Thursday, February 9, 2012
In the Heights won the 2008 Tony for best Broadway musical and, unlike some other recipients, it deserved to. It also introduced a newish musical sound to Broadway and, again unlike some oth…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMThursday, October 27, 2011
Here is a production with a large cast but only one real character; at its heart, in fact, a one-man show. It’s an audience-pleasing, even audience-baiting, piece of work that can also lan…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMTuesday, October 25, 2011
Soulpepper’s 2012 season, its 15th, will contain a dozen shows. Two of these are revivals from previous years: Death of a Salesman, from 2010, and the perennial A Christmas Carol.
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 07:00PMFriday, October 21, 2011
For eight years now, Joel Greenberg’s Theatre 180 has been bringing us plays on urgent public subjects. They have divided into the documentary or quasi-documentary (The Laramie Project, St…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 07:30PMFriday, October 14, 2011
The Art of Time ensemble likes to merge all kinds of performing disciplines, sometimes throwing in some non-performing ones as well. Canadian Stage is giving its Berkeley Street platform to …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00PMMonday, October 10, 2011
There’s an old comedy routine in which a man who has lost his memory is returned by the authorities to the bosom of his family. “Is it really true,” his wife asks, on her way up to bed…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 09:00AMFriday, October 7, 2011
A hearty welcome to Another Africa, which actually is the same Africa we saw last year at Luminato, only shorter. Shorter by a third, since what was previously The Africa Trilogy is now just…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:24PMTuesday, October 4, 2011
The best thing about Chess is its title. The worst is that the title has nothing to do with the rest of the show. OK, that’s an exaggeration. The storyline does involve a world chess champ…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:55PMFriday, September 30, 2011
The most enjoyable Daniel MacIvor plays have usually been those in which he has appeared himself. This, in recent memory, has meant that they have been monologues. However, his new play, ent…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 07:30PMMonday, September 26, 2011
Just to refresh memories: Elyot and Amanda used to be married. They fought all the time, so now, meaning at the beginning of Act One, they’re divorced. They’ve also remarried and, honeym…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 06:00PMFriday, September 23, 2011
Dr. Givings, New York physician circa 1880, turns on the newly installed electric light in his living room and wonders at the marvels Edison has wrought. His wife, Catherine, feels less jubi…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00PMWednesday, September 21, 2011
Last weekend I caught the final performance of the Shaw Festival’s When the Rain Stops Falling, directed by Peter Hinton, and enjoyed it even more than I had on the first night. This Austr…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 03:44PMTuesday, September 20, 2011
It isn’t really accurate to say that The Tale of a Town happens at Theatre Passe Muraille. Taking its name literally, and perhaps reverting to its roots, TPM is here the embarkation point …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00PMSaturday, September 17, 2011
Soulpepper’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Price received a standing ovation on its first night. These days that isn’t such a rarity, anywhere you go. But the cheers and claps on t…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 11:00AMFriday, September 9, 2011
Once upon a time there were two brothers and their washed-up father. Or, in the corpus of Arthur Miller’s plays, once upon several times. The Price, first staged in New York in 1968 and no…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 05:08PMTuesday, August 30, 2011
The year is 2039, and in Alice Springs, Australia, a dead fish falls from the sky. This is even odder than it might seem, because the man at whose feet it falls, whose name is Gabriel York, …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 10:30AMFriday, August 26, 2011
Judith Thompson’s White Biting Dog begins with a depressed and divorced 31-year-old lawyer, who goes by the name of Cape Race, preparing to kill himself by jumping off the Bloor Street Via…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 07:15PMMonday, August 22, 2011
Frank Sinatra never sang the words “come fly away.” He did of course sing the words “come fly with me,” at the beginning of the song of that name, closely followed by…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMFriday, August 19, 2011
When Trey Anthony’s ’da Kink in My Hair was seen at the Princess of Wales Theatre six years ago it had a few musical numbers, and I wished that there might be more. I should have been mo…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 07:00PMThursday, August 18, 2011
Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King is a play that seems, provokingly, to have set out to be a masterpiece. Even more provokingly, it succeeds. Ionesco, the supposed maestro of the Theatre of …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMMonday, August 15, 2011
In 1958 the British theatre critic Irving Wardle, later to become the revered reviewer for The Times, wrote an essay entitled “Comedy of Menace,” in which he identified a group o…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00PMFriday, August 12, 2011
Hannah Moscovitch’s Little One (Summerworks, Theatre Passe Muraille) is about growing up with a sociopath. There’s Claire, who as a sexually damaged four-year-old was rescued by an Ottaw…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 07:00PMThursday, August 11, 2011
The two characters in Topdog/Underdog, a prizewinning American play by Suzan-Lori Parks, are brothers, black, whose father named them Lincoln and Booth. This, according to Lincoln, was daddy…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 05:30PMTuesday, August 9, 2011
Maria Severa Onofriana sang the blues, in Portuguese. More exactly, she was an early exponent — some say the inventor — of the guitar-based form known as fado. She was born in Lisbon in …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 04:23PMFriday, August 5, 2011
Tickets to shows at Toronto’s Summerworks Festival, previously $10 apiece, will this year cost $15. That doesn’t sound like much, but if you want to take full advantage of a festival con…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00PMFriday, July 29, 2011
The Canopy Theatre Company’s Lysistrata — The Sex Strike (their subtitle) is the most satisfying production of an Aristophanes play I have ever seen. That isn’t quite the sweeping stat…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 07:00PMThe musical Next to Normal goes irretrievably down the tubes at the moment, early in Act One, when one of its characters, already a driving force in the action, is revealed to have been dead…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 03:00PMWednesday, July 27, 2011
This is Ted Dykstra’s time. He is the director of all three of the plays in Soulpepper’s current repertoire: the superb Glass Menagerie, the perennially successful Billy Bishop Goes to W…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 01:36PMSunday, July 24, 2011
Back in the 1960s, there was a gently rocking musical based on Twelfth Night entitled Your Own Thing, which is a pretty fair translation of the original play’s subtitle What You Will. More…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 08:00AMTuesday, July 19, 2011
There are 24 named characters in the standard texts of Titus Andronicus, and by the end of the play 14 of them are either dead or under sentence of same. Two of the deceased have, while aliv…
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 05:14PMMonday, July 18, 2011
“I like to quote fictional characters,” says Carrie Fisher, after citing Sherlock Holmes on the amount of information it’s possible for one person to hold in his head “because I’m …
SOURCE: National Post (Canada) at 02:30PM 
