From Press Release:

After being evicted from their watery dwellings, Sojo and Beagle must play their very best “human” to survive in a world dominated by suits (not scales) – all the while searching for home, food, room (or reproductive!) mates, and a bit of multispecies’ love. Hiccups along the way include: a swim out of the water, a hook in the mouth, a pregnancy, and four cans of chatty salmon. A research-based, physical theatre play about salmon and humans finding home in Toronto. It loves humanity. It hates humanity. It’s fishy.

Salmon are often found on our dinner plates, but are not too often swimming around our minds asking philosophical questions about home, reproductive rights, settler-Indigenous relations, feminism, and interspecies narratives. What can salmon tell us about domestic, public, and watery spaces? Salmon also have a remarkable connection to place, using homing abilities to find their way back to their native streams and rivers. As two female artists of European ancestry, living as settlers on Indigenous land, we are interested in how to address the complexity of ‘home’ when our access is predicated on the history of colonial/patriarchal violence. How can a multispecies lens (say, a salmon-humans lens) challenge and influence traditional modes of theatre performance and creation, and habitual modes of thinking? How do we go forward? For two salmon-human amalgamates who are just as complexed about these big questions as any of us, the future is fish.

Details

• Upstream Downtown plays at the St. Vladimir Institute. (620 Spadina Ave.)
• Tickets are $13, including a $2 service charge. The festival also offers a range of money-saving passes and discounts for serious Fringers.
• Tickets can be purchased online, by telephone (416-966-1062), from the Festival Box Office at Scadding Court (707 Dundas St. W.), and — if any remain — from the venue’s box office starting one hour before curtain.
• Content Warnings: Mature language; Sexual content.
• This venue is wheelchair-accessible through a secondary route. After the building’s business hours, a staff member will need to escort you through this route, so plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early for evening shows.
• Be aware that Fringe performances always start exactly on time, and that latecomers are never admitted.

Performances

• Friday July 6th, 6:45 pm
• Saturday July 7th, 1:45 pm
• Sunday July 8th, 3:30 pm
• Monday July 9th, 1:00 pm
• Wednesday July 11th, 7:30 pm
• Thursday July 12th, 11:00 pm
• Sunday July 15th, 4:30 pm

Soulpepper stages Laurence Olivier-winning Comedy at the Young Centre in Toronto

Can wisdom come from bad art, or is good art worth suffering for? This is, to some degree, the central question of Soulpepper‘s La Bête, the 1992 Laurence Olivier Award winner for Best Comedy now playing at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. The answer, apparently, is best served in the form of rhyming couplets.

Continue reading Review: La Bête (Soulpepper) →

August Wilson’s masterwork play hits all the right notes, now on stage in Toronto

When you walk into the theatre for Soulpepper‘s adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, you’re walking into a 1920s recording studio. This is apparent immediately, from the well-loved piano and old-fashioned microphones littering the stage, lying in wait to be used. While the space itself is relatively unassuming, the drama that takes place within is an elegant, well-acted, intricately crafted show that’s both entertaining and cerebral. Continue reading Review: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Soulpepper) →

The Canadian Opera Company brings the tragic tale of Anne Boleyn to the Toronto stage

The story of King Henry VIII of England and his many wives — two of which he had beheaded, two had their marriages annulled, one died of natural causes and the last was left widowed — is the kind of history that you really can’t make up. Undoubtedly, the wife who has most captured the public imagination over the years is wife number two, Anne Boleyn, who was publicly beheaded in order to make way for wife number three, Jane Seymour. The Canadian Opera Company‘s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is a highly fictionalized version of events, but in doing so, it seeks to give Anne a powerful voice she was often denied in life and history alike.

Continue reading Review: Anna Bolena (Canadian Opera Company) →

Mirvish brings the Tony Award winning new musical Fun Home to Toronto audiences

Fun Home, currently playing at the CAA Theatre, is one of those musicals that defies easy description. It’s so full of contradictions. At once funny and heartbreaking, uplifting and tragic, elegant and chaotic, it nevertheless balances all of these elements with expert precision and utter commitment to all of the messy, complex layers of its central plot: a lesbian cartoonist attempts to draw a true, authentic portrayal of her gay father, and in doing so must confront the fact that he killed himself a mere four months after she came out to her family.

Simply put, Fun Home feels like something new and innovative in the musical theatre world, and has since it originally opened on Broadway. This Canadian production absolutely upholds the reputation of the multi-award winning show (which includes the 2015 Tony for Best Musical). Continue reading Review: Fun Home (Mirvish/The Musical Stage Co.) →