If you haven’t rung in the new year with a show at the Next Stage Theatre Festival yet, well, you could very well be alone. Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the festival is having a smashing year: ticket sales are breaking records and the quality of the shows is consistently solid. Running until Sunday, January 15, [...]

After 42 plays and more than a dozen bands, the sun set on the 2011 SummerWorks Festival this past Sunday. And with about 20,000 audience members and 1,500 to 2,000 Music Series tickets sold, the 10-day celebration of progressive theatre, dance, and music seems to have weathered the storm of losing its government funding just fine.

SummerWorks! In case you haven't seen/heard/written that word enough in the past few weeks (because we certainly have), here it is again. SummerWorks! SummerWorks is one week away! Yes, there was a government funding crisis. Yes, it's allegedly because Stephen Harper and the Sun think the festival is sympathetic towards terrorists. Yes, now artists around the country are royally pissed, sparking a potential war between the Conservatives and the Creatives fought on the stage and in the media. Allegedly. And yes, all this is important. But let's not forget the real purpose of the SummerWorks Theatre Festival, shall we? The theatre (there's lots of music too, but we'll have more on that later).

Starting tonight, the 2011 Toronto Fringe Festival is unleashing 145 comedic, dramatic, solo, dance, musical, and kid's plays unto the city. And while actors, directors, and designers have 31 theatrical venues to use as their own peculiar performative playgrounds, this year it's not only theatre artists who get to have all the fun. The first ever Visual Fringe is bringing the fest's signature oddball eccentricity to the visual art scene too.

Tonight is going to be a good one: start off your evening at the Toronto Wine and Spirit Festival; soak up the atmosphere at the first night of a weekly outdoor film and music festival; check out the final show of a trio of Second City cast members, and witness one of the most talked-about fundraising events in Toronto. Amongst all that, Luminato events offer up even more fun.

Aren’t they stinkers? The faces of the sixth annual Toronto Festival of Clowns. Photo by Kathleen Finlay. Mention a clown, and most people either experience (a) fear that out of its joke flower pin will spray a poisonous gas, destroying everything it touches as part of a diabolical plan to spread evil from birthday party [...]

Franklin López speaks to the Cod Host audience in RCC 201 at Ryerson University. Photo by Steven James May. The world of documentaries is vast and varied, and the 2011 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival is showing them all⎯the political, the droll, the artsy, the horrific. In keeping with this trend, consider Hand [...]

FESTIVAL: Kensington Market’s Pedestrian Sunday is today! This month’s theme is “Water! Streams of Consciousness”—not to be confused with a tribute to Virginia Woolf’s life and death. The magic of water will be celebrated through sea shanty sing-alongs, message-in-a-bottle crafts, and something the event’s website refers to as a “water challenge.” Most importantly, no cars [...]