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......

Some biggish news announced this week in regards to two of this city's major theatres: Passe Muraille and CanStage (oh, I'm sorry, I mean "The Canadian Stage Company"—more on that later). Let's start with Passe Muraille, the plucky underdog. Probably the biggest morceau is that they're kicking off their 40th season with a remount of Michael Healey's ridiculously successful The Drawer Boy. If you missed all the (admittedly numerous) previous opportunities to see this which......

A lot of the Big Ticket shows in town these days are shows that we've had the chance to see before. This is not a bad thing. There's nothing more exciting than seeing a brand new play that blows your mind, but it's also good to know that if a play is good enough, it can have a life that extends long after its initial run. Probably the highest-profile of these remounts is John......

Last night we attended the opening of Joan MacLeod's highly anticipated (by us, anyway) new play Homechild, CanStage's first production of 2006. The title refers to the thousands of children who were sent from Scotland to work on Canadian farms between 1868 and 1930 - they were known as "home children", and it is thought that a good tenth of today's Canadian population is made up of their descendents. But MacLeod's play isn't a sweeping......

Torontoist attended the much-touted opening of CanStage's season last night - Alan Bennett's 1973 sex farce Habeas Corpus. We've long been great admirers of Morris Panych, and generally find his work to be some of the most interesting on Toronto's stages, and we naturally want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but we neither share nor understand his fondness for Alan Bennett. The world of Habeas Corpus is full of doctors who......