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Category: Culture

Will budget cuts push kids to crime?

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The infusion of civic energy into the proposed city budget for 2012 has been astonishing. I feel good about a city where so many people care about and have strong opinions about our shared lives, even if I don’t feel so good about some of the opinions of the decision makers. The common thread among the more than 300 deputants at City Hall is that the mayor and his colleagues are being short-sighted. The critics say to City Hall: you need to be smart with public money. You can’t just randomly chop away at spending to balance the budget.

Review: Festival of New Formats at Comedy Bar

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You can thank the January blues for Festival of New Formats. Now in its third year, the festival was created by Comedy Bar’s Gary Rideout Jr. to help people get out of their self-imposed winter cocoons with the promise of free (yes, free!) comedy, while also offering local comedians the opportunity to try out new and (hopefully) funny concepts that haven’t been attempted before.

Six must-see theatre productions for 2012

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Suffering from the winter blahs already? Nonsense. Not with all the terrific theatre that’s going on right now. But if you’re one of those diehard thespians who’s seen both American Idiot and Parfumerie already, you might be wondering what else is there to look forward to in Toronto’s theatre scene in 2012. Luckily for us, there’s a lot — including Broadway favourites and, uh, Yanni.

Theatre Review: Parfumerie

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Parfumerie, written by the almost forgotten but joyously gifted Hungarian-American playwright Miklós László, was a huge hit for Soulpepper in the Distillery District two years ago, even grabbing a Dora for best production. How inspired to bring it back; how perfect is this adaptation by Adam Pettle and Brenda Robins; how sad that it is nearly entirely sold out until its last matinee on Dec. 31.

Theatre Review: Hair

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Regular readers of my monthly theatre column in Post City Magazines may be aware that the subject of my doctorate in theatre and english back in the late ‘70s was the theatre criticism of Nathan Cohen, who was the finest critic in Canada at that time and for several decades before. In his later years — he died young, in his 40s — Cohen was once stopped on the street by the fan of a certain popular musical at the time.