Daniel MacIvor’s Here Lies Henry is the other half of the pair of MacIvor one man shows currently playing at Factory Theatre. It’s quite different from Monster. For starters Damien Atkins plays a single character, Henry “Tom” Gallery rather than the multiple character of Monster. The only things we know for sure about Henry is that he is a liar and he wants, for some reason, to tell us his life story, or rather several versions of it. The only thing he says that we can be fairly sure is true is that you are born, then you do stuff and then you die.
Unfinished Business is a CD of music by Toronto based composer Tristan Zaba. It’s mostly songs for soprano (McKenzie Warriner) and piano (Paul Williamson) but the second and longest track; Matryoski and Blue Vase is a solo piano piece that plays with different textures and densities; sometimes very spare, sometimes very busy, for twelve minutes. There’s also a shorter, ceaselessly busy piece Swan Dive.
The second concert in this year’s West End Micro Music Festival took place at Redeemer Lutheran Church on Friday night. Titled Alchemical Processes it featured a mix of early and modern works written or arranged for some combination of string quartet (Jennifer Murphy, Madlen Breckbill – violins, Laila Zakzook – viola, Philip Bergman – cello), harpsichord (Alexander Malikov) and clarinet or bass clarinet (Brad Cherwin).
Il cappello di paglia di Firenze is a farce by Nino Rota, probably better known as a composer of film music particularly associated with Fellini. It’s playing right now at UoT Opera in a production directed by Jennifer Tarver. It’s an ambitious show. There’s a clever two level set, designed by Michelle Tracey,; indoors on an upper level and outdoors at stage level, and clearly a lot of thought and work has gone into both sets and costumes. The direction and choreography (Anna Theodosakis) is involved and makes use of the full space of the MacMillan Theatre with comings and goings all over the place energetically executed by quite a large cast. 
Once in a while one comes across a really impressive new opera and I would put The Lord of Cries; music by John Corigliano, text by Mark Adamo, into that category. It’s an example of how opera is good at telling “big stories”. In this case the base material is Euripides’ Bacchae but Adamo has relocated it to 19th century London and very cleverly layered onto it the core elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to create a multi-layered and subtle psychological thriller.
operaramblings 