You Can Sleep When You’re Dead is a collection of haunted house-themed vignettes playing at Toronto’s Campbell House

Very little is known about the history of the haunted house as an attraction or Halloween event. It seems clear that they began to take cultural hold in North America in the late 60s and early 70s, and spread quickly as a fundraising idea during a time of year that fell well between car washes and holiday wrapping paper. The typical experience is base and caters mainly to the adrenal glands – it’s dark, things jump out unexpectedly and shriek. You shriek, the people two narrow hallways over hear your shrieking, everyone is excited and scared.

If that’s the haunted house you’re looking for, don’t come see You Can Sleep When You’re Dead, which is a far more subtle pleasure. Combining sensuality, blasphemy, and storytelling in a well-balanced recipe, the vignettes of the You Can Sleep When You’re Dead, site-specific to Campbell House Museum, are mostly a treat and not a trick.

Continue reading Review: You Can Sleep When You’re Dead (TheatreLab) →

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.

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The workshop performance of Catherine Hernandez’s The Femme Playlist, played at Toronto’s Aluna Theatre, was an eye-opening collection of introspective life experiences

There’s a special place in my heart for the workshop performance, in exactly the same way there is for a brand new foal: I adore them even though they cannot yet do all that they someday will. You can see their good bones and  spirit even in the hours when it’s all they can do to stand, damp and wobbly. Catherine Hernandez‘s Femme Playlist (shown at Aluna Theatre for a single-night benefit) is beyond the damp and wobbly stage; not quite outgrown some of it’s angularity but clearly at the last stage before dazzling.

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Toronto’s leading queer theatre space Buddies in Bad Times presents PIG, a complex multi-layered story about perversion, love and making art

Even considering the current fashion for representations of BDSM in the arts, Tim Luscombe’s new play PIG is… a lot. At the same time, the great pleasure of having a world-class queer theatre in Toronto is that we get to make our own choices about whether we prefer to see it, rather than having it erased from our theatrical landscapes by prudish directors afraid to upset their patrons. Brendan Healy, artistic director of Buddies In Bad Times and director of this world premiere play is quite clearly not afraid to be upsetting.

PIG is a complex, multi-layered story about respectability, desire, love, perversion and making art. The official synopsis says that it’s about bug chasing and civil partnerships, but it reminded me of nothing so much as the centagenarian quoted in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray Love, who says “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. ‘How much do you love me?’ And, ‘who’s in charge?'” More than any other play I’ve ever seen, these questions beat out of the text and staging, imposing themselves none-too-gently on the audience. And even still, I left feeling like Luscombe had tied the play up in knots of cleverness, trying to prove that it really was art and not (merely) perversion.

Continue reading Review: PIG (Buddies In Bad Times) →