So, I posted a review of Festen at blogTO, I’m going to repost it here, but then, afterwards I’m going to write more, geek out theatre-wise as it were.
When I went to The Company Theatre’s production of Festen it was one of those rare opportunities for me to go to a show completely blind. I didn’t know what it was about, so I didn’t know what to expect. All I had heard about the show (even though I purposely tried not to read anything about it, there are things that always slip through) was that it was “intense”. And yes, yes it was. Intense is a good word for it. It was also great.
A friend of mine said a while back that theatre in this country was at a standstill because everything seemed to be about identity politics. “Who are we?” “What does it mean to be Canadian?” Thankfully, Brooke Johnson doesn’t go anywhere near that.
Turdeau Stories, currently playing at Theatre Passe Muraille, gives you something very personal and delightfully offbeat that is still uniquely Canadian. In a little over an hour Johnson takes the audience down a path that shows us a side of our PM that few of us knew. It is a personal tribute to a privately shy and simple man with simple pleasures of life who, like any of us, sought the comforts of true friendship. The difference is, this man was Pierre Eliot Trudeau.
Okay, I have to admit, when I first read about a musical love story told by Holocaust survivors, I had my doubts. But that didn’t stop me from setting up a date to see A Glimpse of the Light, being produced by Teatron Toronto Jewish Theatre. I did finally remember that musicals don’t have to be all happy, that a musical about the French Revolution, not a particularly happy theme, is probably one of the most popular musicals of all time. That helped. So, by the time I went to the show I wasn’t really trepidations anymore, I was more curious.
My initial disappointment at the absence of actual Lego® in Theatre Passe Muraille’s newest production was quickly replaced by never-ending giggles: Legoland made my insides bleed. In a good way.
To see KICK‘s production of “Miss Julie: Sheh’mah” – the adaptation of Strindberg‘s play about sex between the upper and lower classes— I wore a two thousand dollar suit, a five hundred dollar shirt and a pair of seven hundred dollar shoes. My date wore jeans and a sweater: An ensemble that cost as much as my socks and much less than my tie.
Yet Shalome has money and no job, being a jet-setting creature of leisure and a blaxican American democrat, while I am, in everything except my politics and attire, decidedly working class. Not to mention broke and white.
These things may seem irrelevant. Yet it is precisely this blurring of social lines that makes it difficult to relate to an 1888 Swedish play about class. Just how does one render “Miss Julie” relevant to the times and land we presently live in? As radical as Strindberg’s play once was, it’s now in danger of becoming quaint.
