Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carre is one of his late plays, worked on over many years and first staged in 1977. It harks back both to the New Orleans setting of A Streetcar Named Desire and to…
Anosh Irani's play is not in fact pretentious. Rather it's unpretentious to a fault, or way beyond.
As one of the few people in the world who never saw the movies, I am in no position to pronounce on how faithful Shrek the Musical is to its source. I have gathered that the first film was g…
Three shocks have hit the Canadian theatre recently. There was the closure of the Vancouver Playhouse; the announcement that the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize will be awarded for the last time;…
I haven't been a great fan of Carole Fréchette's plays; they've seemed to me like tiny surfaces, obsessively polished. Her latest is small too, at least physically " its very title is The S…
On Sunday it was announced that Antoni Cimolino will be the next artistic director of the Stratford Festival. This was not a surprise. What was surprising, or at least unexpected, is that hi…
Rose Cullis's play is called The Happy Woman, and taking into account the expected doses of irony, the decor is very appropriate. It's also very stylish, which befits a script that's accompl…
The source play is a hot brew of physical and territorial lusts, the latter trenchantly summarized in the clinching line quoted up top. This version stirs in a new element.
"If you didn't make allowances in this family, you'd go nuts." Those words, spoken by James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, could probably apply in some degree …
The transforming moment in War Horse " transforming in every sense " comes about 20 minutes in. Joey, the title horse, changes before our eyes from foal to full-grown stallion.
The documentary play Seeds centres on the 2004 patent infringement case of Monsanto vs. Schmeiser. Monsanto, the bio-tech company, claimed that Percy Schmeiser, a Saskatchewan farmer, had in…
The high life enjoyed, if that's the word, by the four characters of Lee MacDougall's play is a chemical one.
The performers and producers of Potted Potter claim their show can be understood without any knowledge of the source material, and I can proclaim, from the full depths of my ignorance, that …
Time to order a double-double. The show called The Double is based on a Dostoevski novella of the same title, concerning one Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. Or rather two Yakov Petrovich Golyadki…
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…
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 land …
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.
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, Stuf…
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 …
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, "tha…
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…
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 champio…
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…
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, honeymooni…
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…