Rebecca Northan in her Secret Salon studio space. Photo by Joel Charlebois/Torontoist. Rebecca Northan, who wears many hats (and occasionally, a red clown nose), had an annus mirabilis in 2010. A spring revival of her one woman production, Blind Date, in which “Mimi” brings an unsuspecting audience member onstage to be her date for the [...]

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 [...]

Reg Hartt, everyone’s favourite dude with a movie theatre in his basement, is promoting the new(ish) film version of off-Broadway tittilator Naked Boys Singing by screening a mini Queer Film Festival at the Cineforum over the next few weeks. Each Thursday night for the next four weeks, he’ll screen Naked Boys (which is exactly what [...]

Toronto seems to get its annual dose of legendary outsider filmmaker John Waters around this time. A couple of years back he was hosting the TIFF gala of his latest film, A Dirty Shame, then in late 2006, he could be found gallivanting around Roncesvalles overseeing the transformation—for good or ill—of his 1988 comedy, Hairspray, [...]

As Torontoist reported yesterday, the Hummingbird Centre is changing its name to the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, marking the second change in corporate naming rights during the venue’s half-century existence. Support of the site has ranged from a philanthropic brewer (O’Keefe Brewing head E.P. Taylor) to a multinational media company. As today’s ad [...]

Last night, the seats of Harbourfront Centre’s studio theatre were packed with a mix of middle-aged art aficionados and well-coiffed hip, young homos all dying to see Francesco Vezzoli give a lecture and screen his notorious Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula. Vezzoli is an Italian artist known for his work in video [...]

We don’t know about where you are, but it seems like spring can’t decide whether or not to happen. Some days are warm, some days are cold, and sometimes you aren’t sure which. Baseball may have started up (and soccer/football winding down) but it still seems cold out there. Unless it’s not. Anyway, onto the [...]

Almost 200 men auditioned to be the new faces of Harlequin romance novels at a Toronto casting house on Saturday. Studies showed that Harlequin’s main readership (female in their mid-40′s) were “upset when slight, young cover models clashed with the brawny, mature heroes described within [the books themselves].” Canada’s Next Top Harlequin Cover Model, anyone? [...]

Toronto theatre crowds like to think of themselves as pretty brainy; quick to criticize stiff performances and dead box office sales, but if you’re of the lowbrow type, then wait no morgue: Evil Dead: The Musical has risen again for another run—or slow walk—at the Diesel Playhouse. When it opened originally in our fair city, [...]

Ah, “beautiful music.” A term rarely attached to current radio formats, this middle-of-the-road mix was the mainstay of many powerhouse radio stations in the 1970s. Two versions of the format tended to exist: • Stations that played mainly light instrumentals, covers of popular tunes, Mantovani and Percy Faith, all to be used as inoffensive background [...]