Intermission Magazine Home

REVIEW: COC’s Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung is a hypnotic exploration of light

Rather than retread the ground of an overall analysis, I’d like to zoom in on an element that particularly interested me: Simonovitch Prize-winning designer Robert Thomson’s expressionistic lighting for Bluebeard’s Castle, which nicely enriches the opera’s ambiguous psychological landscape.

REVIEW: At Buddies, take rimbaud blends critical theory with glorious theatrical mess-making

While Susanna Fournier’s script despairs about the political limits of art, ted witzel's production induces the anarchic sensation that anything is possible on stage.

REVIEW: It’s a Good Life — but is it a good time? Three critics weigh in.

So much of Canadian identity is a sense of place and the actual, physical spaces that we're in. One song where this jumped out for me was "Bobcaygeon," where they’re walking around in falling snow. It put me right into a moment of walking across a frozen lake in Northern Ontario, seeing stars in a dark sky. It almost made me cry to see someone on stage experience that, and have that sort of connection with a physical place in Canada.

REVIEW: Soulpepper’s How to Catch Creation has plenty to offer a Canadian audience

From its Black feminist ethics to its ideas about making art and living a good life, How to Catch Creation stands out most of all as a bold intellectual and affective challenge.

REVIEW: In Rosamund Small’s Vitals, Toronto becomes a map of private catastrophes

The play cuts through the glossy image of health-care workers as haloed heroes, bringing us closer to people working through exhaustion, hypervigilance, and horror.

REVIEW: Nervous Hunter’s Bonnes Bonnes combines laid-back ingredients to flavourful effect

Bonnes Bonnes is a nice reminder that productions can think, play, chill — and chili — all at once.

Preparing to direct Slave Play: A travel guide to Richmond, Virginia

Since reading Slave Play, I’ve asked every romantic partner whether or not they experience a racial dynamic between us in the bedroom. No one has given the same answer. What is it that I am asking them to acknowledge in these scenarios? Who is it that I am asking them to hold? What does it mean to hold someone’s history?

At the 2025 Festival d’Avignon, politics were never far off

I’d performed and directed for festivals in Canada and elsewhere, but it wasn’t at all the same as being on the bum-in-seat side. There I was, in Avignon, rubbing shoulders with the umpteen visitors hungry for a good show. I came away feeling that here, theatre mattered. A lot. In the stony fields of Toronto, that can be easy to forget.

A story with no expiry date: Adapting Fall On Your Knees

At this critical political juncture, as so many forces in the world try to mute and silence women, our Canadian stories merit our advocacy and fervent attention.

Armchairs, tattoos, and an online theatre magazine

When I started at Intermission, my world was limited to the confines of an armchair. Arts journalism was a high it felt dangerously fruitless to chase. The life stretched ahead of me was amorphous and frightening, a chasm filled with hand sanitizer and immigration concerns. It was worth crying over a spilled kombucha and scrubbing at the stain.

Why should you go to the ballet?

My childhood memories of learning to dance were front and centre for me when I attended opening night of The Nutcracker, performed by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

Want to see a magic show about race? Wait, what?

You’d be forgiven for the double-take. It’s a fairly common reaction when I tell folks about my work as a magician.