December Man, currently playing at CanStage's Berkeley Street Theatre, is not a happy play. But it's won a Governor General's Award, so you know going in that it's going to be about a depressing moment in Canadian history. In this case, the moment in question is the 1989 Montreal Massacre. Rather than dramatizing the events themselves (which would be pretty tasteless), The December Man tells the personal story of one family and how the......

When it premiered in the 1980s, Fire, a "jukebox musical" set to the music of Jerry Lee Lewis and some Christian spirituals, was considered something of a sensation. Twenty years later, CanStage has decided to revive the show, bringing the multi-talented Ted Dykstra (pictured) back to the role of Cale Blackwell, a fictionalized stand-in for Lewis. While none of this sounds like a terrible idea, the current production of Fire which opened last night......

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......

Want to hear the news that's been making its way around the water cooler at theatres all over town this afternoon? Well, do you remember back in May when we reported that actor/director David Storch would be promoted to Artistic Director of CanStage as a result of a recent regime change? Apparently, as of today, in only the seventh month of his directorship (which officially began on July 1, 2007), Storch has resigned from......

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......

In a strange moment of synchronicity, there are currently two musicals on the Toronto stage about a man who kills people and disposes of their bodies by feeding them to someone/something. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has been playing at the Princess of Wales since early November, and closes on December 9. Sweeney tells the story (which we are all likely to become more familiar with after Tim Burton's film adaptation......

Hannah Moscovitch's play East of Berlin is familiar territory for Tarragon's extra space. Remember Rosa Laborde's Léo, which was remounted last season? Well, here's another show in the same space that's set in South America, has political subject matter, spans the life of its main character, and features only two other actors, a man and a woman, both of whom he has sex with. This may be a bit of a tangent, but Torontoist......

Last night at the beautiful Winter Garden Theatre, the winners of the 28th Annual Dora Awards were announced in a ceremony hosted by the hilarious Rick Miller (of MacHomer and Bigger Than Jesus fame). The Doras are basically Canada's version of the Tonies, except you can't watch them on TV and see Molly Ringwald and John Stamos jazz-hand their way through a radical new interpretation of Hello, Dolly! As one might expect, the whole......

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......

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......

Canstage's heavily-hyped season-ending production of The Rocky Horror Show has finally opened at the Bluma. Last season, they finished things off with "revolutionary" 60s musical Hair, and this year they have opted for one of the 70s' key "revolutionary" musicals. Fortunately for the audiences, Rocky is an infinitely superior show to Hair in almost every way: the songs are catchier, the characters more memorable, the plot more engaging and Canstage's production, helmed by Ted......

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......

Morris Panych shows abound in this city. In the past few years alone, we've had Vigil, The Dishwashers, The Government Inspector, Habeas Corpus, Take Me Out, Amadeus, Sweeny Todd and The Girl in the Goldfish Bowl. After What Lies Before Us, The Overcoat is his second Canstage show of the year - and it's only February! He has become a theatre artist of a very divisive nature - some people love his whimsical physicality......

What Lies Before Us is the new play by Morris Panych, one of Toronto's theatre auteurs-du-jour. This one is only written by Panych, though, and directed by Jim Millan, ex-Artistic Director of Crow's Theatre. It's the story of two geographical surveyors stuck in the Rockies in pre-Railroad Canada with only a Chinese-speaking "manservant" to keep them company. The play suffers a bit from neither-fish-nor-fowl syndrome. The first act plays like an historical comedy and......

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......

Glorious! The True Story of Florence Foster Jenkins: The Worst Singer in the World has just opened for CanStage at the Bluma. It tells the tale of Ms. Jenkins, a soprano who died in 1944, shortly after giving a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall. The hook, to which the play's subtitle alludes, is that Florence Foster Jenkins was truly an awful singer. If you want to hear for yourself, check out this recording......

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......

We finally got around to seeing CanStage's anachronistic (and possibly mid-life crisis-induced) production of Hair last night. As the photos in the adverts promise, the cast is young, gorgeous, and sometimes scantily clad. The tagline in the adverts ("Now More Than Ever") is less accurate, however. Hair is very much a product of its time, a reaction to the draft and the Vietnam War, and a celebration of the free-lovin' hippy lifestyle. And while there......

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......

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......

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......

Death, sickness and resurrection in today's theatre round-up: -- Canada's theatre community is mourning Tom Patterson, the trade-magazine journalist who founded the Stratford Festival of Canada to save his economically-depressed home town in 1953. Patterson died yesterday after battling a long illness. -- If you're hoping to see Bat Boy: The Musical tonight, better call and check with the box office before swooping over to the Bathurst Street Theatre. Several cast members are reportedly "severely......

CanStage set the table for yet another tasty season in 2005-06, making the delicious and nutritious announcement yesterday. On the menu are Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, Caryl Churchill's A Number, Joan MacLeod's Homechild and much, much more. Expect Torontoist to be out with our bibs on and our spoons ready to slurp up some of Canada's brightest stage talent. Read more about the upcoming theatrical feast here.......

Torontoist went to see Small Returns at Theatre Passe Muraille last night and was interested to see that you can now buy tickets for TPM online at the brand-spanking-new www.artsboxoffice.ca. The bigger theatre companies like Mirvish and CanStage have had online ticket ordering for a little while, but it’s nice to see one of the smaller kids get in on the game. Toronto's theatre community has traditionally had a pretty poor showing on the ol'......

Only the hottest director in town right now with two shows running concurrently. There's the critically-acclaimed production of Helen's Necklace at the Tarragon, and Side by Side by Sondheim, which opened at CanStage last week and is not-so-critically-acclaimed. (Though -- as a sidenote -- Kamal Al-Solaylee's comment that he owns at least three recordings of "I Remember" shows that he is decidedly not the target audience for this let's-discover-Sondheim cabaret.)But wait! That's not all. Come......

Torontoist has a contest running to see who can fall asleep in the most Martha Henry plays. We didn't mean to initiate this contest. We were just very tired as we sat in the front row at the opening night of Copenhagen at the Winter Garden Theatre a few months back. Ms. Henry, a true veteran of Canadian stage and screen, was very good. It's just that the lighting was so mellow, and those fake......