A Critical Lens on Canadian Arts.
About Galen Simmons
2025
Here For Now Theatre review: Ruby and the Reindeer is a fun, heartfelt and local holiday story
Antoni Cimolino looks ahead to his final season as artistic director of the Stratford Festival
Stratford Festival review: The Winter’s Tale mixes comedy and tragedy to perfection
Stratford Festival review: Annie wows with talented kids and a cast to back them up
Stratford Festival review: Anne of Green Gables brings the fandom on stage in hilarious production
Stratford Festival review: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels offers plenty of dirty rotten fun
2024
Stratford Festival review: Director-choreographer Donna Feore does it again with Something Rotten!
Stratford Festival review: Wendy and Peter Pan offers emotional alternative to a classic
Stratford Festival review: The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? challenges an audience’s tolerance
Stratford Festival review: Get That Hope offers a familiar family story with new context
Stratford Festival review: London Assurance serves up cartoonish hilarity
Stratford Festival review: Romeo and Juliet delivers teen angst and rash decision making
Stratford Festival review: ‘60s counterculture gives new context in McKenna’s Twelfth Night
Stratford Festival Review: Rarely produced Cymbeline brought to life on Tom Patterson Theatre stage
Stratford Festival review: The Diviners weaves past and present into a story about storytelling
Category: 2025
-
By Galen Simmons For the entirety of what will be his 40-year career at the Stratford Festival, and even before that as a young actor who chose to dedicate his life to the stage, Antoni Cimolino has been enraptured by the magic of theatre. Looking ahead to the 2026 season – Cimolino’s last as artistic…
-
By Galen Simmons To me, the mark of a good play – or any piece of art for that matter – is that it leaves me with a new way of looking at the world around me, or that it shifts my perspective to one I may have never considered otherwise. Director Severn Thompson’s production…
-
By Galen Simmons James Dallas Smith as Hugh, Madeline Kennedy as Anya and Richard Comeau as Bobby in the Blyth Festival’s 2025 production of Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion. Photo by Lyon Smith. What happens when historic oppression is framed through a modern lens? In playwright Drew Hayden Taylor’s sesquicentennial play,…
-
By Galen Simmons Part tragedy, part comedy, part tragic comedy, part comic tragedy. Whatever one might identify Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as, the Stratford Festival and director Antoni Cimolino’s 2025 production of one of the Bard’s stranger plays certainly fits the description. The play is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster ride with one half…
-
By Galen Simmons When I first heard director Robert Lepage was going to stage a production of Macbeth set in the brutal and hierarchical world of motorcycle gangs, I had one word in mind – ambitious. Would the prospect of bringing motorcycles and guns to the stage in a realistic way that stays true to…
-
By Galen Simmons Do the protagonists in Forgiveness, a play adapted by actor and playwright Hiro Kanagawa from author Mark Sakamoto’s 2014 book, Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, actually find forgiveness in their hearts for the people and countries that did them wrong? That’s the question I found myself asking at the end of…
-
By Galen Simmons In Kate Hamill’s adaptation of the classic Jane Austen novel, Sense and Sensibility, for the 2025 Stratford Festival stage, gossip is more than a plot driver and social regulator, it is a force of nature. Though gossip plays several key roles in Austen’s book – advancing the story with half truths and…
-
By Galen Simmons When my partner, Julia, and I sat down in the Avon Theatre on opening day of director Kat Sandler’s new adaptation of Anne of Green Gables – the classic Canadian story by Lucy Maud Montgomery told countless times before – I wasn’t sure what to expect. Unlike Julia, who first watched the…
-
By Galen Simmons Sophistication and class versus lowbrow simplicity. There are many ways to trick someone out of their money, as long as you remember one rule: give them what they want. The cast and crew of director Tracey Flye’s 2025 Stratford Festival production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels did just that, delivering a fast-paced, highly…
-
By Galen Simmons What more could one ask for in a musical than a group of talented kids, a stellar cast to back them up and a very well-trained dog? (He’s a good boy! Yes, he is!) With all these elements and so much more, director-choreographer Donna Feore has everything she needs for yet another…
NORTHERN ARTS PERSPECTIVE 