Carly Maga

Hi, I'm Carly. I'm a freelance arts journalist and communications specialist in Toronto, Ontario. In one half of my life, I'm a theatre critic for the Toronto Star, voting member of the Toronto Theatre Critics Awards, and current president of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. In the other half, I create and implement communications strategies - from social media to newsletters to key messaging and media training - with experience in tech startups, arts organizations, and global brands like BMO, Rogers, Coca Cola and Bell Media.

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In 2023, these were Arts' favourite things | Arts

Here's a question: what was your favourite thing about 2023? For us, it was the movies we watched and the shows we binged — the festivals we discovered and the art that moved us. Want more specifics? Read on! CBC Arts staff and contributors have plenty to say about their personal picks for the top arts and culture of the year. The monoculture is dead, right? For ages, I've been convinced it disappeared sometime around the invention of YouTube, assassinated by the algorithm and whatever else.
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Merry and Pippin are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern | Arts

From California to Halifornia, and from The Shire to Hogtown — the next theatre season in Canada is getting a double dose of two beloved, fearless but accident-prone hobbits. Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd, a.k.a. Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took, have both been busy in the two decades since the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They've often built upon their famous friendship by working together on podcasts (The Friendship Onion, Moriarty: The Devil's Game) and TV (Boyd appeared on Monaghan's travel
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How one of the world's first viral videos led to Canada's first all-Filipino musical production | Arts

May is Asian Heritage Month, and there's no dearth of lauded, buzzworthy pieces of TV, film and more to mark the occasion. Earlier this year, Everything Everywhere All At Once made Oscar history with its historic wins for Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan for their roles in the story of a Chinese American family. More recently, Lee Sung Jin's Netflix series Beef starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong has been taking over our timelines. Just last week, Broadway announced its first ever all-Filipino cast f
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Nearly 10 years ago, he publicly forgave his attacker. This play shares his complex journey since | Arts

One day in 2014, theatre director Jillian Keiley stumbled upon an article that was posted to a bulletin board at Ottawa's National Arts Centre, where she was artistic director of English Theatre at the time. It was about the sentencing of a man who violently stabbed another in a homophobic attack in Nova Scotia, paralyzing him from the waist down — but primarily, it was about how the victim, then-28-year-old Scott Jones, publicly forgave his attacker at the proceedings . "I burst into tears. It
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Why groundbreaking Black playwright Alice Childress is having a resurgence | Arts

When Broadway returned to action in 2021, one of its first hit productions was Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress. The play-within-a-play goes backstage with a group of Black and white actors and a white male director as they rehearse a new production with an anti-lynching message, exposing the gender, racial, and social dynamics in theatre and the world in the process. In a season that featured many Black playwrights responding to 2020's Black Lives Matter and racial equality movements, the New
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Calgary Stampede's First Nations Princess wants you to understand her people's connection to the rodeo | Arts

Sikapinakii Low Horn has attended every Calgary Stampede with her adopted grandparents since her early teens. But this year, she's in the spotlight: she's the 2022 . The 27-year-old Siksika Nation Traditional Women's Dancer, artist, and Master of Fine Arts student at the University of Calgary will represent First Nations communities during Stampede festivities and beyond. The year-round title is meant to increase knowledge of rodeo traditions and cultures, specifically from a First Nations pers
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Trojan Girls embraces the live-and-in-person future of theatre — safely and with a twist | Arts

The era of pandemic theatre will be known for a few key signatures and buzz words: live-streamed, outdoor and socially distanced, digital pivots, audiences of one or one pod, bubbled seating. But what theatre makers are grappling with now is the question of how we will define the not-quite-but-almost-out-of-the-pandemic era of live performance. Can it look as adventurous as before, while still acknowledging the inherent risks of gathering as a group of humans sharing the same air? An upcoming c
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'I'm way too impatient. I just want to do it.' Nina Lee Aquino on representation and resilience at NAC | Arts

Theatres in Ontario are facing their biggest challenge in generations; on January 5, provincial restrictions shut down live productions once again, just as many companies were about to restart their winter seasons since the first round of cancellations in March 2020. But, the next day, there was cause for celebration on social media when Ottawa's National Arts Centre announced the new artistic director of its English Theatre company, Filipina-Canadian director Nina Lee Aquino. The formative Tor
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In unclear times, How To with John Wilson showed me how to see the world with sharper eyes | Arts

Warm Blanket is a series of personal essays from Canadian writers and artists reflecting on the pop culture that has brought them comfort and coziness during one year of the pandemic. In a pandemic, you live your life from behind a protective barrier: a mask, a plexiglass panel, an apartment window, your bubble. It's for our own good, of course — if anything they should be thicker. But it's undoubtedly one of the hardest parts about this incredibly weird, stressful, and uncomfortable time: bein
thestar.com •

The technology in sound installation ‘Blindness’ is so ‘amazing’ even its star Juliet Stevenson got carried away

Last summer, the celebrated actor Juliet Stevenson had what she calls a “mind-bogglingly strange” experience: being an audience member at a theatre production she stars in. The show is “Blindness,” a sound installation in which audience members listen to Stevenson performing an adaptation of José Saramago’s novel about a pandemic of sightlessness. Because the show is pre-recorded, Stevenson was able to attend a performance and found herself caught up in the fiction. “I know every word of the s
thestar.com •

