Pss Pss: Why so old-fashioned?
It’s fine. It’s okay. It’s kind of charming. But that’s not enough. In Pss Pss, Swiss artists Camilla Pessi and Simone Fassari play mute clown characters who meet, struggle for possession of an apple, and, through increasingly challenging acrobatics, end up on a...
Fun Home: talent galore—and lesbians centre stage
It’s subtle, which is great. It’s queer, which is welcome. It’s narratively unsurprising. But it's still the best show in town. The musical Fun Home is based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In both, Bechdel, who is lesbian, struggles...
Next to Normal: more interesting for the local talent than the prize-winning material
The cast is talented and the production is musically precise, but Next to Normal is not a well-built musical—despite having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010. Act 1 is mostly boring because the protagonist, a housewife named Diana who has bipolar disorder with...
No Foreigners delivers less than it appears to offer
No Foreigners is extremely stylish. Unfortunately, that style is rarely theatrical. No Foreigners is a kind of fairytale, digitally told. In it, a young Chinese-Canadian man finds out that he can inherit his grandfather’s wealth, but only if he can tell the executor...
The Skin of Our Teeth: Maybe not this time
It’s easy to see why Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth was hailed as a great work when it premiered in 1942. And it’s easy to see why director Sarah Rodgers would choose to stage it in 2018. But that doesn’t mean it’s worth watching for two and a half hours. The...
Ruined: Don’t look away
War is fought on women’s bodies. That truth is at the heart of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined. Nottage sets Ruined during the war in Congo, which was officially over in 2002 but continues to rage. The action unfolds in Mama Nadi’s roadside canteen and brothel. Government and...
Shit: strong performances emerge from a distancing script
For a script with such an earthy title, Shit is oddly abstract. In Shit, Australian playwright Patricia Cornelius presents us with three incarcerated women. Billy, Bob, and Sam have all grown up in foster care and they have all been brutalized sexually, emotionally,...
Jitters begs the question, “Why bother?”
There are a whole lot of skilled artists at work here and there are a couple of good laughs in the script. Mostly, though, David French’s Jitters is a waste of precious theatre time. Jitters is a backstage comedy, a show about putting on a show. In it, a Toronto...
King Arthur’s Night opens the door to new worlds
Theatre moves me to tears on a regular basis. But after watching King Arthur’s Night I flat out sobbed. This show speaks so concretely—and so skilfully—to isolation and inclusion. The publicity material for King Arthur’s Night describes it as “radically inclusive”—and...
Subscribe Free!
Sign up for the FRESH SHEET newsletter and get curated local, national, and international arts coverage — all sorts of arts — every week.
Contact
Drop a line to colinthomas@telus.net.
Support
FRESH SHEET, the reviews and FRESH SHEET, the newsletter are available free. But writing them is a full-time job and arts criticism is in peril. Please support FRESH SHEET by sending an e-transfer to colinthomas@telus.net or by becoming a patron on Patreon.
Website by Mighty Sparrow Design.