In this image released by AMC, zombies appear in a scene from the second season of the AMC original series, "The Walking Dead," in Senoia, Ga.Gene Page/The Associated Press
Critics know their disciplines, sure, but most of them love all sorts of art. Here, our scribes share their favourites this year that they didn't cover in their work for The Globe.
Norma Winstone Trio, Jazz Bistro, Toronto, June 28
As jazz singers go, Norma Winstone isn't as well known as Diana Krall. In the mid-nineties she even released a recording titled Well Kept Secret. But this relative obscurity is more the world's fault than hers. Indeed, one encounter with the pure, reed-like tone of her voice is usually sufficient for an irrevocable conversion into fandom. Now in her early 70s, the Londoner made a rare one-off Canadian club date during the Toronto jazz festival, accompanied by her wonderfully sympatico music-mates of recent years, pianist Glauco Venier and reedman Klaus Gesing. Winstone can sing happy but she's most affecting walking the plangent side of the street. A rapt audience was rewarded with a generous sampling of her eclectic repertoire, including near-definitive versions of Tom Waits's San Diego Serenade and Nick Drake's Time of No Reply. – James Adams
The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead has been my guilty pleasure for years now, but since Scott M. Gimple took over as showrunner a season and a half ago, my love of AMC's hit zombie drama is no longer embarrassing. Gimple has made the gore visually poetic, not just gross-out: His images of the undead, stuck in mud up to their waists or tied underwater and struggling to reach the surface, sometimes seem borrowed from Beckett. Gimple added depth to cartoonish "bad guys," then blurred the distinction between good and bad. By now, all the survivors have proper back stories – and no character is "expendable" any more. It's no surprise many fans took the mid-season finale hard and launched a petition to bring back [REDACTED]. To me, the senselessness of it made bleak sense. The group can't go on, the group will go on. – J. Kelly Nestruck
Soulpepper Theatre's Spoon River
I saw dead people, about 20 of them, singing, testifying and fiddling from the other side. The occasion was the Toronto company Soulpepper's affecting adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, a cycle of poems from 1915 that gave fictional, epitaphic voice to small-town America. Musicals are not usually to my taste, but I found myself intrigued this year by the ones which were lively, colourful and uncommon, namely Evalyn Parry's inventive Spin remount, Raoul Bhaneja's curious Life, Death and the Blues and Mike Ross's poignant but robust setting of roots music and regrets. The theatre was a funeral parlour, but the upshot was uplifting. "Is your soul alive?" the audience is asked. "Then let it feed." And Spoon River was so filling. – Brad Wheeler
Opera Atelier's production of Handel's Alcina, Toronto
When out at a performance I ache to be moved and to meet the sublime. Opera Atelier delivers. From co-artistic director Marshall Pynkoski's stirring onstage introduction of performances to the stunning concoction of music, song, dance and drama that is the Baroque company's métier and forte, it is a ravishing experience. This year, Atelier's production of Handel's madly plotted Alcina was a knockout. The rage of the Amazon/sorceress Alcina (Meghan Lindsay), her crimes suggested with dazzling visuals, was trumped only by the staging of the tragic, erotically charged story of Alcina's sister Morgana (Mireille Asselin). Days later, my mind drifted often to Asselin alone on stage in a pale blue dress and the heart-scalding delicacy of her aria. Sublime. – John Doyle
Havel: A Life, by Michael Zantovsky
One man in his time plays many parts, though in the case of Vaclav Havel – playwright, philosopher, dissident and president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic from the non-violent Velvet Revolution of 1989 to 2003 – all these parts were united by a core belief in "living in truth." In this elegantly written biography, Havel: A Life, Havel's former press secretary and adviser Michael Zantovsky, a psychologist by training, takes a tough-love approach to his late friend's contradictions, his charisma and self-doubts, his moral courage and fear of confrontation. In one obvious irony, the playwright-president stayed on the political stage too long after his period of glory. – Liam Lacey