The Trip to Bountiful is a touching tale of one woman’s devotion to her roots

Written by Horton Foote, The Trip to Bountiful at Toronto’s Alumnae Theatre evokes differences between city life and country life and between the needs of the elderly and the younger generation. But the heart of the story goes much deeper than that as it expresses one woman’s unshakable longing for her roots.

Mama Watts (Jane Hunter) is an elderly woman who’s cooped up in a Houston, Texas apartment at a busy street corner. She’s living with her son Ludie (Jamie Johnson) and daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Kim Croscup). Mama Watts yearns to return to her hometown Bountiful (also called a “swamp” by Jessie Mae) and this desire is all-encompassing. She hasn’t been home for 30 years.

Continue reading Review: The Trip to Bountiful (Alumnae Theatre) →

The daring third installment of the Queenmaker series explores the rise of Bloody Mary

Soulpepper has mounted the third play in writer Kate Hennig’s Queenmaker Trilogy, Mother’s Daughter is an enthralling and tense historical drama on stage at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts.

This play checks all the boxes for me: the writing is tight and Hennig weaves an interesting and engaging story with these characters from the Tudor era. The performances are great across the board and the technical aspects and set design are certainly impressive. It’s a great show, and I do recommend it. Continue reading Review: Mother’s Daughter (Soulpepper) →

It may be cold out, but Theatre Rusticle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is here to heat you up

Theatre Rusticle has given new life to Shakespeare’s fantastical comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their production, now on at Buddies in Bad Times, feels like an antidote for sorrows of the soul. It’s like a burst of summer love in the dead of winter.
It’s breathtakingly dreamy, intensely physical, and unrelentingly playful.

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Legally Blonde: The Musical is a delight

With sparkling pink enthusiasm, Legally Blonde: The Musical brings all the feminism and glitter of the original film and novel to the stage for Hart House Theatre’s 100th anniversary season. A wonderful homage to the original, this production addresses issues of sexual harassment, academic exclusivity, and touches (very, very lightly) on class differences. Continue reading Review: Legally Blonde: The Musical (Hart House) →

Sweat may not be perfect, but it’s important and worth seeing

I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I knew walking out of Sweat, playing at Canadian Stage‘s Berkeley Theatre, that it was going to be a hard piece to write about. In fact, I already knew it at intermission.

It’s a solid production. It was a lovely way to spend an evening, but I was having a hell of a time getting this review written. After having written bits and pieces of this it over the past couple of days, but never managing anything cohesive, the reason finally struck me as I ambled down my stairs: I wanted to like this piece more than I did.

Everything about this production was fine. It was all good. Good directing, good acting, good design, all of it good. But none of it took my breath away. And I could tell it had the potential to.

Continue reading Review: Sweat (Canadian Stage and Studio 180 Theatre) →