Sky Gilbert's Ladylike, a new one-act play written specifically for Canada's favourite trans woman, Nina Arsenault, comes to us by way of a well-received run in Hamilton. The play—in which Arsenault's character mostly addresses the audience (and occasionally her boyfriend, played by Wes Berger) on subjects like her family history, her many cosmetic surgery procedures, and ideas about gender construction—probably seemed pretty audacious and daring for Hamilton, but it's interesting to see how a......

Dear Jimmy Hogg, I am the guy with red hair who was sitting in the front row of your show, A Brief History of Petty Crime, at its Toronto Fringe debut last night. I am sure that you remember me. You started talking to me a bit during your show, at first when I laughed at a joke you made about pesto. Your chatty, digressive performance style allows for such interaction and abandonment of......

For patriotic theatre-going homosexuals (and really, is there any other kind?), there has been little downtime as of late. Pride, Canada Day, and now the mighty Toronto Fringe Festival have all bled into each other, separated only by a single Monday in which to nurse RuPaul-induced hangovers. Now in its twentieth season, Toronto's biggest theatre festival takes over the city as of 5:30 p.m. this evening. (And it's for straights, too!) Fringing blind is......

Last night, the 29th annual Dora Mavor Moore Awards were handed out at the Winter Garden Theatre over the course of about two hours and forty five minutes. Sometimes known as the "Canadian Tonys," our theatre capital's award show is decidedly more low-key (if, somehow, not any shorter) than its American counterpart. A few nomination upsets aside (host Sharron Matthews made a pointed comment about the lack of a single nomination for popular and......

With news of environmental disaster a daily reality, artistic response on the topic couldn’t be more timely. But instead of poe-faced polemics and dour finger-wagging, The Rumoli Bros. have concocted a delightful, fun, and super-smart musical. With inspiration from a certain Oscar-winning film with a remarkably similar-sounding name, An Inconvenient Musical, playing at the Factory Theatre’s Studio Theatre (it closes Saturday night), is shrewd for its simultaneous milking and mocking of both sides in......

There are those of us whose parents started bringing us to the Dream in High Park when we were six, who have probably seen A Midsummer Night's Dream a half dozen times, studied it in school on a regular basis since grade five, and can probably recite Helena's "O, spite! O, Hell!" monologue from memory. We will not have any trouble understanding the RSC's production of Dream currently playing at Luminato. But for those......

Even if you’re sick of hearing about war stories in the news, there’s no denying they can make for powerful drama, particularly when the story onstage is about those who tell those grim stories for a living. BLiNK, the collective creation for Luminato by the inaugural Soulpepper Academy, examines the impact of war on the life of a photojournalist, played by Dora nominee Mike Ross. Using a combination of sonic and visual effects, as......

Nominees for the 29th annual Dora Mavor Moore Awards were announced yesterday morning at the Sony Centre. Over muffins and coffee, various TAPA members, politicians, and mainstays of the Toronto theatre scene presented three awards and read off a long list of those eligible for taking home the coveted (if heavy) jesters come June 30th. This year’s nominee list, for the most part, is a rich cross-section of the Toronto theatre-going scene over the......

If you didn't already have an excuse to visit the lower Don Valley, Canadian playright and Fringe favourite Dave Carley will be on hand this Tuesday for a special fundraising performance of After You at Todmorden Mills. Performed by the East Side Players, the resident theatre group at Papermill Theatre, the two-act drama is a reflection on how the aged see things differently than the young. It tells the story of Adele and Jean, two......

Soulpepper continues its year-round season with Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize–winning drama 'Night, Mother. Written after the suicide of one of Norman's close friends, this quiet, personal drama tells the story of a mother and daughter's strained relationship in a single scene, at the beginning of which the daughter informs the mother that she will be killing herself that night. The play not only consists of the events that take place between this revelation and......

The Eco Show is a new Necessary Angel co-pro currently playing at Buddies. It's also the latest work written and directed by Daniel Brooks, so it would seem to go without saying that it's one of the most visually striking plays of the season, with masterful use of sound, lighting and A/V. It tells the story of a mysterious, insular family presided over by the sanctimonious and wheelchair-bound patriarch Hamm (yes, ha ha). Put-upon......

Performance Spring continues over at Factory with The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a play written by celebrated Canadian novelist Yann Martel (pictured). Roccamatios is Martel's sole dramatic work, and the script is actually adapted from one of his 1993 short stories of the same name. Eric Goulem is the performer in the one man show, in which he tells the audience the story of his friend Paul who, when they were both in......

Photo of the cast of A Hand of Bridge rehearsing courtesy of Toronto Chamber Opera Productions. Always eager to reach new audiences, local opera companies have been pretty innovative in their offerings recently. First, the well-established Canadian Opera Company and Royal Conservatory of Music teamed up to throw turntablism and improvisation into the opera mix for the Hip Hopera. For busy people who are interested in opera but don't have three and a half......

Sexual Practices of the Japanese opens with actresses Manami Hara and Maiko Bae Yamamoto entering the stage as giggling schoolgirls, their pink kimonos open to reveal their wet dream school uniforms. They come right out to the audience and begin an informal survey based around the question "What are some things that come to mind when you associate the word 'sex' with the word 'Japan?'" It's a bold, funny and very successful piece of......

Photo of the Toronto Centre for the Arts by selosa On Thursday, Cameron Mackintosh’s revival of My Fair Lady makes its long-awaited Toronto debut. Just as significantly, however, its arrival brings a new lease on life for one of the city's finest major theatres.......

