A relationship in shambles, a spunky innkeeper with a dark past, and thousands of eyes watching—Annie Baker’s John brings audiences face-to-face with the unsettling and the uncomfortable. Directed by Jonathan Goad for the Company Theatre, and performed at the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs in Toronto, John presents a…
On Thursday January 19th 2017, the night before one of history’s most controversial U.S. presidential inaugurations, St. Catharines’ own Twitches and Itches theatre company took to the Robertson Hall stage at the First Ontario Performing Arts Centre with an engaging, critical theatrical reimagining of Euripides’ The Ba…
On August 6th we (Caroline and Sarah), had the pleasure of interviewing four astounding actresses at the Shaw Festival: Natasha Mumba, Marla McLean, Fiona Byrne, and Jennifer Phipps. Between them they represent a spectrum of experiences and generations, from Natasha, who is in her first Shaw season, to Jennifer, who pe…
The Stratford archives warehouse “What’s in the Stratford Festival archives? Do we even really know what archives are? Are we going to be looking at dusty photographs the whole time?” … These were all questions swirling around in our heads as we discussed our upcoming archives tour. We, Caroline and Sarah, were spendin…
Terrible Torontonians, kleptomaniacs, and botched circumcisions—these are only a few of the hot-button topics shared among four women living in Stewiacke, Nova Scotia. You’re probably wondering, where and what the heck is Stewiacke? If you were to ask its residents, as in the title of Norm Foster’s play, they would tel…
A haunting opening number asks us to “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” and attend it we did, with pleasure. The Shaw Festival’s production of Sweeney Todd, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler, and directed by Jackie Maxwell, transforms the Festival Theatre into the gritty underbelly of Lond…
This summer, we (DARTcritics staff writers Caroline Coon and Sarah Bradford) had the opportunity to spend three weeks in Stratford, Ontario taking courses towards our Brock University Dramatic Arts degrees. While there, we thought it would be beneficial to interview a few of the fresh new faces at Stratford this season…
What do you get when you mix the tale of Romeo and Juliet with a touch of Twelfth Night’s Viola, and then the story of Shakespeare himself? A smorgasbord of laughs, tears, and exploding ovaries. Directed by Declan Donnellan, Stratford Festival’s North American premiere of Shakespeare in Love is a witty, and surprisingl…
Dayna Tietzen as Cassie. Photography by David Hou. A five, six, seven, eight! As a musical theatre buff, I brought high expectations to this show, and it fan-kicked them all the way into the balcony. A Chorus Line was one of the first musicals I fell in love with in high school, and I spent hours pirouetting (badly) ar…
While viewing the Stratford Festival’s production of All My Sons by Arthur Miller, at one moment I found myself on the edge of my seat, the next on the brink of sleep. Though the script is chock-full of gripping tension, shocking deceit, and skeletons in the closet, the structure of the show is like that of a ping-pong…
