Having reviewed for Mooney on Theatre for a number of years now, I must admit that I’ve become a bit of a theatre snob. This is of course contrary to the mandate of MoT, which aims to share opinions that are constructive and accessible for theatre lovers and soon-to-be-converts. After years of biweekly (or more) productions, it’s rare to see a production as clever, well-rehearsed, and completely spot-on as Nictophobia Films’ Night of the Living Dead Live, playing at Theatre Passe Muraille until May 19th.
In A Few Brittle Leaves, the women are men, the men are gay, and for this straight, female theatre reviewer, the play’s self-proclaimed exploration of aging gracefully is just as important as the question: how the heck do those guys do it?
Gavin Crawford of This Hour has 22 Minutes fame plays Viola Pie, the straight-laced half of two spinster sisters living in the classical, English town of Upsydownsyshire. Crawford’s portrayal is absolutely straight and totally real. If I hadn’t known who was who, seriously, I would have thought the woman on stage was female.
There’s a moment in gay history that I once heard a slam poet describe as “half past herpes and five minutes before AIDS,” – the late seventies, when the Gay Liberation Front was starting to gain some cultural footholds and the stigma of HIV hadn’t yet settled in. It’s this moment in which the first of the two plays of Falsettos presented – in a collaboration between Acting Up Stage and the Harold Green Jewish Theatre – is set, with the second one being set a scant two years later, even though they were written ten years apart. They’re rarely staged as original one acts, since they were later combined into the Broadway musical Falsettos, but this staging offers theatregoers such a lot of both emotion and history in this marvelous co-production.
Toronto’s Sterling Studio Theatre delivers a dynamic second week of their One Act Festival.
I only caught the second week of Sterling Studio Theatre’s One Act Festival, and it made me wish I’d been there for the first, and was going to be there for the third. Each week features a new double bill of one-act wonders. The festival began last week with two local playwright contest winners. This week’s show moves on to one-acts with a bit more history behind them – Lewis John Carlino’s Snowangel and Anton Chekhov’s The Bear.
The two plays make an intuitive pair in their shared bill. The concept of reflection plays heavily into both pieces, each coupling a man and woman as mirrors in a swirling battle-of-the-sexes.
The emotive Snowangel begins the evening. What is most captivating about this piece is how quickly it shifts audience feelings from empathy to disgust and back again. A shy, nervous john named John (Colin Edwards) enters the abrasive Connie the call girl’s (Lisa Aitken) bedroom, and commands our pity and understanding. We can all understand nervousness and uncertainty and it’s easy to commiserate with John’s initial – seeming – sincerity.
Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre presents the world premiere of David Yee’s play carried away on the crest of a wave
On December 26, 2004 an earthquake under the Indian Ocean triggered a massive tsunami along the coastline of Southeast Asia. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand were hit the hardest. I still remember being haunted by the images from the 24-hour news cycle that day; entire villages washed away into the ocean, the endless heartache and misery. It was devastation of unimaginable proportions.
