Always a theatre lover Sam realized in middle age that there's more to Toronto theatre than just mainstream and is now in love with one person shows, adores festivals, and quirky venues make her day.
Cash Me If You Can is a ‘fun evening’ of a one-man performance full of self-deprecating humour
Patrick Combs took on a bank and won. Cash Me If You Can is his story and he’s telling it at the Marilyn and Charles Baillie Theatre. It’s a great story and he tells it well. Which is to be expected; he’s been telling it to a lot of people for a while now.
When Combs was 29 he got one of those junk mail cheques in his mail. The kind we’ve all received, part of a ‘you can get rich too’ pitch. It was payable to him in the amount of $95,095.33, drawn on a real bank, signed, and had “NOT NEGOTIABLE FOR CASH” printed in the top right corner. He decided to deposit it as a joke. The show is the story of what happened after that.
You can’t vote at The Election at Theatre Passe Muraille, but you’ll laugh
The Election opened at Theatre Passe Muraille on Friday. “Huh?” I can hear you thinking, “I’m pretty sure the election is on October 21st.” Yes, the Federal Election is on Monday, October 21st. That’s not the election I’m talking about. This is a play is about volunteering for federal candidates in the 2015 election.
My friend Patricia has a lot of experience working on federal political campaigns, both as a staffer and a volunteer. It made sense for me to ask her to come with me, I don’t know anything about volunteering for a campaign. She said that the campaign office parts of the play were true to life. It reinforced why I don’t volunteer to work election campaigns.
Bob Dylan musical is “dramatically beautiful,” now on stage in Toronto
It’s a mistake to expect Girl from the North Country — playing at the Royal Alexandra Theatre — to be a musical. It’s a play with singing and some dancing. With a couple of exceptions, the songs are sung to the audience, not by one character to another the way they usually are in musicals. Playwright Conor McPherson says it’s “a conversation between the songs and the story.”
Simon Hale’s superb arrangements of 20 Bob Dylan songs — or sometimes parts of songs — as solo and ensemble pieces bring new depth to old favourites like “Slow Train”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, and “Forever Young.” And the music is just part of what makes the play terrific.
Yes, I saw the movie, but that was years ago. It was also before the rituals: throwing toast, confetti, and rice; the water guns; the callbacks; and the audience costumes. I’m not a costume girl. No projectiles or water guns were allowed at this performance, but callbacks were encouraged, and there were lots of other people not wearing costumes. Great! I could relax and enjoy.
“No Foreigners” is an innovative work with a beautiful dreamlike quality.
No Foreigners could be the exemplar for theatre collaboration; presented by The Theatre Centre, it’s a Hong Kong Exile and fu-GEN Theatre Production created by Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Milton Lim, Remy Siu and David Yee with April Leung and Derek Chan credited as co-creators.
The multimedia performance is set in a Chinese mall – like the Pacific Mall – and is a series of vignettes that are made by projecting small models through cameras onto a large screen. The dialogue is in Cantonese and English with English text at the top of the screen. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.
You can’t vote at The Election at Theatre Passe Muraille, but you’ll laugh
Bob Dylan musical is “dramatically beautiful,” now on stage in Toronto
Rocky Horror is a rollicking good time, complete with audience participation and inclusive casting