Happy solar eclipse day, Toronto! For your theatre viewing pleasure this week, Toronto’s stages have Shakespeare, a dishonest Wizard, Pirates, GAGA, and much more! Check them out below the cut:
Continue reading Playlistings in Toronto for the week of August 21st
Dauntless City Theatre presents an al fresco gender-bent Two Gentlewomen of Verona in TorontoTheatre’s greatest triumph as a medium is getting us to engage in dialogue and ask questions. Dauntless City Theatre‘s latest production poses an age-old question: would it be awesome to do a gender-bent, inter-sectional feminist, immersive adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona with a dog wearing a tiny cowboy hat? Yes, yes it would.
Continue reading Review: Two Gentlewomen of Verona (Dauntless City Theatre)
What XO Secret is doing with Landline, playing during the final weekend of the SummerWorks Festival, is breaking apart every notion of what traditional and standard ‘theatre’ actually is. Here, one individual doubles as both audience member and actor as they traverse the city on their own, listening to audio cues on an MP3 player. While on their journey — which, without this element, can feel rather isolating — they are texting back and forth with an individual in Hamilton, taking part in the Hamilton Fringe, who are simultaneously embarking on the same journey but in their own way.
This is the kind of interactive performance that takes ‘audience participation’ to a whole new level where everything that you can take out of it is entirely dependent on what you put into it.
Continue reading Landline (XO Secret) 2017 SummerWorks Review
Memorials surround us every day, depicting tragedy, triumph, famous people, and famous events that are no longer around, asking us to remember and learn. But does the act of Memorial actually achieve the things we claim? With These Violent Delights, Guilty By Association from British Columbia take a hard look at this seemingly benign act and demands we ask ourselves why we really do it.
Continue reading These Violent Delights (Guilty By Association) 2017 Summerworks Review
Early in Shaista Latif’s solo show The Archivist, a disembodied, cartoonish voice starts asking her questions about whether she wants a lawyer, disregards her answers, and tells her she has to swear to tell the truth using a complicated oath that involved spinning around.
The show—which opened on Saturday at Pia Bouman – Scotiabank Studio Theatre as part of the 2017 SummerWorks Performance Festival—Latif says, will prove that she’s Afghan. Continue reading The Archivist (Shaista Latif) 2017 SummerWorks Review