Hazel Adie and Frances Johnson write, Feeling almost as excited as if we were about to step on stage ourselves, we take out seats in the Robertson Theatre. Director Colin Anthes steps forward to thank us all for attending and gives a land acknowledgement. That calm, confident voice now so familiar from rehearsals is li…

Carousel Players is known for bringing thought-provoking theatre to a younger crowd as they tour their inventive creations to school gyms across Southern Ontario. Their latest play Whole World explores themes of communication and understanding through the story of Omar, a young refugee who has newly arrived in Canada.…

Still in two groups, one half of our embedding team returned to The Team‘s rehearsal room once again and share their final observations. Dani Shae Barkley, Jonah Pace, and Kristina Testa write,  Returning to the Suitcase in Point rehearsal space, we are quite excited to witness the progress that the artists of The Team…

Having returned to the rehearsal room once more, half of our embedding team remarks on the changes they witness.  Hazel Adie and Frances Johnson write,  We arrive for our second and final visit to familiar smiling faces. This rehearsal is a week and a half away from Essential Collective Theatre’s first performance of T…

This year, our student embedders become one of The Team, as they follow the creation process of Essential Theatre Collective‘s upcoming show. To start, they met with director Colin B. Anthes and designer James McCoy to discuss their vision for The Team. Hazel Adie, Dani Shae Barkley, Frances Johnson, Jonah Pace, and Kr…

In October, the DARTcritics class of 2017/18 saw the Shaw Festival’s production of Alan Bennett’s 1994 historical dramedy The Madness of George III. Cue an impassioned discussion about madness and metatheatricality:  Colin Williams writes, As I enter the auditorium of the Royal George Theatre, I am immediately whisked…

“And what’s a woman worth? What’s life worth? Without self-respect!” These questions are posed in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, directed at the Shaw Festival by Eda Holmes. Sex work and feminism, two of the show’s themes, are hot-button topics in 2016—I can only imagine the taboos against them when the play was first perfo…

Something wicked (and wonderful) this way comes. The Stratford Festival opened its 2016 season with Macbeth last night at the Festival Theatre with a performance that satisfies cravings for the supernatural, sensual, and sanguinary from Shakespeare’s notoriously dark “Scottish Play”. Macbeth (Ian Lake) and members of t…

Sarah Bradford writes: No talk of kings and queens, nor of heroes and dastardly villains — the Shaw Festival’s 2016 production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town places a spotlight on ordinary people in an extraordinary way. Director Molly Smith strips to its essence an American classic about life, love, and death. Dr. Gibb…

Rarely have I seen such intricacy in the interweaving of artistry and topicality as in the thundering whisper that is Quote Unquote Collective’s Mouthpiece. Playing this weekend at the in the Robertson Theatre as part of St Catharines’ In the Soil Arts Festival, Mouthpiece appears to tell the story of one woman’s attem…