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 is getting its CanCon through co-pros at the Berkeley Street Theatre. They're calling it The Berkeley Street Project, and......

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 8) aren't just good shows for CanStage, they would be amazing shows for anywhere. Hopefully, they can win the audiences they deserve, but......

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 character interaction altogether and breaks her show into three long monologues, each spoken by someone who has been greatly......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Each Sunday, the editors of every site—from LAist to Londonist—choose their most interesting article, a list which is compiled into the network-wide feature Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse. A towering bench mysteriously appeared in Manhattan, and New York City officials are baffled. Chicago tragically lost one of its most recognizable neighborhood icons, the pigeon man of Lincoln Square.The Los Angeles Police Department left a body......

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 Monday. Doors open at 8 p.m. and admission is free, with copies of the magazine on sale at the......

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 time to kill and bands to see––Vice, Rimmel London, and CKIN2U are hosting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Berkeley......

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 show is to be something like "Sessions at West 45th," with a focus on capturing up-and-coming indie bands before......

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 then, in a way, that Mercury Stage's production of Homebody/Kabul at the Berkeley Street Theatre, a play that caused......

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 enough tickets left to let our readers know.) If last October's show at Lee's was any indication, tonight's performance......

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, is about a thirteen-year-old autistic girl who has to go live with a mother who abandoned her as a......

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 were thrilled when we found out earlier this year that they were publishing a book. We've seen the handsome volume......

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 premiere of The Story of My Life, a self-labelled "small musical." The two-hander is all about friendship and death. Or......

Bloggers, festivalgoers, volunteers and Yorkville shopkeepers can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there's still plenty of fest left. We've been picking up blog chatter about Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. TIFF Dilletante wonders why so many French guests have flaked out on this year's festival. We're just happy that Juliet Binoche is here. Guy Leshinski goes on the trail of TIFF autograph hunters. If you have any energy left, we......

Ronnie Burkett has long been the patron saint of puppeteers - living proof that one can make a living by pulling strings. His marionettes are consistently beautiful, complex characters peering out of their carved faces, and his multi-faceted storytelling is always well-served by his theatrical ingenuity. Burkett's latest offering, 10 Days on Earth, is by far his most restrained show yet. It tells the story of Darrell, a developmentally disabled 50-year-old man with the mind......

Sorry we're so slow getting started today. This September-in-November weather groove has us thoroughly confused. Anyway, CanStage continues their trend of staging pretty much anything that has been successful on the stages of New York City in the past four years (not that we're complaining; we thought Take Me Out and Urinetown were the best shows we'd seen at the Bluma in ages) with Edward Albee's 2002 Tony Award-winning play The Goat, or Who is......

Dear Theatre Dude, I don't have anything to do tonight and was hoping to catch a play that explored psychoanalysis, nature and capitalism. If possible, I'd like said play to do this through story, question sessions and video projections. Thanks, Hard for Avant-Garde Yo HAG, You should, like, totally check out Revolutions in Therapy, which opens in previews tonight at Artword Theatre. Written and directed by Nadia Ross and Jacob Wren, RiT is totally like......

Une oeuvre du dramaturge Michel Tremblay, Impératif Présent, est présenté du Théâtre Français de Toronto (TfT) du 5 au 15 mai. C’est l’histoire de Alex et Claude, père et fils du Vrai monde ? trente ans plus tard. Habituellement, les femmes sont très présentes dans l’œuvre de Tremblay. Bien que les femmes rôdent toujours dans l'imaginaire de Tremblay, cette fois-ci, c'est la relation père-fils qui est mise en évidence. Le synopsis du TfT souligne :......

Molière est passé maître dans l'art de ridiculiser ses contemporains. Et il le fait avec grand génie et se moque du snobisme de Monsieur Jourdain dans le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, une pièce qui est actuellement présentée par le Théâtre Français de Toronto (TfT). Guy Mignault, directeur artistique du TfT affirme à l’Express de Toronto : «Le personnage du bourgeois gentilhomme, est une espèce de nouveau riche. Actuellement, c'est l'argent qui mène le monde. Ce bonhomme-là est......

Le 19 novembre dernier, Torontoist vous alléguait que du 1er au 5 décembre 2004 le Théâtre français de Toronto (TfT) produirait un spectacle du clown SOL sur les planches du théâtre Berkeley. Marc Favreau (SOL) a fait ses débuts il y a 46 ans au petit écran et avec le clown Gobelet. Il a cependant commencé sa carrière solo en 1972. Depuis, il nous fait connaître maintes subtilités de la langue française avec des......

À la suite d’un congrès d’affaire au Moyen Orient, Hélène décide d’y rester pour y retrouver son collier de perles en plastique déposé sur un fil transparent; un collier évanescent le vendeur a-t-il dit. L’importance de ce collier auquel Hélène semble tant attaché nous paraît si mince comparé à la situation de ceux qui ont vécu la guerre dans ce pays en revitalisation. La pièce de la dramaturge québécoise Carole Fréchette est actuellement présentée......