Theatre

The Toronto Fringe Festival has been bringing laughs, surprises and cutting-edge theatre to Toronto for 25 years. Tickets are now on sale for this year’s event. The 2013 Toronto Fringe Festival includes 148 shows in 35 venues including bars, back alleys, churches and a coin laundromat.

The SummerWorks Performance Festival has announced the selection of their 2013 artists in residence: Sook-Yin Lee, Benjamin Kamino and Adam Litovitz. Led by broadcaster, filmmaker, musician and actor Sook-Yin Lee, the trio will spend their three-week residency working on their performance piece How Can I Forget? The work was originally made as part of a partnership with the 2013 Rhubarb Festival.

In 1968, director George A. Romero, the “Godfather of Zombies”, brought a new kind of monster to the realm of horror. The zombies, or ghouls, in Night of the Living Dead, were fresh–or as fresh as dead bodies can get–and his film helped spawn a whole new genre of horror; the splatter film.

William B. Davis is one of the most recognizable actors I have had the good fortune of interviewing. From his face to his distinct voice, Davis’ is unforgettable, and it’s largely thanks to the role that made him a star around the world–the very memorable Cigarette Smoking Man, or Cancer Man, in The X-Files series.

A juried festival of independent theatre, Toronto’s Summerworks blooms in August every year, offering a bouquet of dramatic delights. Here are a few reviews.

The new work by acclaimed playwright Hannah Moscovitch (The Russian Play) doesn’t disappoint as it leads the audience through an uncomfortable story that, like the car accident, we can’t turn away from. Actor Joe Cobden is superb as the storyteller, Aaron, a long suffering teenage brother whose adopted sister Claire (played by Michelle Monteith with a wonderful reined-in neurotic flourish) is emotionally disturbed due to an early childhood featuring unnamed abuses that are never spelled out but only alluded to (making them all the more horrifying).

Theatre critic Susan Down continues her reviews from the 2011 Toronto Fringe Festival, which runs until July 17 in venues across Toronto. Reviews include: The Sparrow and the Mouse: Creating the Music of Edith Piaf, So I Married a Muslim, Bloom, and Wishes Are Horses.

Theatre critic Susan Down wades deep into the 2011 Toronto Fringe Festival, which runs until July 17 in venues across the city. Reviews include: Pitch Blond, Finally: An Epic Cycle, Mary’s Wedding, Man on My Face, The Godot Cycle, She Said What, and Limbo.

As I was sitting in a comfortable seat in the Avalon Theatre in the Fallsview Casino and Hotel in Niagara Falls on a warm, clear June evening, I had to ask myself a few times over the course of two hours if I was really watching what I was seeing on the stage in front of me.

Edward Albee‘s seminal play about the degradation of American marriage and ethics is another vehicle for a successful Soulpepper event. It’s a supremely difficult task to follow an act like Mike Nichols’ movie adaptation starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, whose famously tempestuous marriage imitated Albee’s plot.

Difficult, yes, but not impossible.