Reviews of productions based in Toronto – theatre includes traditional definitions of theatre, as well as dance, opera, comedy, performance art, spoken word performances, and more. Productions may be in-person, or remote productions streamed online on the Internet.
The dark world of the sex trade comes to light in Soliciting Temptation playing at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre
Soliciting Temptation, playing now at Tarragon, pits an aging business man with a taste for young flesh against a fiercely ideological university student, both from North America, in the slums of an unnamed developing country. The context is sex tourism, specifically youth sex tourism. The man has hired the girl for the night, believing her to be local and younger than she is. She is posing as a sex worker, and as underage, in order to torment whatever man engages her for the evening. Continue reading Review: Soliciting Temptation (Tarragon Theatre)→
A study on the concept and theory of colour, I Send You this Cadmium Red is playing at Toronto’s Enwave Theatre
What do we talk about when we talk about color? Probably not the same things John Christie and John Berger did. The two men — one an artist, the other an art-writer — passed letters back and forth on the subject for more than two years, a beautiful correspondence that was later collected into the book I Send You This Cadmium Red. It’s a philosophical effort, but never fancy or arcane: just red, blue, and the rest. Beneath the simplicity, however, lies an astonishing depth.
Toronto’s Storefront Theatre presents a tragic comedic double bill of Swell Broad and The Homemaker
Tonight, the Storefront Theatre presents a double bill: Swell Broad and The Homemaker, two tragi-comic plays which examine relationships with a special focus on the perspectives of unconventional women.
In Swell Broad, something between a budding romance and a business transaction unfolds at a local malt shop. She has expectations; so does he; and as the two begin to collide, all hell breaks loose. This script feels eerily post-millennium for something set in the 30s–and perhaps that’s the point. The 30s, like the 00s and 10s, was an era when the old scripts around adulthood in general and gender in particular suddenly stopped working. Young people–here played by Janelle Hanna and Philip Furgiuele–are left to cobble together whatever they can, and the results aren’t always going to be pretty.
The company for ShakesBeer is three talented, energetic and well-versed Shakespeare aficionados. They’re actually out-of-town ringers, brought down to Toronto via York University.
Chutzpah aplenty, Matt Drappel, Jeff Hanson and Kevin Ritchie rip through all those dry plays we had to memorize in high school. ShakesBeer is hilarious from the moment the cast hits the stage. The performers wear over the top tights, which are pretty shocking at first. However, their comedic and theatrical chops soon take centre stage. It’s a tad like Rocky Horror in that the outfits soon move to the background and the talent comes to the fore.
Toronto’s Unit 102 Theatre’s Reasons to be Pretty‘s social commentary on female beauty falls short of hitting the mark
I was intrigued by this description: “LaBute’s play questions how we value female beauty in modern society.” It’s a hot topic and worthy subject matter. This is not really what Reasons to be Pretty is about though. In fact, having seen The LaBute Cycle’s production at the Unit 102 Theatre, I find the title of this play to be rather misleading.
The core conflict is sparked by a remark about physical attractiveness (and there’s some preaching at the end), but Neil Labute‘s play doesn’t really explore the phenomenon of beauty. The narrative suggests an eternal conflict between the sexes, without much hope for mutual understanding. Continue reading Review: Reasons to be Pretty (The LaBute Cycle)→
