This week takes us into December, and with that comes a torrent of holiday-related shows! If you’re still not in the spirit of the season, though, there are still plenty of non-denominational shows on this week for your viewing pleasure. As always, our picks for the week are in red text. Here are the weekly picks:
As we left the Brigantine Room at Harbourfront Centre after seeing The Big Band Tap Revue, my guest for the evening exclaimed, “Well, that was just pure fun from beginning to end!” And she was bang on.
The Big Band Tap Revue is actually less straightforward than it sounds, though. My favourite pieces were the ones that branched away from what I was expecting based on the idea of a ‘big band tap revue.’
Continue reading Review: The Big Band Tap Revue
Howard Barker’s script for The Castle is notoriously extreme, and has been described as actively hostile to its audience: not only opaque and twisted, but calculated to unnerve, upset, distress and bother. When he heard I was seeing it, a friend of mine (who had worked on it in university) even warned me off: “The Castle is a protracted excuse for men to say the word cunt a lot of times with impunity.”
The good news is that The Storefront is, as always, a singularly good acting company, here supplemented with a dazzling array of local stars. A cast of this caliber can work miracles, and often they do — but the script is such heavy lifting that by the end I was regretting not ducking out at intermission.
Continue reading Review: The Castle (The Storefront Theatre)
The Road to Paradise (presented by Crow’s Theatre and Human Cargo), currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, is a harrowing look at the traumatic experiences of those involved with the controversial Canadian military operations in Pakistan and Kandahar. Easily one of the best productions I’ve seen all year, The Road to Paradise smartly refuses to provide any easy answers.
Continue reading Review: The Road to Paradise (Crow’s Theatre and Human Cargo)
Lion in the Streets, the surreal story of a murdered 9-year-old and the community where she lost her life, opened last weekend at the Glad Day Bookshop. Put on by the seven-member collective Theatre By Committee, the show has moments of extremely compelling drama but due to the bizarre nature of the script these often give way to moments of confusion for the audience.