Louis Train

I reckon it’s a stroke of producing genius to launch a run of DEATHTRAP, Ira Levin’s classic meta-thriller, on the same day that the Toronto Fringe Festival kicks off. Fringe plays tend to be edgy, experimental, personal, and always of their moment; DEATHTRAP, a sturdy two-acter about a playwright whose idea for a murder mystery becomes reality, is safe, comfortable. Fringe is hot sauce; DEATHTRAP is a fine mayonnaise.

If KING GILGAMESH & THE MAN OF THE WILD doesn’t bring it with the plot, it more than delivers on music.

In BLINDNESS, people resort immediately to cruelty and selfishness. Not only have they lost their decency, Stephens’ script has deprived them of everything else that makes us human: culture, religion, art, and love have been stripped away from the story, leaving nothing but animalistic urges.

I was born too late to enjoy disco, too early to quite understand what Billie Eilish is. Fortunately, good music knows no generation, and when a?oeEnough is Enougha?? comes on the playlist, I expect everyone from ages 8-80 to jump up and dance with me. And, indeed, we did dance at SUMMER: The Donna Summer musical, visiting Toronto now under the auspices of Mirvish at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical inspired by the pointillist painting 'A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte', has always felt to me like a you-had-to-be-there musical.

OIL, which premiered last night at Geary Lane, is an epic story, an eat-before-you-arrive play that will take up your evening and take over your mind. It consists of five vignettes across five periods of history, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing into a bleak, imagined future. The scenes are united by theme - oil, modernity, ambition, isolation - and character: each scene follows a woman called May, a mother or mother-to-be, who only wants the best for her child.

When the musical OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR! premiered in London, in the 1960s, World War One was relatively fresh in the minds of the audience, most having either lived through it or being the child of someone who had. Today, the show, which strings together British songs from the Great War through a series of comical and melodramatic vignettes, feels neither contemporary nor historical. In its new treatment at Hart House Theatre, Autumn Smith has tried to breathe twenty-first century life into the show through the contemporary metaphor of war as a video game, and through unusual and edgy audio-video. The result is a show that is conceptually confused, but aesthetically rather charming.

SECRET LIFE OF A MOTHER is a simple, sweet, agonising, and intimate work of autobiographical theatre by some of Toronto's best theatre talent. With a script (mostly) by Hannah Moscovitch and (mostly) starring Maev Beaty, SECRET LIFE offers an inward look at the pains and paradoxes of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.

In the opening scene of THIS WAS THE WORLD, on now at Tarragon Theatre, a law professor (R.H. Thomson) meets with his supervisor (Kim Nelson) to discuss a problematic statement he made in class. a?oeI apologised immediatelya??, he insists, but the fact that he's reclining with his feet up on his briefcase suggests he is anything but apologetic. His supervisor (we later learn she is the associate dean) also informs him that the department has gone ahead with the hiring of a new law professor, an Indigenous woman, despite his complaints that she is unintelligent and unimaginative. It's important, the dean argues, Canada's legal system include more Indigenous perspectives.

The theatre shook with applause for Jully Black last night as she opened the musical CAROLINE, OR CHANGE at the Winter Garden Theatre. She was one of many in the cast to give powerhouse performances in a dramatically and musically challenging show.

Lucius is an exuberant, charismatic serial killer who claims to have found God while incarcerated. His exact religious philosophy is unclear - he preaches justice but cannot account for his own atrocities.  Angel was arrested for shooting the leader of a dangerous religious cult. He doesn't think he's done anything wrong, but he lacks Lucius'  energy and confidence; whereas Lucius can convince himself - and others - that God loves all sinners, Angel is plagued by doubts, first in the competence of his attorney, and, eventually, in himself.

MARJORIE PRIME is set some 30 years in the future, after scientists have invented Primes, charmingly lifelike holographic representations of dead people you can buy to keep you company after a loss. Say your husband's passed away - I'm so sorry, but look! here he is, or something that looks and talks just like him. (It is the exact premise of the Black Mirror episode a?oeBe Right Backa??, which first aired some two years before MARJORIE PRIME premiered off-Broadway, in 2015.)

Theatre Passe Muraille kicks off 2020 with an Arabic-language double-bill. Is it novelty or innovation? A bit of both, I think.

SWEAT is a work of social realism, that controversial genre of fiction, film, and drama that tries to be romance and documentary all in one. It casts light on an often ignored part of American society, that is, those disenchanted workers - and ex-workers - whose dreams have been disrupted by some thirty-odd years of decline in the country's once robust manufacturing industry. For those of us with a New York Times subscription, SWEAT will feel like a continuation of a familiar trope, a vivid illustration of an idea that's been described to us again and again, especially more frequently since 2016. SWEAT seems to be answering the question: Who are these angry, bitter people who have set the country on its current course, and how did they get that way?

EVERY SILVER LINING is about being a teenager, and cancer. Clara (Allison Wither, who also composed the music and wrote the lyrics) is a teenager. She reads books, goes swimming, and ignores her friends. Her brother, Andrew (Daniel Karp) is dying of leukemia.

As in the best novels by Philip Roth, playwright Hannah Moscovitch delights in convincing us that her character's predatory behaviour is a minor flaw, not that bad in context, and that he's not that much worse, really than anyone else. Annie is intelligent, independent, has some sexual experience; it's not as though Jon's screwing a child. And come on, he's only human. 

Jess is torn between her obligations to her family and her dream of being a soccer star. Everyone tells her she has what it takes to make it big - except her parents, who remind her that her commitment, first and foremost, should be to her family. I won't tell you how BEND ITa?? ends, suffice to say that this is an uplifting musical, more Hairspray than Les Mis, and everyone, on stage and in the audience, ends up getting what they want.

Patrick Combs was knee-deep in credit card debt when he got a piece of junk mail that caught his eye - a phony cheque for nearly $100,000. He knew the bank would never cash it, but he had nothing better to do, so he popped it into an ATM and - lo and behold, it cleared. Now Patrick Combs, slacker was Patrick Combs, celebrity, and public enemy number one to his bank, which did everything in its power to threaten and entice him into giving the money back.

TORONTO, I LOVE YOU has been playing on and off for a while now but, like the 6ix itself, the story is always changing. At the start of each show, the cast takes a few suggestions (Koreatown! The Alexandria Park pool!) so every night the action ends up somewhere different.

Thorne and Mullen have a natural stage chemistry, an easy back-and-forth that lets them bounce dialogue and jokes off each other like a game of table tennis. They are joined in I BE LIKE.... by Gavin Pounds, who opens the show with a stellar bit of inspirational comedy, and is a welcome addition to each scene he is in.