Toronto Theatre Reviews

Reviews of productions based in Toronto – theatre includes traditional definitions of theatre, as well as dance, opera, comedy, performance art, spoken word performances, and more. Productions may be in-person, or remote productions streamed online on the Internet.

Review: Porch View Dances (Kaeja d’Dance)

Roses in the Rough

Toronto families perform choreographed routines outside their homes in Porch View Dances

If there’s one thing that strangers do really well, it’s breaking your heart.

Life is weird and sometimes beautiful, but it’s easy to forget all that. It just seems normal. Then some person you don’t know will step out their front door and do something so utterly terrifying it boggles the mind — namely, perform a dance — and all of a sudden you start secretly crying because people are so exquisitely themselves. Admittedly, that sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, but it is happening right now in the Annex, as Kaeja d’Dance pairs families with professional choreographers to create collaborative dance-works in front of their own homes.

Porch View Dances takes audiences on a tour of four such dances throughout Seaton Village neighbourhood, along with one roving contact-dance piece and a participatory performance in Vermont Square Park.

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My Last (Theatre Double Take) 2014 Fringe Review

Her name is Lucia and she is 17, born in 16th-Century Italy, a young duchess fallen from grace — and all she wants is your company. My Last is an Alley Play presented by Theatre Double Take at this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival.

This is interactive storytelling for a small intimate audience. Situated in the tent space at the Fringe Club, Lucia graciously welcomes you to sit with her as she tells you her story, and assures you she is repentant.

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Ask Lovecraft (Monkeyman Productions) 2014 Fringe Review

Love classic horror? If you do, then you are no stranger to the name H. P. Lovecraft or the creatures from the deepest dark that he has created – Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth – or a certain book “bound in human flesh, written in human blood”.

Now during the Toronto Fringe Festival, Monkeyman Productions have gone to the trouble of resurrecting the Grandfather of Horror. In the tent space at the Fringe Club, Lovecraft himself appears to answer questions from his fans and followers, give advice on life and love, and indulge in a bit of poetry.

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Tachycardia (Dysrhythmia Theatre) 2014 Toronto Fringe Review

Artists take a major risk when they set out to make theater about love. In this respect, I give major kudos to Dysrhythmia Theatre for Tachycardia at the Toronto Fringe Festival – Fringe is for risk, and not enough artists dive from the limb. The problem with making theatre about love is that every heart in the audience knows how the story should be told. Mine is no different, I make that clear from the start.

‘Tachycardia’ is a blood and guts way of saying heartache; writer/director Rebecca Gismondi’s definition is “When the heart is ripped and the mind is torn.” Another definition would be “Breakup.” Love and breakups: prime drama territory, yet such a minefield for theatre. The potential for cliché, the gravitational pull toward melodrama spike the ground.

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Redheaded Stepchild (Nobody’s Business Theatre) 2014 Toronto Fringe Review

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Ah the elusive one-man-show; a form so oft-attempted but oh so rarely done successfully. Redheaded Stepchild, presented by Nobody’s Business Theatre as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival, is written and performed by Johnnie Walker and ought to be studied as the model of how to write and perform a proper, impactful one-hander.

Redheaded Stepchild tells the story of Nicholas, a precocious 12-year-old redheaded boy whose proclivity for Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan make him a bit different from the other kids at school. Nicholas is troubled; his father has recently remarried, literally making him a redheaded stepchild, and the biggest kid in his sixth grade class is threatening to beat him up.

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