Toronto Theatre Reviews

I was fortunate enough to see Every Silver Lining again for the Next Stage Festival on Monday, and I have to say I love this show just as much as I did the first time I watched it. The long and the short of it is that the music is amazing, the book is solid and the acting is fantastic.  But when you watch something for a second time, especially when so little has changed, the things that bothered me the first time became much more magnified- but even then my minor quibbles with the story pale in comparison to...

I knew it would only be a matter of time before I would have to turn my attention to this subject.  Let’s talk Shakespeare.  Or more specifically, let’s talk about the Shakespearean twist.  It seems that any production of Shakespeare in today’s day and age needs to have a twist. Henry V as the 1969 Stanley cup playoffs. Othello in the deep South. MacBeth as a godfather style gangster fantasy- Shakespeare continues to be set in alternate places and timelines on a daily basis. (All these shows were REAL and brought to life by my former teacher Rod Carley who...

In many ways BFFs feels like I watched a millennial take on a Seinfeld musical episode.  It’s funny, smart and entertaining and geared towards a very specific audience. It’s clever without getting in the way of itself and shows a talented cast being talented. The songs are good. The staging is well done. But at the end of the day, it feels like nothing really happened.  The plot of the piece revolves somewhere between a box of wine and a wish. And that’s really it. Two old friends catch up by trying to go back to what they were in...

Certain things transcend barriers: music, art and - most importantly- pizza.  But laughter is a close second.  And Tita Jokes had me laughing from the start to the finish.  While I saw more sketch comedy over this Fringe than ever before, this was one of the most coherent, dynamic and hilarious that I was fortunate enough to come across. The Tita Collective is smart in how they begin by setting each of them to represent a ‘stock’ character that then lays the foundations for every sketch that comes after it. This type of planning is really fantastic as not only...

Tara Travis is a madwoman.  This show was absolutely spectacular.  From her frantic acting, to her manic performance, to her absolute and total command of the audience, this show had an extreme amount of polish that makes it hard to believe that it is performing at Fringe. It deserved the “Best Of Fringe” title and the work created was absolutely marvelous and fascinating. Portraying one of King Henry’s wives would be a feat by itself. But her take on it by playing them all at once in the same space and effortlessly moving back and forth between them was an...