Up until the morning of July 31, 2010, Catherine Frid's Homegrown was just another one of the 42 plays produced by The SummerWorks Theatre Festival that year. But mere days before the show was to open, it was thrust into the media's spotlight under the headline "Sympathy for the Devil." Suddenly, Homegrown was no longer just a developing piece about a woman's relationship with an accused terrorist associated with the Toronto 18—it became the city's symbol for the battle between artists and Conservative politics. This past Friday, almost a year later, an event to recuperate the losses of SummerWorks's unanticipated denial of government funding (commonly believed to be in direct response to the play itself), made Homegrown all of Canada's.

For a guy who admits he’s not really the outdoorsy type, Joel McConvey seems pretty at home in High Park. He even colour-coordinates. Photo by Corbin Smith/Torontoist. On a gloomy and unseasonably chilly day in mid-May, we stand next to Joel McConvey on a hill in High Park, our eyes squinty and backs slightly hunched [...]

Arcade Fire chats with CTV’s Tanya Kim at the 2011 Juno Awards. Canadian music is world-class stuff, that’s no secret. Unfortunately, not everything or everyone that has represented the True North Strong and Free on the global sales charts have been in tune with the tastes of listeners back home. And, even worse, the same [...]

Oshawa: amazing. Photo by Carnotzet from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Oshawa, you big, adorable, patriotic lug, your heart really is in the right place. But seriously, calm down or you’re going to pull something. You’d think that complaining shoppers at the Five Points Mall—all one of them, or possibly two, as the Star reported this [...]

NDP charges Liberals “deceptive” over nuclear energy plans. Apparently the nuclear energy commitments the provincial government has made require almost four times the nuclear energy generation capability that their promised plant could deliver, unless the plant itself was four times larger than the Darlington plant. This is all part of the current clever government plan [...]

Photo by David Spigolon. Just over a decade ago in the basement of a SoHo café, playwright Eve Ensler began performing a series of moving and celebratory monologues dealing with the shame many women have over their physiology and sexuality. Since then, The Vagina Monologues has evolved to legendary fame, so far staged in 120 [...]

Plagued by complaints, the City of Toronto has finally gotten around to ticketing some homeowners who don’t clear the snow in front of their property. A city spokesperson said they prefer not to send out inspectors in the winter because it’s so difficult to get around. Anxious to cement a reputation for self-serving indifference to [...]