Canadian Stage presents Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre
In the past few weeks the issue of drug addiction has been at the fore of the news cycle in Toronto. Indeed, the psychotropic misadventures of Mayor Ford have all the trappings of a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s a fitting backdrop for Canadian Stage to present avant-garde Quebec theatre director Robert Lepage’s revival of his play Needles and Opium; a meditation on addiction and dependency. Continue reading Review: Needles and Opium (Ex Machina/Canadian Stage)→
Aladdin, playing at Toronto’s Ed Mirvish Theatre, has a Whizz-Bang Light Show–And A Few Gaping Holes
It’s clear, watching even just the first few minutes of Broadway-bound Aladdin at the Ed Mirvish Theatre that the Disney production team is hoping for another Lion King. The Toronto production is busy shoehorning in extra performances to meet ticket demand, and taking out advertisements all over New York to trumpet the arrival. Unfortunately, unless there are some significant changes made, I cannot with any confidence predict Broadway success.
To be sure, some things about the production are very good. Chief among them is James Monroe Iglehart who is ten kinds of fabulous, each with its own theme song. He plays Genie full-camp and full throttle. Iglehart is so relatable that we’re disappointed and delighted in turn when he is. Adam Jacobs as Aladdin has such a great, classic Broadway voice and does a pretty good job channeling a certain aw-shuckness that lets us like Aladdin. The costumes are great, and they seem endless – you might have thought that no scene on earth could require a single actor to wear four different colours of lamé harem pants, but you would be incorrect. They lend a sense of grandness to the proceedings that, frankly, it needs.
The evolution of young love is served up in Mature Young Adults playing at Toronto’s Videofag
Walking into Mature Young Adults is, itself, an experience. Videofag has been transformed into an urban forest straight off Portlandia: rough-hewn wooden picnic tables; a cobbled-together, grown-up-sized swing set; functional lamps strewn across the stage; fairy lights in the sky.
It’s exactly what you’d build if you were trying to create a wooden playground for grown-up children. The script is playing a similar game: young love, served up by adults.
But the hinky thing with nostalgia is that, artificial and saccharine as it may be, it still punches you square in the gut.
Or, in the case of Mature Young Adults, hugs you and hugs you and promises to never let go.
Discover up and coming opera talent at the Centre Stage Competition at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre
If you’re prepared to accept on principle that there’s some way, however small, in which General Director Alexander Neef is like Simon Cowell then the new – and frankly quite exciting – Centre Stage event at Canadian Opera Company on November 26 might be called a rarified version of American Idol. Nine young, talented, Canadian opera singers from across the country will battle it out live onstage for cash, glory, and – though it will be announced after appropriately more complex deliberations – possible invitations to join COC’s famed Ensemble Studio.
A musical journey of self-discovery, Pieces of Me is playing at the Theatre Passe Muraille
I love musicals, but they’re tricky beasts. I love how effortlessly they can whisk me away to the land of melodrama, to a place where it doesn’t seem weird for people to drop their briefcases and burst into song, yet they can so easily become awkward or ridiculous. There are many moments in Deon Denton’s Pieces of Me (which opened last night at the Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace) that transported me with whimsical abandon, but they are sometimes disjointed from the rest of the action.
I enjoyed the flashy dance numbers, but spent most of the first act rather discomfited regardless. The songs are not, in my opinion, particularly memorable. They are uptempo and fun, but they are bouncy even during the story’s gloomy patches which disrupts the emotional reality the songs should enhance. But deeper than that, I found the implications of the story itself—at first, anyway—quite troubling. Continue reading Review: Pieces of Me (Promise Productions)→
