The Killing Game is an absurd and bizarre dark comedy playing at Toronto’s Annex Theatre in time for Halloween

‘Ring Around the Rosie’ was a song we all sang as kids and then learned, years later, the true meaning behind the nursery tune – the black plague. The juxtaposition of a lilting kids’ song to deliver a lesson of history’s most devastating pandemic is greatly exaggerated in an avant-garde and absurdist way in Eugene Ionesco’s The Killing Game presented by Art & Lies Productions.

Numerous single act vaudevillian skits performed with as much outlandish kitsch and dazzling jazz handed grandeur as the production’s team of 18 actors can muster make up the evening’s two hour show. In the style of absurdist theatre with a nod to theatre of the macabre, The Killing Game, playing at the Annex Theatre,  is a perfect precursor to Halloween festivities.

Continue reading Review: The Killing Game (Art & Lies Productions) →

Stunning performances fill Soulpepper Theatre’s The Norman Conquests playing at Toronto’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts

At first blush, The Norman Conquests (playing at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts) would be easy to confuse with any number of tacky 1970s British sex farces;  the sort of play in which horny middle-aged men chase scantily-dressed women in and out of constantly-slamming doors while dodging various wives, ministers, tax inspectors, etc.

Ayckbourn’s script is a child of this genre: the philandering husband, the impotent cuckold, the ice queen and the frustrated virgin all make their mandatory appearances, complete with a furtive shag on a truly appalling hearthrug.

But while they’re filled to the brim with sex and raunch, bedroom farces lack intimacy: we laugh at the jiggle and wiggle and the slap and the tickle, but that’s as good as it gets. People over thirty having sex, haw-haw-haw.

What sets Conquests apart from its seamy brethren is in escaping this inevitable descent into laughing at middle-aged people fucking; in finding clever and innovative places to insert moments of insight, of love, of trust and of intimate feeling. Conquests is a clever, hilarious, unflinching and playful adventure through the shadows and crannies of adulthood, and more than lives up to its billing as one of Ayckbourn’s greatest–and most challenging–projects.

Put it in the hands of Soulpepper, and you know you’re in for a real treat.

Continue reading Review: The Norman Conquests (Soulpepper) →

Fixed is a funny and poignant production about gay culture playing at Toronto’s Videofag

The set is minimalist and futuristic—a strip of LEDs and several bare bulbs hung from the ceiling.  They were flickering dimly as I took my seat in the intimate Videofag venue.   The space seats only about 20 people, so I felt like one of a select few specially invited guests.  This, I discovered, is the perfect lead-in to Fixed.

The year is 2050.  The show opens with a charming song and dance number as Gayle, the fictitious inventor of Grindr—the first proximity-based hook-up app for gay men—introduces us to the latest version of the app, which allows users to transmit holographic representations of themselves directly into other users’ homes. Continue reading Review: Fixed (Videofag) →