Results tagged “youngcentre”

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.

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.

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.

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.