Results tagged “soulpepper”

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.

We're back! Drama Club's been taking it easy over the summer, but now that September has rolled around, it's back to school (ew, as if!) and back to the theatre. Not that theatre picks up and leaves town for the summer the way it used to. Sure, most of the playhouses go on hiatus, but between Fringe, SummerWorks, Luminato, and independent productions, there's always something you can go see. Which brings us to Soulpepper, a local oddity in its decision to program a February–December season, rather than a September–May one. The poor ushers at the Young Centre barely had any cottage time at all this year, what with the summertime productions of Loot, Awake and Sing!, Of the Fields, Lately, and Billy Bishop Goes to War.

There's a certain kind of boy—and we're not saying it's every boy—who can recite all the words to the Will you go to lunch? scene from Glengarry Glen Ross from memory. Although the 1992 film, featuring an all-star, all-machismo cast filled with the likes of Alan Arkin, Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Jack Lemmon, and Kevin Spacey, was more of a cult-hit than a blockbuster, it has still inspired a pretty devoted (and probably pretty male) group of followers, who have nicknamed the cuss-filled real-estate-agent drama "Death of a Fuckin' Salesman." In the past couple of years, there has been a serious glut of popular (and in some cases, not-so-popular) movies finding their way onto the Toronto stage. CanStage has been a pretty serious offender this season, with one show based on a popular movie, and two others whose runs coincided with their Oscar-nominated adaptations' screen dates. Mirvish's upcoming season seems to be almost entirely populated with shows based on existing popular movies and TV shows. And last night, Soulpepper's stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross opened at the Young Centre. To be fair, David Mamet's Pullitzer Prize–winning play the film was based on debuted on Broadway almost a decade before the film was made, so it may not be entirely fair to include it as an example of this movies-on-stage trend. However, we're sure that more than one person in the crowd last night was wondering when Alec Baldwin's character was going to show up.

Each week, Drama Club looks at Toronto's theatre scene and tells you which shows are worth checking out.

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

When Dylan Thomas began writing Under Milk Wood, his famous "play for voices" about the sleepy Welsh community of Llareggub and its inhabitants, he intended it to be performed as a radio play with a full cast of actors. Over the years, the play has been both recorded and performed for stage in a variety of productions (including a film version with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole), sometimes with a cast as large as fifty. The Soulpepper version now playing at the Young Centre, a revival of last year's popular production, features a sole actor, Kenneth Welsh, performing every single role.

The Way of the World is a comedy, but it’s also a difficult play, with a complicated plot, a lot of characters, and stories within stories involving finance and property. It takes deft direction and clear exposition to move past the details of William Congreve’s 1700 work without getting bogged down. The current Soulpepper/National Arts Centre co-production playing at the Young Centre is only partly successful in untangling the knotty details; while there are impressive performances by a stellar ensemble cast, the sum is never greater than its parts. Chuckles, smirks, and guffaws aside, you might actually find yourself… bored.

Theatre in Toronto doens't get much better than the current Soulpepper remount of their successful 2001-2002 production of Uncle Vanya, on at the Young Centre until Saturday.

Even if you’re sick of hearing about war stories in the news, there’s no denying they can make for powerful drama, particularly when the story onstage is about those who tell those grim stories for a living.

Nominees for the 29th annual Dora Mavor Moore Awards were announced yesterday morning at the Sony Centre. Over muffins and coffee, various TAPA members, politicians, and mainstays of the Toronto theatre scene presented three awards and read off a long list of those eligible for taking home the coveted (if heavy) jesters come June 30th. This year’s nominee list, for the most part, is a rich cross-section of the Toronto theatre-going scene over the past year.

Soulpepper continues its year-round season with Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize–winning drama 'Night, Mother. Written after the suicide of one of Norman's close friends, this quiet, personal drama tells the story of a mother and daughter's strained relationship in a single scene, at the beginning of which the daughter informs the mother that she will be killing herself that night. The play not only consists of the events that take place between this revelation and the act itself, which involves the mother, Thelma, pleading for the daughter, Jessie, to change her mind, but also the simple, mundane events of a typical night in. The mother-daughter dynamic owes more than a little to Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, and the play can almost be read as a the further adventures of Laura and Amanda Wingfield.

Soulpepper, that scrappy little theatre company from The Distillery, just released their 2008 schedule. If you haven't seen a Soulpepper play before, you've been missing out on some of the best theatre this city has to offer. This past season was one of Soulpepper’s greatest. Among other fantastic shows, the company put on an astounding rendition of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera and a hilarious staging of William Saroyan’s Time of Your Life. They also...