Well, with September 21st over with, it’s now the true beginning of autumn! Start the season off right with some theatre. Here’s our list of the shows playing in Toronto this week. Anything in red with two asterisks before it comes highly recommended by our Editor, Mike.
Continue reading Play Listings for the Week of September 22nd, 2014
Confession — sex work fascinates me. Having befriended strong and proud individuals from professional dominatrixes to professional girlfriends (or ‘companions’ as many prefer to be called), I feel I have a pretty strong understanding of what the industry entails. So when the opportunity to see Aromas, playing at the Red Sandcastle Theatre, arose, I was instantly intrigued.
The performance is a one-woman show — a first-person account of a skating ballerina turned professional escort and the wondrous encounters with fascinating and colourful individuals from her rich and vibrant past. What the audience is left with is an empowering and revealing story that speaks on many levels, with nuggets of intriguing wisdom like how “the Kama Sutra is a book of prayers”.
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s best-known comedy of manners — “a serious comedy for trivial people”, or is it the other way ’round? — roasts Victorian manners and stuffiness, with a series of twists and convolutions which will tickle even a post-Seinfeld audience. Several of the roles are veritable gifts to actors, and while some of the language has begun to creak, many of Wilde’s observations have become even more trenchant over time. Earnest is exactly the kind of show that Hart House does extremely well, but while the text still sparkles and gleams, I found this production to be more mixed.
Continue reading Review: The Importance of Being Earnest (Hart House Theatre)
On Friday night, I made my way through a tiny door into a quiet quadrangle behind the University College building at U of T. There, the student-driven UC Follies Theatre Company performed an adaptation of Woyzeck for a very chilly but attentive audience. While the show itself raises some interesting issues and has been adapted multiple times worldwide, I felt that this particular production didn’t quite hit the mark it was aiming for. Continue reading Review: Woyzeck (UC Follies Theatre Company)
When a production is advertised as “rarely performed,” I can’t help but be curious. I have a passion for unusual plays, operas, and dances that rarely, if ever, sees the contemporary stage in Canada, so Opera 5’s double bill of Reynaldo Hahn’s L’île du rêve and Jacques Offenbach’s Le Ba-ta-clan, immediately got my attention.
These productions, performed back to back over the course of an evening, suggest some interesting questions regarding how and why smaller companies like Opera 5 choose their seasons. There is always a risk associated with the less-familiar productions where failure can be dramatically highlighted and where success still begs the question of whether specific works should ever make it to a contemporary stage.