Like many people, I’ve worked service industry jobs while aspiring to bigger and better things and that experience is part of what drew me to Pressgang Theatre’s Served by Graham Isador. It’s a site-specific service industry confessional playing in the intimate upstairs space at Queen West’s Epicure Café as part of this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival. Continue reading Served (Pressgang Theatre) 2015 Toronto Fringe Review
Aluna’s Blood Wedding & Canadian Opera Company’s Falstaff win big at 36th Dora AwardsThe Dora Mavor Moore Awards ceremony is the Toronto theatre community’s big night out to celebrate its own. This year the ceremony was hosted by comedian Gavin Crawford, who kept the pace swift and generally killed it with his material, injecting his wry observations throughout the proceedings. His opening musical song and dance number as Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was a riot.
Continue reading Announcement: 2015 Dora Mavor Moore Award Winners (With Links to MoT Reviews)
Fact: white privilege, heterosexual privilege and male privilege all exist and together they give straight, white males countless systemic advantages in society.
If that statement isn’t a truism to you, you should probably just stop reading now and move on; none of the rest of this review or this play will make much sense to you. American playwright Young Jean Lee’s new play Straight White Men is a timely, relevant, subversive and remarkably insightful exploration of the concept of privilege from the point of view of its beneficiaries. Continue reading Review: Straight White Men (World Stage/Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company)
The sinking of the ocean liner RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912 during its maiden voyage is an ambitious subject for a musical. You have to wonder if the most infamous nautical disaster in history can be treated in a meaningful way through song and dance.
First of all, Titanic The Musical is not an adaptation of the James Cameron film Titanic; there’s no Jack and Rose, and Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On does not feature in the score. Originally opened on Broadway in the spring of 1997, a few months in advance of the blockbuster movie, Titanic The Musical is an original work by composer Maury Yeston with book by Peter Stone. The musical has always been a bit uneven and the version currently on stage in Toronto is a mixed bag; I enjoyed parts of it immensely but I thought other aspects fell short. Continue reading Review: Titanic The Musical (Mirvish)
A family trip unravels; fu-GEN/Theatre Smash present Julia Cho’s play Durango in TorontoTheatre Smash and fu-GEN Theatre Company have partnered to present American playwright Julia Cho’s Durango, a beautifully-written, character-driven script that centres on a Korean-American family’s road trip to the eponymous Colorado town. It’s a compelling portrait of a family buckling under the weight of expectation and struggling to re-define themselves and their relationships with each other. Continue reading Review: Durango (fu-GEN Theatre Company/Theatre Smash)