For their first review of 2018, the DARTcritics class attended Matt MacKenzie’s Bears, a co-production between Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts and Punctuate! Theatre, in association with Native Earth Performing Arts at The Theatre Centre in Toronto. MacKenzie’s dark comedy is both an exploration of Indigenous cosmol…
For their final review of the term, the DARTcritics class take on The National Theatre’s production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, playing at Mirvish’s Princess of Wales Theatre. The acclaimed production may have won both Olivier and Tony Awards, but our critics have more mixed reviews: Abigail B…
The November Ticket: there’s something gloomily appropriate about the title the Theatre Centre has given its mini-season, co-presented with Why Not Theatre, surface/underground, and Butcher’s Block Collective. Seeing the season’s three plays is a thoroughly sobering experience, as chilly and raw as the skin on my face…
The title Love + Hate sums up my feelings towards the brightly costumed but darkly delivered doomsday pop-musical at SummerWorks this season. Performing in the Factory Theatre Mainspace, The PepTides deliver their upbeat take on what is wrong with humanity in the form of a five-part harmony interspersed with quick, qu…
Is Shrödinger’s rapist still a rapist if the box hasn’t been opened yet? That’s the question the red light district is looking to answer in their updated take on Heinrich von Kleist’s 19th Century short story, the marquise of o-. Playing in the Factory Theatre Mainspace during Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival, marquise i…
Nick and Hayley’s open dialogue about Annable Soutar’s newest play The Watershed continues. For those of you who are behind, you can read part one here. Here is Hayley’s response to Nick’s letter. Hi Nick, Thanks for your letter. I like what you have to say about The Watershed’s narrative structure and I agree: what ma…
“This river I step in is not the river I stand in,” postal worker Albert Jackson reads from a sign on his daily route; what feels like a misplaced line of poetry soon sets up an entire performance. The Postman, based on the trials and tribulations of Toronto’s first black postal worker Albert Jackson, is a show that of…
A note from Hayley: Nick and I have wanted to do a joint review for a while now. We were fortunate to both be free last week to see Annabel Soutar’s new piece The Watershed, playing at Canadian Stage as part of PANAMANIA. Keeping in kind with the play itself, which played with the use of Skype, Facebook chat and emails…
All aboard the Rukmini’s Gold train, stopping now at the Hamilton Fringe Festival. Their next stop? Perhaps a tune-up at the train yard is in order. Radha S. Menon’s play, winner of the 2015 Toronto Fringe New Play Contest, is playing at Mills Hardware this summer in Hamilton. Presented by Red Betty Theatre and directe…
“This story is not going to be real, but it’s going to be really felt,” Ravi Jain, Artistic Director of Why Not Theatre, says in a hokey Indian accent, imitating his grandfather. Dropping the accent Jain goes on, “Stories help us discover our future, and connect us to our past.” Gimme Shelter, playing at the Young Cent…
