There are some operas that feel more like events; you could feel a palpable sense of excitement when walking into the lobby of Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing arts last Tuesday for the premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
Continue reading Review: Tristan und Isolde (Canadian Opera Company)
Growing up, most of what I knew of the prairies was culled from Laura Ingalls Wilder novels and snippets of Joni Mitchell’s songs. Café Daughter is a story of a young girl coming of age in Saskatchewan in the 1950s but it definitely isn’t Little House on the Prairie.
Continue reading Review: Café Daughter (Native Earth/Gwaandak Theatre)
The new year has just begun and the first theatre festival of 2013 is already well underway. The Next Stage Theatre Festival, a twelve-day festival that runs through January 13, is produced by the Toronto Fringe as a showcase for local and national independent theatre artists. Continue reading Review Round-Up: The 2013 Next Stage Theatre Festival
In Memorial, a play by Steven Gallagher playing as part of the Next Stage Theatre Festival, Dylan (Mark Crawford), a terminally ill cancer patient is simultaneously planning both his wedding and his funeral.
Most of us, at one point or another, have morbidly fantasized about our own funeral. You’ve probably pictured your own memorial. Who would be there? What they would say about you? How would the flowers be arranged? Continue reading 2013 Next Stage Theatre Festival Review: Memorial (Next Step Productions)
In high school, I was a huge RENT fan. The prolific pop-rock musical, a story about a group of struggling artists dealing with the realities of HIV/AIDS in New York’s East Village in the mid-’90s, captured the voice of a generation of starving artists and the imagination of middle-class suburban kids like me who fetishized their New York boho lifestyle. Continue reading Review: Without You (Off-Mirvish)