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......

Look at how cute the cast of The Drawer Boy is! And yes, that is the much-ballyhooed inflatable cow in the background. Have you continued to miss your chance to catch this new Canadian classic? Well, somebody must keep seeing it, because it's already been extended a couple of times and now plays until December 2. But if that somebody wasn't you, don't despair! The lovely people at Passe Muraille have decided to give......

Passe Muraille has been pushing its remount of the hugely popular Michael Healey hit The Drawer Boy with considerable fanfare, including leaving giant, inflatable barnyard animals outside the theatre for a few days last week. And why not? It's the most successful play to ever come out of that theatre this side of The Drowsy Chaperone, which has definitely grown a bit too gigantic for a return trip. But The Drawer Boy, with its......

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......

A Good Idea (In Theory) is a new play currently running at Passe Muraille that, as its title implies, is trying to do things a little differently. For starters, in lieu of a program, audience members are given a soundtrack CD. As the play's website explains, the idea behind the project came from the question: "What would happen if an award-winning stage play by a young Canadian was supported by a group of independent......

This weekend, Passe Muraille kicks off its new season by remounting one of its most successful shows ever: Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy. To celebrate the seminal piece of theatre's homecoming, Passe Muraille will be displaying a two-story-high inflatable cow outside the theatre tomorrow at noon. The cow is a reference to Daisy, a stressed-out milk machine who is integral to the play's plot (although no actual cows appear as characters in the play).......

Nicole Stamp's absolutely charming one-woman show BETTER PARTS plays tonight and for tonight only at the brand-new Bread and Circus Theatre Bar in Kensington Market at the corner of Baldwin and Augusta (we hadn't heard of it either!). You might recognize Stamp as the host of totally amazing kid quiz show Reach For The Top, but she's also an accomplished theatre artist who has been working BETTER PARTS for a few years now. The......

If one thing can be learned from the seedy-yet-tragic life of John C. Holmes, it's that bigger is not always better. So don't dismiss the SummerWorks Theatre Festival (which opens today) as a month-late, poor cousin of the Toronto Fringe simply because its complete playbill boasts only 40 shows, rather than Fringe's 140. There are a few reasons why SummerWorks is a grower and not a shower. For one thing, while successful Fringe applicants......

In a bold move on Tuesday night, city council voted in favour purchasing 16 Ryerson Avenue, the historic building which currently houses Theatre Passe Muraille. As part of the deal, Passe Muraille will lease the space from the city, ensuring that it is able to remain open indefinitely. The well-respected alternative theatre (the first of its kind in the city) has been experiencing financial difficulties of late, so this new deal allows it to......

As the Luminato Fest continues, two more George F. Walker plays open at the Factory. Escape from Happiness is the sequel to already-opened Better Living, while Tough! is another one of Walker's East End Plays, focusing on a different group of characters. The entire play, which is only about an hour and twenty minutes long, is composed of a single scene: a confrontation between three young people in a park. Tina knows Bobby cheated......

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......

Noble Parasites, the show closing Passe Muraille's 06/07 season, has the distinction not only of being the last play of the theatre's 39th season, but also of being the last play produced by the theatre under the leadership of longtime artistic director Layne Coleman. It was recently announced that Tarragon Associate Artistic Director Andy McKim will be taking over from Layne beginning next season. Happily for Layne, he is ending his term at Passe......

You may remember a recent Torontoist Valentine's Day contest, the prize for which was tickets for two to a Valentine's peformance of The Sheep and the Whale, currently playing at Passe Muraille. So, we'd be rather remiss not to provide any sort of review of the show after the fact. It is perhaps worth pointing out, though, that Torontoist had not seen the play at the time of the contest and had little notion......

Valentine's Day is less than a week away - are you still stuck for date ideas? Well, Torontoist, along with Theatre Passe Muraille and Random House, are here to help you out. We have five pairs of tickets to give away for the The Sheep and the Whale, the new play at Passe Muraille, for the night of February 14th at 8:00pm. The play tells the story of a stowaway on a freighter passing......

Are you excited to see this fall's Hysteria Festival? Gearing up for Rhubarb! in February? Well, stop already, because they aren't happening. Buddies in Bad Times, Toronto's favourite theatre/gay dance party, has scrapped its entire usual season in favour a series of performance creations, put into groups called Wave One, Wave Two and Wave Three (reminds us a little of what Passe Muraille did last season with Stage 3). But don't worry! This is......

Torontoist would like to extend our congratulations to the creative team of The Drowsy Chaperone, which just garnered a truckload of Tony Award nominations. The Drowsy Chaperone was written by the hilarious Torontonian team of Lisa Lambert, Greg Morrisson, Bob Martin and Don McKeller. The show got its start at the little old Toronto Fringe Festival back in the day, followed closely by a run at Theatre Passe Muraille, and it has been growing ever......

It's pretty much impossible to be a theatre enthusiast for over a decade (Torontoist started early) and not see a lot of productions of Hamlet. And sometimes we get cranky and cynical and grumble over our beer with our fellow cynical theatre school graduate chums about how it's enough already with the freaking Hamlet, and can everyone please just stop for awhile and, say, trot out Coriolanus instead. But that's just cynical beery grumbling. Because......

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,......

After a whirlwhind, SummerWorks-filled weekend (we saw nine shows in three days for Eye - whew!), Torontoist needed a couple of days to recover from the theatre marathon. But it was all worth the risk of brain implosion, for there are some really stellar pieces playing this at this year's festival, and you still have a whole weekend left to catch them. Here are our top three: First off, pictured above is the cast......

Half Life, the new play by mathematician/playwright John Mighton that opens in previews tonight at the Tarragon, is not a memory play – but it is a play about remembering and forgetting. It takes place an old folks home where an elderly man is reacquainted with an old flame from before the war. The couple falls back in love, but their respective children are sceptical that the two ever knew each other at all before......

When a cell phone goes off in the middle of a play, the logical person to hiss at is the miscreant who forgot to turn off his or her phone, of course. At the same time, however, we must recognize that to err is human. Even Torontoist has had something of ours beep at an inappropriate time once or twice. (It was a funeral. Yeeks.) Less understandable are theatre companies that still do not have......

Let's say you go to see Poochwater, the Dora-winning play by Winnipeg-born Mike McPhaden which opens in previews at the Theatre Passe Muraille tomorrow. And then, let's say you come out with a craving for something else from Winnipeg: Old Dutch Chips. Well, fear not! You're just a hop, skip and a jump away from Super Queen Market, the convenience store located at 596 Queen St. W. Conveniently close to both Theatre Passe Muraille AND......

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'......

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......