“Deserves a permanent place in the Canadian canon… transcendent new adaptation”

Despite being programmed as this year’s Schulich Children’s Play, this is a Pixar-level masterclass in making grownups ugly-sob, which we fortunately get to do in community with one another. It’s performances like these that remind me why I love theatre, as was the case with Sandler’s Cockfight in 2014 (also starring Toal) and then Punch Up a month later. As lucky as I feel to have been audience to her artistic maturation over the intervening decade, I’ll always cherish those early plays as being formative taste-making experiences during my undergraduate salad days. Her body of work has become as important to me as Montgomery’s novel is to so many of my compatriots. With any luck, Sandler’s transcendent Anne of Green Gables will become as central to the Canadian canon as the much beloved tome that inspired it.

RYAN BOROCHOVITZ