FILM: Andrew Fleming's 1999 comedy Dick is screening tonight as part of the Fido-sponsored Free Flicks series at the Harbourfront Centre. In case you don't know, the movie is about two teenage girls (played effortlessly by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) hired as the official dog-walkers of President Richard Nixon, in an attempt to conceal their knowledge of the Watergate scandal. Except, funny! Sirius Stage at the Harbourfront Centre (235 Queens Quay West), 9 p.m.,......

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......

We really hope you saw The Swearing Jar by Kate Hewlett (pictured) at the Fringe, because it just had its last performance yesterday evening. Funny, compelling, and at times heartbreakingly sad, Hewlett's top-notch script (developed in the 2007 Tarragon Playwrights Unit) was brilliantly brought to life with Geoffrey Pounsett's direction and an absolutely perfect cast. Carey and Simon are a happy young couple about to become parents. Without giving too much away, there is......

Domestic is an absolutely insane black comedy about a bright-eyed 50s housewife who has to deal with an encyclopedia salesman who keeps dying in her kitchen, pesky phone calls from someone named "God" who keeps talking about the end of the world and her inability to have enough cat food. Also, a pair of fast-talking weirdos with faux British accents (pictured) keep bursting into her home and she may or may not have murdered......

When Antonin Artaud wrote Theatre and Its Double, the manifesto for his so-called Theatre of Cruelty, he called for the actors to bleed on the audience as well as a bunch of other things that are probably best left interpreted metaphorically. Surely, Glen Callendar's Transcendental Masturbation, now playing at the Fringe, was not exactly what he had in mind? During last night's performance, during a "peeling" joke gone awry, Callendar wound up removing not......

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......

Caterwaul Theatre's How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Abortion, currently playing at the Fringe, is a heartfelt and hilarious dark comedy about a devout Christian named Esther who lives a happy existence with her husband in a small religious community, but also happens to run a secret midnight abortion clinic under the name "Medea's Buy and Sell." Things get complicated when a splinter cell within her Bible study group hears about the......

The name "TJ Dawe" has become ubiquitous at the Fringe. In any given summer, it seems like not only are we bound to see one of his famous one-man shows, but probably when we search through our programs at the end of various other shows we will undoubtedly discover that he has directed them or been in some way involved. This summer is no different. Not only is his new 90 minute one-man show......

David, a show playing at this year's Fringe, opens with a video projection of a man taking a shower. This should come as little surprise for anyone who's seen the play's racy poster (although, don't be fooled into thinking you'll get to gawk at a nude dude, the super NSFW trailer on their website shows more nudity than the actual play). The shower scene segues into a light show with a pre-recorded voice over......

Not all Fringe shows happen at the main or studio spaces of the big three (Tarragon, Muraille, Factory); some are in school basements (like Eve Ensler’s A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and a Prayer), others are in smaller theatres (like the Robert Gill or Glen Morris), and others take place in bars. The Cameron has the Christian Republic Fundraiser in Dayton Tennessee, Paupers has Opera on the Rocks, and Bread and Circus has The......

Thick-Skinned is a play by first-time writer Laura Ross about Scleroderma, a rare and sometimes debilitating disease. Susie is a painter who always thought she just had cold hands until she gets diagnosed with a condition her doctor doesn't seem to know more about than she does. But pride gets in the way of her being able to fully share the full details of her condition with her roommate Ember or her new boyfriend......

It may be too early to call, but Lupe: Undone might just be the funniest thing at this year's Fringe. This completely insane one-woman show starring Melissa D'Agostino as a charismatic South American woman waiting for her lover, David Mirvish, in the alley behind Honest Ed's is one of the freshest, weirdest, and utterly charming pieces of theatre we've seen in a while. Lupe enters the scene scaling down a fire escape in a......

Sky Gilbert's Ladylike, a new one-act play written specifically for Canada's favourite trans woman, Nina Arsenault, comes to us by way of a well-received run in Hamilton. The play—in which Arsenault's character mostly addresses the audience (and occasionally her boyfriend, played by Wes Berger) on subjects like her family history, her many cosmetic surgery procedures, and ideas about gender construction—probably seemed pretty audacious and daring for Hamilton, but it's interesting to see how a......

Dear Jimmy Hogg, I am the guy with red hair who was sitting in the front row of your show, A Brief History of Petty Crime, at its Toronto Fringe debut last night. I am sure that you remember me. You started talking to me a bit during your show, at first when I laughed at a joke you made about pesto. Your chatty, digressive performance style allows for such interaction and abandonment of......

For patriotic theatre-going homosexuals (and really, is there any other kind?), there has been little downtime as of late. Pride, Canada Day, and now the mighty Toronto Fringe Festival have all bled into each other, separated only by a single Monday in which to nurse RuPaul-induced hangovers. Now in its twentieth season, Toronto's biggest theatre festival takes over the city as of 5:30 p.m. this evening. (And it's for straights, too!) Fringing blind is......

