Strong performances and profound emotion are packed into Canadian Opera Company’s La Boheme playing at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre
Crossing the lobby of the Four Seasons Centre after La Boheme, I saw a couple standing with their young daughter of eight or nine years old. I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to ask her: “Did you like it?” Her parents smiled tolerantly at me (I may not have been the first person to ask) as she nodded and said, reverently “I loved it.”
I did too. And, I would like to add, with a very similar child-like glee. It’s not that often that I attend something to review it and find myself just happy, with my review-brain noticeably silent for long minutes at a time while the lifetime lover of performance in me sighed with pleasure and reached for my sweetheart’s hand. This production of La Boheme made me so happy.
ProArteDanza’s Season 2013 is filled with stunning and exceptionally performed choreography playing at Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre
I think I have seen all of ProArteDanza’s Seasons and every year they deliver the goods. This year sitting once again in the Fleck Dance Theatre watching the spectacular dancers that make up Season 2013, ProArteDanza showed that they followed through with their commitment to excellent dance.
The evening consisted of two 2011 works, Shifting Silence and Fractals: a pattern of chaos; and one world premiere, Beethoven’s 9th – 3rd Movement. Choreographers Robert Glumbek, Roberto Campanella, and Guillaume Côté have a contemporary work that highlights all artists balletic backgrounds in Season 2013. Featured in these three dances were some of Toronto’s strongest dancers including Valerie Calam, Justin de Luna, Tyler Gledhill, Mami Hata, Benjamin Landsberg, Ryan Lee, Delphine Leroux, Erin Poole, Anisa Tejpar, and Katherina Nakui. Continue reading Review: Season 2013 (ProArteDanza)→
Crash is an emotionally raw and visceral autobiographical story playing at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille
Pamela Mala Sinha’s Crash, currently onstage in the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, takes the audience on a harrowing journey where sadistic rape is ever present, grief and loss loom larger and larger, and spectres of murder and suicide lurk around certain corners. And yet there is a through-line of familial love that keeps hope alive. Also, on a more objective note, there is the pleasure of watching a production where sound, lighting, projection and dance are all seamless and integral aspects of the storytelling.
Greek mythology meets a small Quebecois fishing village in The Flood Thereafter playing at Toronto’s Berkeley Theatre
I’d never really thought about Greek mythology in the context of a small Quebecois fishing village, but Sarah Berthiaume’s The Flood Thereafter is an interesting re-imagining of the travels of Odysseus, brought to vivid corporeality at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Theatre.
The Flood Thereafter hones in on the specific involvement of the sirens in the Odyssey, gorgeous sea creatures who enticed sailors into the depths with their song. The sirens in Berthiaume’s story are Grace and her daughter June, both seemingly tied to the village and its men, unable to move on. Grace owns a diner, and June has taken to stripping to earn her living, her nude form so potently beautiful that it makes the men cry. It’s the arrival of a stranger, a young man named Denis, who starts to shake things up.
Toronto’s Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company’s Funny Girl in Concert launched their current season with musical precision and larger-than-life performances
These are stories that have been millennia in the making – stories that capture the very heart of the Jewish existence. Now entering its seventh season, the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company , held its 2013 – 2014 season fundraiser last night at the Toronto Centre for the Arts .
The night featured a workshop production of Funny Girl (reviewed below), and was a smash success in its execution – heralding boisterous bouts of applause and multiple standing ovations from its spectators.
Pamela Mala Sinha’s 
