Mike was that kid who walked into the high school stage crew booth, saw the lighting board, and went ooooooooooooh. Now that he’s (mostly) all grown up, Mike keeps his foot in the door as a community-theatre producer, stage manager and administrator. In the audience, he’s a tremendous sucker for satire and parody, for improvisational and sketch-driven comedy, for farce and pantomime, and for cabaret of all types. His happiest Toronto theatrical memory is (re) Birth: E. E. Cummings in Song.
Lower Ossington Theatre gets packed with good vibes in this prom-themed Toronto production
The Marvelous Wonderettes, playing at the Lower Ossington Theatre, is packed full of songs, colour, feeling and good vibes. We visit a high school gymnasium on prom night, and our masters of ceremony are the school’s award-winning songleaders, a quartet of bright young women with their futures ahead of them—if they can keep from throttling each other first. Who’ll be elected Prom Queen? Who’ll end up with the playboy Johnny? Will Missy consummate her crush on a mystery man? And where will the world lead our heroines?
A Robin Hood of glee, energy and verve, at Toronto’s Hart House Theatre
Hart House‘s 2012/2013 season has surprised me for one key reason: the movement. Maybe it’s Artistic Director Jeremy Hutton’s background in musicals and fight choreography bubbling to the surface, but everything they’ve done has been filled with obvious attention to space, positioning, physicality and motion. With Robin Hood: The Legendary Musical Comedy, this all comes to a head. It’s nearly three hours of music and dance, and it’s every bit as spectacular as it ought to be.
The Second City presents a hilarious and mischievous holiday show in Toronto
It’s December in Toronto, which brings the annual return of three holiday traditions: skating accidents at Nathan Phillips Square; fistfights in the crowded aisles of the Eaton Centre; and massive queues to get into the latest show at The Second City. This year’s offering, The Nut-Cracking Holiday Revue, is all-new, all-live, and very, very funny.
Canadian theatre is in good hands with Panfish Productions’ New Play Contest in Toronto
Walking home from the final night of the Panfish Productions New Play Contest, I had the most wonderful feeling. Yes, yes, three nights of good theatre—and that’s fantastic. But more importantly, this was an opportunity to look into the future: to explore the creative output of some of our city’s best emergent playwrights.