Going to see a staged reading is pretty much the theatrical equivalent of watching a live jam band, only in this case the target audience is not inhalant abusers. It’s like a play, but with no movement and featuring an additional character—Mr. or Mrs. Reads The Stage Directions. The HOTscrawlsfestival is a showcase of this often overlooked art form, which puts a focus on the writer and the actors, throwing away such frivolities as......

Fish Shak isn't what it used to be. Literally. Last fall, that place in Kensington that always advertised enigmatic "fish tea" turned itself into Bread & Circus Theatre Bar, one of the tiniest places in the city to catch a show and drink a beer. And Fish Shak Co-op is the name of the company whose production of Morris Panych's two-hander Lawrence and Holloman is currently enjoying its second run inside the former seafood......

Happy: A Very Gay Little Musical is the latest show to open at Buddies and also the first musical by Sky Gilbert the theatre has produced in 17 years. And what a tricky little number it is. Essentially a musical about people writing a musical about people writing a musical, Happy tells the story of Bob and Dave, a married gay couple writing a musical about themselves, and Sue, Bob's dramaturg/faghag extraordinaire. Some scenes......

December Man, currently playing at CanStage's Berkeley Street Theatre, is not a happy play. But it's won a Governor General's Award, so you know going in that it's going to be about a depressing moment in Canadian history. In this case, the moment in question is the 1989 Montreal Massacre. Rather than dramatizing the events themselves (which would be pretty tasteless), The December Man tells the personal story of one family and how the......

Well, the snow has melted, which means it must be about time for Factory to remount another George F. Walker show. This year, it's 1974's Beyond Mozambique, which hasn't been performed by Factory in thirty years. As the title implies, this early piece by the seminal Canadian playwright is many miles away from more popular, recent Walker plays, such as the Suburban Motel and East End Plays cycles, which typically focus on working-class Torontonians......

When it premiered in the 1980s, Fire, a "jukebox musical" set to the music of Jerry Lee Lewis and some Christian spirituals, was considered something of a sensation. Twenty years later, CanStage has decided to revive the show, bringing the multi-talented Ted Dykstra (pictured) back to the role of Cale Blackwell, a fictionalized stand-in for Lewis. While none of this sounds like a terrible idea, the current production of Fire which opened last night......

Alec Scott wrote a piece for this month's Toronto Life called "Flop Culture" that heavily criticizes the Canadian theatre scene. In the piece (which was strongly rebutted by Factory Theatre Artistic Director Ken Gass over at BlogTO), Scott notably snipes that if he has to "watch another mime-inspired adaptation of a Chekhov short story, [he] may spontaneously combust." This is almost certainly a dig at Theatre Smith-Gilmour, who have for almost a decade produced......

Photo by David Spigolon. Just over a decade ago in the basement of a SoHo café, playwright Eve Ensler began performing a series of moving and celebratory monologues dealing with the shame many women have over their physiology and sexuality. Since then, The Vagina Monologues has evolved to legendary fame, so far staged in 120 countries and translated into 45 languages. Ensler's success also inspired her to create V-Day, a non-profit, worldwide movement opposing......

Marjorie Chan's A Nanking Winter is a show about the 1937 genocide of the citizens of Nanking committed by the Japanese army. The atrocity, which claimed the lives of at least 300,000 Chinese, is an often-overlooked tragedy, and Chan's story focuses on a young woman named Irene who has written a book exposing the truth about the massacre. Chan's play is inspired by Iris Chang and her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten......

Michael Frayn's play Democracy, currently playing at Tarragon, is not always easy to follow. For some reason, this doesn't particularly matter. The second political drama set in Berlin in Tarragon's current season chronicles the rise and fall of Willy Brandt, West Germany's charismatic leader from 1969 until 1974, and is crammed full of politicians, spies, treaties and references to the nuances of Cold War-era Germany that may occasionally go over your head. But it......

This fjord is my fjord, this fjord is your fjord, From the valley Thörsmork to the geyser Strokkur, From Lake Lögurinn to Björk's house in Reykjaviík. Iceland was made for you and me. Our favourite Nordic country just got a little closer: Icelandair will launch direct flights between Toronto and Reykjaviík on May 2. To celebrate, Iceland Naturally is hosting a week-long Taste of Iceland festival from March 10–16 to promote modern Viking culture......

Evil Dead: The Musical has returned to Toronto. Again. It was actually all the way back in 2003 that it made its debut in the Tranzac Club. Back then, it was known as Evil Dead 1 & 2: The Musical, on account of the fact that it took the plot of both of the first two movies in the cult schlock-horror franchise. It was a quirky concept and the budget little-show-that-could found itself an......

Gossip no longer, culture vultures. We've finally got confirmation on CanStage's upcoming season. Like it or not, it looks like the rumours are true. As we reported before, the Bluma Appel Theatre's rather commercial lineup is entirely free of any Canadian-written shows, which has some folks in quite a tizzy. And as we suspected, CanStage is getting its CanCon through co-pros at the Berkeley Street Theatre. They're calling it The Berkeley Street Project, and......

Leave it to CanStage to somehow, in the midst of extreme internal upheaval what is maybe their darkest financial hour, be simultaneously running two of their strongest shows by far in recent memory. In fact, Palace of the End (which closes tomorrow night) and The Clean House (which runs until March 8) aren't just good shows for CanStage, they would be amazing shows for anywhere. Hopefully, they can win the audiences they deserve, but......

The history of Michael Hollingsworth's "epic play-cycle" The History of the Village of the Small Huts is almost as storied (and confusing) as the events they represent. Many are familiar with the plays only since 2000, when VideoCabaret's residency began in the back room at the Cameron House. Since then, they have produced a new Hollingsworth play every year (with the exception of 2004), making the currently-running Laurier the eighth play in the cycle.......