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 [...]

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 aren’t just good shows [...]

Palace of the End, Judith Thompson’s most recent play, is not only her most political work, it is also her best. As most auditioning actors in this country have discovered, Thompson’s greatest strength has always been her monologues, and in this piece, she uses that strength to its full advantage. In fact, she dispenses with [...]

The ever-excellent Spacing is celebrating the launch of their latest issue––an “eco-friendly” one, pictured above––next Monday, December 3rd. The launch will take place at the newly-green Berkeley Church (316 Queen Street East), which has been redesigned to have a green roof and (holy crap!) a 25-person-capacity treehouse that may or may not be usable come [...]

If you’re not already exhausted on September 7 after trying to check out M.I.A., Stars, The Hidden Cameras, k-os, and You Say Party! We Say Die! playing for free for U of T and Ryerson’s frosh, why not throw in a little free Yeah Yeah Yeahs for good measure? That night––if you’re still looking for [...]

Early in May, Torontoist made it out to a free Long Winters concert at the Berkley Church. The show was terrific—we scored John Roderick’s kazoo!—and, as it turns out, was just one episode in a series of shows put on for an HDTV channel in the States called called Rave HD. The aim of the [...]

American playwright Tony Kushner is one of the most important playwrights of contemporary theatre. He also remains conspicuously under-produced in our fair city. His landmark play Angels in America (since adapted into a popular HBO miniseries) has received only one Toronto production in CanStage’s 1996 season, noticeably absent from any season at Buddies. It’s unsurprising [...]

As the weather starts to get lovely, a band name has never seemed more appropriate. The Long Winters are playing a free show tonight in two hours and there are still (apparently) forty tickets left that they can give away. (We originally read about it on Chromewaves but were waiting to hear if there were [...]

Canstage‘s publicity department might have you convinced that the only thing on their plate right now is the upcoming Rocky Horror production heading to the Bluma at the end of the month, but tucked away at the Berkeley is a real theatrical gem that deserves its own audience. Lucy, written by local actor/playwright Damien Atkins, [...]

We’ve admired the work done by the people at WorldChanging for a long time. The blog has opened our eyes to the hundreds if not thousands of creative solutions out there to some very pressing problems. The fact that the blog is cautiously optimistic about the possibility of a green future is refreshing. So we [...]

Canstage opened its new season at the Bluma Appel with a much-ballyhooed production of Of Mice and Men (scooping Stratford’s 2007 season), which resulted in Torontoist’s inbox becoming full of e-mails requesting that we audition our dogs for the show (we declined). Things recommenced rather more innocuously at the Berkeley Street Theatre with the world [...]