CBC Arts and Obsidian Theatre asked ‘What is the future of Blackness?’ Black theatre students who are the future have some thoughts

One of the biggest theatre projects of the pandemic era in Canada, “21 Black Futures” is a partnership between Obsidian Theatre and CBC Arts showcasing 63 Black Canadian actors, directors and playwrights answering the question “What is the future of Blackness?” The project is the brainchild of Obsidian’s new artistic director, Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu, to celebrate the company’s 21st anniversary. The 21, 10-minute-long pieces in “21 Black Futures” rolled out on CBC Gem during Black History Month and
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Soulpepper will take audiences ‘Around the World in 80 Plays,’ letting theatre lovers experience new lands and cultures without ever leaving their bubbles

Soulpepper Theatre has pivoted so many times since the pandemic began last March, they’re now “pirouetting.” That’s the term offered by Emma Stenning, executive director of Soulpepper, who joined the company in late 2018, shortly before the arrival of Weyni Mengesha as artistic director. The pair took over leadership of Soulpepper at a difficult time, after a major scandal left pervasive rifts, including accusations of abusive power imbalances between historical members of the company and newer
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You can’t go to the theatre. Artists can’t even share the same space, so how does the show go on? Theatre companies pivot yet again

Nearly a year into the pandemic, performing artists and audiences won’t be sharing space inside a theatre anytime soon. And due to the most recent additional lockdown precautions, artists can’t even share space with each other. But some theatres in Toronto are pivoting yet again, in a number of innovative directions, from delivering shows online to transforming them into publication projects. This week, Tarragon Theatre is producing the world premiere of Rick Roberts’ play “Orestes” as what Ta
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Opinion | Here’s what we learned about theatre in 2020 and what we miss — yes, even the washroom lineups

A non-traditional year in theatre calls for a non-traditional year-end reflection. So instead of the usual countdown of their favourite productions of the last 12 months, Star theatre critics Karen Fricker and Carly Maga list the lessons the industry learned this year, the moments that will define 2020 and the things they never thought they’d miss about going to see live theatre. Our theatre scene was built on shaky, unjust foundations. The convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global up
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How Handel’s Messiah became a ‘Canadian’ Messiah: by inviting Indigenous and BIPOC soloists to make it their own

George Frideric Handel’s 1741 oratorio “Messiah” is synonymous with tradition: its story is pulled from the King James Bible, it’s a part of holiday rituals and gatherings. And it’s a revered piece in the classical world — certainly in Toronto, as the annual Toronto Symphony Orchestra performance is a huge draw for audiences. Yet “Messiah” hasn’t been stagnant throughout history; this centuries-old work is in a constant state of reinvention and reinterpretation. Which brings us to 2020, when
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When you watch Ross Petty’s annual family musical at home, make sure you get up and dance

A seasonal tradition is happily — and hilariously — returning to entertain families this year with Ross Petty’s newest pantomime, “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays.” And this year’s production, a sequel to 2018’s “The Wizard of Oz” show, will feature “America’s Got Talent” gold-buzzer performer, 11-year-old Roberta Battaglia of Vaughan. The annual holiday panto, typically performed in one of the city’s grandest venues — the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre — thrives on a live atmosph
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Princess of Wales Theatre is set to re-open with a detailed pandemic plan and a pertinent play about an outbreak

After abruptly closing down a roster of productions in March — including long-running smash hit “Come From Away” and the highly anticipated Canadian premiere of “Hamilton” — Mirvish Productions is preparing to invite audiences back inside the Princess of Wales Theatre, the Star has learned. Groups of up to 50 people will be seated, socially distanced, on the Princess of Wales Theatre stage for “Blindness.” The production is a sound installation adaptation of the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize-winnin
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Live comedy is back in Toronto clubs and it’s emotional for the artists, the audiences and the venue operators

They say “Laughter is the best medicine,” but this is a bit of a stretch. It has been six months since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the performing arts industry in a matter of days. For the first few weeks, there were pivots to digital. Then, enterprising local companies began backyard shows in neighbourhoods, or even larger outdoor performances in a park. So far, the only genre that has tiptoed back into a semblance of its former indoor model has been comedy. First, Comedy Bar on Bloor Str
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Over a storied acting and directing career, Philip Akin has made sure Black theatre lives matter — a new award will keep that legacy alive

Philip Akin wants people to disagree with him. Specifically, he wants other Black artists to disagree with him. And now there’s a fund for that. At 70 years old, Akin retired this summer after 14 years as the artistic director of Obsidian Theatre Company, Canada’s leading culturally specific theatre company, which he co-founded in 2000. That’s only part of a storied career that includes playing Othello at the Stratford Festival, voicing the character Bishop in the animated “X-Men” series, and
TheStar.com •

Going to a live indoor Second City show felt strange and unnerving — for both the audience and the performers

As the Second City Toronto became the first professional company to resume live indoor performances on Thursday night, I approached its “Safer, Shorter & Still So Funny” thinking about the five performers about to premiere the show — to an anxious crowd of 50 people seated eight feet part, their laughs muffled under masks, the performers recoiling if their comedic energy propelled moist globules too far off the stage. But after being seated in the cavernous mainstage theatre — at just 16.7 per
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