Mike was that kid who walked into the high school stage crew booth, saw the lighting board, and went ooooooooooooh. Now that he’s (mostly) all grown up, Mike keeps his foot in the door as a community-theatre producer, stage manager and administrator. In the audience, he’s a tremendous sucker for satire and parody, for improvisational and sketch-driven comedy, for farce and pantomime, and for cabaret of all types. His happiest Toronto theatrical memory is (re) Birth: E. E. Cummings in Song.
Soulpepper theatre in Toronto offers up a dramatic and intimate reading of a biblical tale
I was a little nervous entering the Young Centre to see The Gospel According to Mark. While I had a high-church upbringing (two of my grandparents were Church of England ministers) it just never took, and it’s been years since I’ve been inside a church, weddings and funerals excepted.
But the marketing promised a “fresh, transcendent and thrillingly immediate” take on the story; Kenneth Welsh is as close to a rockstar as one gets in Canadian live theatre;and even Richard Dawkins thinks the King James Bible is a beautiful work of literature on its own merits, one of the most poetic and significant texts produced in the west. Surely it’s worth a shot?
Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience is a fun night out for fans of the sitcom at Toronto’s Sony Centre
Forty years after it premiered in 1975, Fawlty Towers remains one of the most important sitcoms ever made, famous for merging slapstick with clever writing, and piling up streams and piles of convolutions in a compact half-hour format.
Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience (that’s “Faulty” with a “U”) extracts three of the characters — the bumptious owner Basil, his shrewish wife Sibyl, and the befuddled waiter Manuel — to serve a genuine three-course meal in the basement of the Sony Centre. As the bread rolls fly, they recreate famous sequences from the show, introduce new material, and improvise with the audience.
Oh, but the theatres are bustling! Every Mirvish house is doing gangbusters business, while Canadian Stage, Tarragon and Theatre Passe Muraille are also on the hop. An all-new show in at The Second City, breathtaking dance down at Harbourfront, and you never know what you’ll find at the Comedy Bar — it’s a great week to love performance in this city, plain and simple.
But in the midst of all this spectacle, don’t forget about the little productions. This week, Mooney on Theatre’s Cheap Theatre listings focus on tight, character-oriented stories which don’t rely on glitz, fog machines or acrobatics to tug you in. These five pieces use individual experiences — stories about one or two people — to draw conclusions about our world, telling a small story to explore the big ones.
Mirvish presents a new production of Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit starring Angela Lansbury in Toronto
Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit is a utter cream puff of a comedy, completely devoid of nutritive value, but perfectly scrumptious. In the sitting-room of novelist Charles Condomine, a dinner party culminates with the local medium summoning forth a visitor from beyond the veil: Condomine’s deceased first wife, who proceeds to ruin a vase, the party, and his marriage. Now cohabitating with both spouses, Charles tries desperately to send her back — but how do you dispatch someone who isn’t there?
What’s best about this production is that director Michael Blakemore isn’t afraid of hurting this creaky old play: most stagings (including recent outings at Stratford and Soulpepper) almost handle it as a museum artifact, to be exhibited but not played with, lest something get broken. Blakemore’s willingness to alter language and staging gives this version a modern edge and finds new jokes and insights in unexpected places. Moments which are meant to shock or scandalize the audience have a new resonance, while the marriages (Charles is turned into a “spectral bigamist”) acquire a tenderness which has been absent from these previous attempts.
Piece by Piece (playing in the Next Stage Festival) examines the stories of three women who find themselves hanging out, for one reason or another, in a hospital ICU. Jessie has had a string of miscarriages, and is grappling with a marriage that may not be able to hold this burden; Barb lost her husband to Alzheimer’s years ago, but is still obligated to bring this now-unfamiliar man to his medical appointments; Steffie’s mother died a few weeks ago, but she keeps returning to the waiting area, finding comfort in the familiar sights, smells, people and energy of critical care.
Together, they form a sort of support group, providing community and structure to one another’s lives: Barb gets to make friends and see people for the first time in years; Jessie gets to escape from her own funk and see different perspectives; Steffie meets some adults who take the high-school student seriously and take an interest in her well-being. Playwright Alison Lawrence connects them together and examines parallels and contrasts between their experiences in the awful, fluorescent twilight of this medical ward.
