Despite winning an armful of Dora's, poor ticket sales and a lukewarm critical reception means that the Lord of The Rings musical will be dying an untimely death come September, less than six months after it opened. Producer David Wallace blamed it on the show's British sensibility which we unsophisticated Canadians are just not able to understand. Ok, we paraphrased this last bit. He also blames Toronto critics, many of whom gave the production only......

Toronto's theatre critics are luke warm on the $28 million production of the LOTR musical. Both Richard Ouzounian at the Star and Kamal Al Solayee at the Globe give the play two stars. The CBC gives a nice little roundup of the play's shortcomings. Even the Sun's John Colbourn gives it a so so review with the headline "Middling Earth." Ouzounian calls the play dull and the music and script both problematic but he keeps......

Seems like it's just bad news piled upon bad news for the city's small theatres this fall... - First, falling closely on the heels of the closings of the Tim Sims Playhouse and the Poor Alex, Artword Theatre is told to vacate the premises of 75 Portland St by March (Hello condos!); - Then, the Great Hall at Dovercourt and Queen went on sale, putting the Theatre Centre's future in doubt (Hello condos?); - Now,......

For theatre in Toronto, anyway. Houses have reportedly been weak for World Stage: Flying Solo, leading the festival to offer reduced-price tickets to TAPA members. The Seven Lives of Simon Labrosse, a Carole Frechette play that Torontoist actually likes (don't get us started on Helen's Necklace), has been playing to underwhelming houses (except for the night the Governor General dropped by last week). And the cast of The Confessions of Punch and Judy has been......

Fired Globe and Mail columnist and avid bicyclist David Macfarlane’s new play Fishwrap (previously discussed on Torontoist here), which is about a "fictional" newspaper columnist and avid bicyclist who gets fired, opens in previews tonight at the Tarragon. According to eye’s on-the-ball theatre scribe Gord McLaughlin, the show includes a few not-so-subtle digs at Globe booster-in-chief Edward Greenspon and "that column by that awfully pretty young woman who writes about being an awfully pretty young......

Well, it was Toronto’s theatre critics, rather than the city’s theatrical performers, who were in the spotlight last week when Bat Boy: The Musical announced that the show was going to close a month ahead of schedule on March 19. Publicist Carrie Sager spelt out the reason for the early end in a press release:Toronto audiences have embraced the half-bat half-boy creature who leapt from the pages of Weekly World News to the stage of......

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......

The Tarragon Theatre’s got a couple of winners on its stages right now. In the Mainspace, David S. Young’s adaptation of Alistair MacLeod’s epic novel No Great Mischief is playing to well-deserved sold-out houses. Even on a Tuesday night this Torontoist theatregoer and his fake date had trouble finding seats next to each other, so do arrive early if you want a good placement. The reviews haven’t been very kind to the show about the......

Though familiar to most Montreal anglo-audiences, Jacob Richmond is a relative unknown in the Toronto theatre scene. The playwright's only appearance on Hogtown's stages to date has been in 2001 with his excellently-titled show The Qualities of Zero. (A show that critic Kamal Al-Solaylee liked then at Eye, and is still raving about in The Globe and Mail today.) Richmond, son of CanTheat VIPs Brian Richmond and Janet Wright, is a clever fella whose plays......