A new year has begun, and I am very excited to see what this year will have in store for Toronto Theatre Goers! I’ve got plenty of productions to attend this month, and I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts about them with you all!
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 – Crow’s Theatre and The Musical Stage Company
Crow’s Theatre and The Musical Stage Company present the long-awaited Canadian premiere of the Broadway phenomenon NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 by Dave Malloy.
This 12-time Tony-nominated musical delivers a radically contemporary and moving take on Tolstoy’s War and Peace with its audacious storytelling and groundbreaking score that mixes indie rock, pop, folk, electronic dance, and classic Broadway music.
Winner of two Tony Awards, three Lucille Lortel Awards, the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Musical, a Special Obie Citation, and the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 is “the most innovative and the best new musical to open on Broadway since Hamilton” (The New York Times).
December 5 – January 21
Streetcar Crow’s Nest Guloien Theatre – 345 Carlaw Avenue
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 – Crow’s Theatre (crowstheatre.com)
Migraaaants – Two Thousand Feet Up Theatre Company
In Matei Visniec’s dark comedy Migraaaants, we journey with asylum seekers from war and unrest to an over-crowded boat, to an uncertain welcome in an unknown land.
The mosaic of stories in Migraaaants leads us through the many facets of a global crisis: not only the terrifying journeys of those in flight but the machinations of deadly chaos shaped by political forces.
Migraaaants is an immersive, multimedia performance about refugees who risk their lives to escape oppression. Through interconnected stories, the play captures the struggles, hopes, and fears of refugees and sheds light on the human impact of war and migration.
January 13 – 28
Theatre Passe Muraille – 16 Ryerson Ave
Migraaaants | mysite (2000feetup.com)
The Tempest – Theatre Rusticle
After a four-year hiatus, Toronto’s Theatre Rusticle returns to the stage in our fifth partnership with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre with Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, directed by Allyson McMackon. Building on the wave of our ground-breaking Midsummer in 2020, this Tempest combines physical poetry with simple story-telling to create rusticle magic. Five performers traverse all the characters as we unearth and confront a story about freedom, love and paths to truth. We collide head-on with Shakespearean myth, magic, harsh history and all the ways we make theatre.
January 18 – 24
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre – 12 Alexander St
Two Noble Kinsmen – Shakespeare BASH’d
Returning to The Theatre Centre after a sold-out run of The Tragedy of King Lear, Shakespeare BASH’d is shifting gears from one of the most well-known Shakespeare plays to one of the least known or performed.
The Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration between playwrights Shakespeare and John Fletcher, explores many of the same themes we expect, including love, honour, and duty. But in this quirky play, those familiar topics are shown to us from new and unfamiliar perspectives, challenging expected ideas of gender, sexuality, romance, and ceremony.
Although it was written over four-hundred years ago, much of this play feels incredibly modern, exploring a multitude of relationships, including same-sex love and attraction in some of the most overt ways of a play from this period.
BASH’d is embracing the collaborative origins of the play in every element of the process. This includes an open rehearsal process featuring continued room for conversation, inviting the cast to bring their full identities to the fold to explore how that reflects and informs their performances.
January 25 – February 4
The Theatre Centre – 1115 Queen St. W
SHAKESPEARE BASH’d – Home (shakespearebashd.com)
ROCKABYE – ARC Theatre Company
Capitalism, Race, and Pop Culture. You know, the small stuff.
Sidney can feel her career slipping down the drain. No one loves a pop star when she’s past forty. Unless she wants to join the ranks of the has-beens on the casino circuit, she needs to reinvent herself – and quick. But what if she regains her former glory and still feels that something is missing?
January 26 – February 11
Factory Theatre – 125 Bathurst St
Quartet – Other Hearts
QUARTET is a play written by Heiner Muller, and translated into english by Marc Von Henning, inspired by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Liasons Dangereuse. In a space that is equal parts “a drawing room before the French revolution/ an air raid shelter after WWIII”, two people remain: the Marquise de Merteuil (M) and the Vicomte de Valmont (V). Through a series of role-playing games they move fluidly across gender, age and identity, while the spectre of death, both inside and outside their private world, looms large.
In this new production, Other Hearts re-examines this work through the lens of kink, queer intimacy and contemporary crisis. We treat M and V as the last two survivors of an unnamed catastrophe, seeking to pass the endless hours through the fetishization of a world they never really knew. This fetish goes beyond Muller’s script to include 20th century pop music, comic books and pornography, explored through various interstitial scenes to create space around Muller’s infamously dense text. These games are colored by the wasted landscape outside, and by the wasting body of M, whose sickness becomes increasingly apparent as the work progresses.
January 11 – 21
Video Cabaret – 10 Busy Street
We Quit Theatre Anthology – Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
A week of performances by We Quit Theatre and friends. Rituals for the discontented, diversions for the disenchanted, and a carnival for quitters! A conversation between trans best friends and lovers, and a sharing of the shit they made, together and apart, in their basement apartments.
Last seen in a google doc performing 805-4821 as part of Buddies’ Queer, Far, Wherever You Are series, Winnipeg-based duo We Quit Theatre takes over the Cabaret space with a collection of three works, including a trans coming out story made out of other stories; an errant lecture on Shakespearean text analysis; and a series of improvised erotic revisions of bible stories, immortalized to cassette tape live on stage.
The performance of 805-4821 will be accompanied by a sharing of Sadie Berlin‘s This Alien Nation, a loose political exposé and response to We Quit Theatre’s piece.
January 16 – 21
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre – 12 Alexander Street
We Quit Theatre — Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
Death of a Salesman – Scarborough Theatre Guild
This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is an American classic. After many years on the road as a traveling salesman, Willy Loman is struggling with his loss of identity and his failure as a husband and a father. His old ways of life and of making a living are disappearing with the advancement of technology, urban sprawl, and an up-and-coming modern generation of fellow workers and managers. Even today, we experience all of these issues, which makes this play still relevant.
January 12 – 21
Scarborough Village Theatre – 3600 Kingston Rd, Scarborough
DEATH OF A SALESMAN – Scarborough Theatre GuildScarborough Theatre Guild (theatrescarborough.com)
THE SHADOW WHOSE PREY THE HUNTER BECOMES – Canadian Stage
Weaving a narrative through human rights, sexual politics, and the rise of artificial intelligence, THE SHADOW WHOSE PREY THE HUNTER BECOMES is a sly theatrical revelation reminding us that none of us are self-sufficient and all of us are responsible for the future. At the center of this exploration lies a fundamental question: If artificial intelligence took over the world, would human beings all end up living with an intellectual disability?
Written and performed by neuro-divergent actors interrogating the parameters of traditional theater and their own perceived disabilities, the three performers from Back to Back Theatre challenge contemporary presumptions about artificial intelligence and the human mind.
January 18 – 28
Berkeley Street Theatre – 26 Berkeley Street
The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (canadianstage.com)
A View from the Box 