June is fast approaching and, as ever, it’s one of the odder months in the performance calendar.  Here’s what has caught my eye (so far).

• June 1st to 25th at Crow’s is Alex Bulmer’s Perceptual Archaeology (Or How to Travel Blind).  This is a show for blind and sighted people about, well, travelling blind (literally).  Since blindness is my worst fear I don’t know whether I can do this one.  We’ll see.
• The final COC show of the season is Kye Marshall and Amanda Hales’s Pomegranate.  It’s billed as a world premiere so I assume it’s changed quite a bit from the version that played at Buddies on Bad Times in 2019.  Curiously there are only three performances (June 2/3/4) at the COC Theatre on Front Street.  Tickets are quite hard to come by so it seems odd that, in a world where everyone is moaning about the difficulty of selling tickets a popular new show should have so few performances and in a smaller venue.
• June 3rd at Heliconian, Opera Sustenida are launching the film version of their production of Il Trovatore based on this production.
• June 3rd to 24th at Factory Theatre one can see the intriguing sounding Armadillos; a play by Colleen Wagner directed by the always excellent Jani Lauzon.  A play about the wedding of Peleus and Thetis spills over in to the lives of the touring cast who are performing it..
• June 10th to 17th as part of Luminato there’s a run of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha featuring Neema Bickersteth plus an all black cast, creative team and orchestra.  That’s a the Bluma Appel Theatre.
• June 15th to 18th it’s Dragon’s Tale at Harbourfront.  This is an outdoor, free but ticketed show co-produced by tapestry and Soundstreams as part of the Luminato festival.  It reunites the Iron Road team of Chan Ka Nin and Mark Brownell and is directed by Michael Hidetoshi Mori.
• June 16th to 24th Boys in Chairs Collective with the support of Cahoots Theatre present Access Me; “An all-access queer disability sex-positive performance”.  That’s at the Aki Studio at the Daniels Spectrum.

Now two late May shows I’ve mentioned before but want to give another plug:

• Opera Revue’s Debauchery at the Dakota at the Dakota Tavern (surprise!) on May 31st and June 1st.  Opera plus tits and bums; whoc could resist.
• And on an entirely more serious and scholarly note the UoT/McGill collab production of Haydn’s extremely rarely seen (and once banned) Orfeo at the Macmillan Theatre on May 26th and 27th.  This is another free but ticketed show.  I’m told tickets are going fast for the Friday but there’s good availability for Saturday.  There’s a very good article on this show in U of T News.