Last night, the 29th annual Dora Mavor Moore Awards were handed out at the Winter Garden Theatre over the course of about two hours and forty five minutes. Sometimes known as the "Canadian Tonys," our theatre capital's award show is decidedly more low-key (if, somehow, not any shorter) than its American counterpart. A few nomination upsets aside (host Sharron Matthews made a pointed comment about the lack of a single nomination for popular and......

With news of environmental disaster a daily reality, artistic response on the topic couldn’t be more timely. But instead of poe-faced polemics and dour finger-wagging, The Rumoli Bros. have concocted a delightful, fun, and super-smart musical. With inspiration from a certain Oscar-winning film with a remarkably similar-sounding name, An Inconvenient Musical, playing at the Factory Theatre’s Studio Theatre (it closes Saturday night), is shrewd for its simultaneous milking and mocking of both sides in......

There are those of us whose parents started bringing us to the Dream in High Park when we were six, who have probably seen A Midsummer Night's Dream a half dozen times, studied it in school on a regular basis since grade five, and can probably recite Helena's "O, spite! O, Hell!" monologue from memory. We will not have any trouble understanding the RSC's production of Dream currently playing at Luminato. But for those......

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. BLiNK, the collective creation for Luminato by the inaugural Soulpepper Academy, examines the impact of war on the life of a photojournalist, played by Dora nominee Mike Ross. Using a combination of sonic and visual effects, as......

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......

If you didn't already have an excuse to visit the lower Don Valley, Canadian playright and Fringe favourite Dave Carley will be on hand this Tuesday for a special fundraising performance of After You at Todmorden Mills. Performed by the East Side Players, the resident theatre group at Papermill Theatre, the two-act drama is a reflection on how the aged see things differently than the young. It tells the story of Adele and Jean, two......

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 Eco Show is a new Necessary Angel co-pro currently playing at Buddies. It's also the latest work written and directed by Daniel Brooks, so it would seem to go without saying that it's one of the most visually striking plays of the season, with masterful use of sound, lighting and A/V. It tells the story of a mysterious, insular family presided over by the sanctimonious and wheelchair-bound patriarch Hamm (yes, ha ha). Put-upon......

Performance Spring continues over at Factory with The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a play written by celebrated Canadian novelist Yann Martel (pictured). Roccamatios is Martel's sole dramatic work, and the script is actually adapted from one of his 1993 short stories of the same name. Eric Goulem is the performer in the one man show, in which he tells the audience the story of his friend Paul who, when they were both in......

Photo of the cast of A Hand of Bridge rehearsing courtesy of Toronto Chamber Opera Productions. Always eager to reach new audiences, local opera companies have been pretty innovative in their offerings recently. First, the well-established Canadian Opera Company and Royal Conservatory of Music teamed up to throw turntablism and improvisation into the opera mix for the Hip Hopera. For busy people who are interested in opera but don't have three and a half......

Sexual Practices of the Japanese opens with actresses Manami Hara and Maiko Bae Yamamoto entering the stage as giggling schoolgirls, their pink kimonos open to reveal their wet dream school uniforms. They come right out to the audience and begin an informal survey based around the question "What are some things that come to mind when you associate the word 'sex' with the word 'Japan?'" It's a bold, funny and very successful piece of......

Photo of the Toronto Centre for the Arts by selosa On Thursday, Cameron Mackintosh’s revival of My Fair Lady makes its long-awaited Toronto debut. Just as significantly, however, its arrival brings a new lease on life for one of the city's finest major theatres.......

Going to see a staged reading is pretty much the theatrical equivalent of watching a live jam band, only in this case the target audience is not inhalant abusers. It’s like a play, but with no movement and featuring an additional character—Mr. or Mrs. Reads The Stage Directions. The HOTscrawlsfestival is a showcase of this often overlooked art form, which puts a focus on the writer and the actors, throwing away such frivolities as......

Fish Shak isn't what it used to be. Literally. Last fall, that place in Kensington that always advertised enigmatic "fish tea" turned itself into Bread & Circus Theatre Bar, one of the tiniest places in the city to catch a show and drink a beer. And Fish Shak Co-op is the name of the company whose production of Morris Panych's two-hander Lawrence and Holloman is currently enjoying its second run inside the former seafood......

Happy: A Very Gay Little Musical is the latest show to open at Buddies and also the first musical by Sky Gilbert the theatre has produced in 17 years. And what a tricky little number it is. Essentially a musical about people writing a musical about people writing a musical, Happy tells the story of Bob and Dave, a married gay couple writing a musical about themselves, and Sue, Bob's dramaturg/faghag extraordinaire. Some scenes......