste of time. In Cheyenne Rouleau’s new script, which is set in the...
FATHER TARTUFFE: AN INDIGENOUS MISADVENTURE — INCONSISTENT BUT RICH
Big chunks of this production of Father Tartuffe: An Indigenous Misadventure are boring. And there are elements that don’t work at all. But the underlying premise is so good and the bits that work are so uniquely rewarding that, despite the holes in it, this show...
CHILD-ISH: Effervescence
I love this show, everything about it. And I strongly encourage you to see it. For CHILD-ish, Toronto playwright Sunny Drake interviewed 41 kids over a period of years. He also invited the kids to interview one another. And they interviewed him. The result is an...
EVERY BRILLIANT THING: Some Assembly Required
It’s fun. It’s moving sometimes. There something essentially theatrical about it. And I suspect we’re in particular need of it right now. Every Brilliant Thing is a one-actor show that was developed by playwright...
JULIET: A REVENGE COMEDY — Got Me
By the end of Juliet, A Revenge Comedy, I was completely into it. In the script, which was written by Ryan Gladstone and Pippa Mackie, Juliet from Romeo and Juliet finds herself in a kind of Shakespearean Groundhog Day: she keeps falling in love, losing her...
THE SHADOW WHOSE PREY THE HUNTER BECOMES: The One That Got Away
For about the first 20 minutes of The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, I was enjoying the uniqueness of the experience. By the end of the show’s 60-minute running time, I was struggling to stay awake. The problem, no doubt, was partly with me.
CHOIR BOY: But Not Story Boy
The music is sublime. Sublime. But, especially as it’s presented in this production, the script is not. When Choir Boy started, with Andrew Broderick, who plays the central character, Pharus, singing a cappella, and then, when he was joined, in perfect harmony, by...
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