Results tagged “chrisabraham”

This has been a week for big announcements in theatre. First off, Brendan Healy has been appointed as new artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, taking over from the departing David Oiye. And just this morning, Tarragon Theatre announced the winner of their inaugural Under 30 National Playwriting contest: Evan Placey for his play Mother of Him.

Crows Theatre has Toronto under siege. First, there was the company's much-ballyhooed remount of I, Claudia, which has just been extended due to popular demand. Then, last weekend, the company hosted The Directors' Showcase & Exchange, which involved a fascinating panel discussion by some of the country's most prolific and accomplished theatre directors. It also featured the performance of several plays, including a reading of Caryl Churchill's controversial new work Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. Written in January as a response to the recent attack on Gaza, the ten-minute piece has been highly acclaimed by some, and dismissed as anti-Semitic propaganda by others, including B'nai Brith, which tried to protest the work's being performed in Toronto. We found the piece powerful, tragic, and ultimately very human, less interested in pointing fingers than drawing attention to the complexity and the sadness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Claudia may be Canada's favourite official pre-teen. The star of Kristen Thomson's one-woman masterpiece, I, Claudia, has been delighting audiences for the better part of a decade. Since the play's 2001 premiere at Tarragon Theatre, it's toured the country, won multiple awards, been adapted into a wonderful film for CBC's (now defunct) Opening Night series, and, most recently, been performed by actors other than Thomson. Now, it's back to Toronto with a remount that opened last week at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts.

Each week, we take a look at Toronto's theatre scene and tell you which shows are worth checking out.

Another month, another Daniel Brooks show at Buddies. Technically, this remount of the Daniel Brooks/Guillermo Verdecchia-written show that last appeared in Toronto in 1998 is directed by Chris Abraham, but it has Brooks' fingerprints all over it. And what that means is a masterful use of lighting and sound that is almost worth the price of admissions alone.