Today is Blue Monday. Supposedly the most depressing day of the year – it’s Monday, which sucks, plus it’s already been a month since Christmas, and we’re a month away from Valentine’s Day. So what to do? How about getting out of the house and seeing some theatre! Here are our playlistings for the week. Anything highlighted in red with two asterisks before it comes highly recommended by our Editor, Mike.
Canadian Stage with Crow’s Theatre bring the Anton Chekhov classic to life in Toronto
Crow’s Theatre had me with the trailer: super-stellar cast making toasts around a dining table, up close interviews with actors, and sneak peeks of the stage. I had to see The Seagull.
Opening night, a cold Toronto winter night. The stage is bare, the air is smokey, there’s the sound of crickets chirping in the distance. For the next three hours, the audience was pulled into the 1895 world of Anton Chekhov: hurting with the hurt while digging deeply into love, life and the meaning of art. Continue reading Review: The Seagull (Crow’s Theatre)→
Toronto’s Hart House Theatre presents the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar
Jesus Christ Superstar, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s bombastic, over-the-top rock opera treatment of the Easter story is now a classic musical that’s regularly staged by community theatres, high school drama clubs, and regional theatres around the world. The Hart House Theatre is the latest company to mount a production in Toronto.
Written in 1970 as a concept album, the musical has shown a remarkable ability for adaptation to reflect the politics and culture of the times in its subsequent productions throughout the years. For this production, director Luke Brown draws inspiration from the youth culture and political movements of today. Continue reading Review: Jesus Christ Superstar (Hart House Theatre)→
The Toronto Fringe Festival runs a yearly festival called Next Stage Theatre Festival (NSTF), which they bill as “12 days of the best indie theatre in Canada”. There’s a wide variety of shows playing at the festival, and we’ve reviewed all of them! Check out our coverage below to find out more about the shows playing and to see our reviews. A full festival schedule is available here.
If you want to access all of our reviews at once, click right here.
Nightwood Theatre’s production of HER2, currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, is the second play about cancer I’ve seen this week; it is also the least satisfying. Despite the astounding ensemble cast, this show just doesn’t pack the emotional punch I was expecting.
HER2 is the name given to a protein that promotes the growth of cancer cells. Maja Ardal’s play explores the relationships between seven women—a diverse array—who have tested positive for this protein and have been selected to undergo a clinical trial for a new drug treatment. While these women bond over their shared experience, the lead researcher and her assistant have that age-old argument about science versus sociology. Each woman’s unique personal journey is framed by this question: can hard science be strengthened by unquantifiable human factors like a sense of community? Continue reading Review: HER2 (Nightwood Theatre)→
