Category Archives: Performance review – Theatre

Metamorphoses 2023

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Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s production of Metamorphoses 2023 opened last night at Crow’s Theatre.  It’s an 80 minute show, written and directed by Michele Smith, (with, it’s clear, a lot of input from the cast) taking various stories from Ovid.  Most of them involve women (or goddesses) revenging themselves on men for various failings ranging from being smug to violent rape.  It’s also very concerned with gender fluidity.  The principal narrator is Tiresias and along the way we also meet Hermaphorditus and Caenis.

1A7S03545-Dean Gilmour, Neena Jayarajan, Sukruti Tirupattur, Daniel R Henkel _ Rob Feetham

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Prodigal

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What do we mean by “forgiveness” or “redemption”?  Prodigal, written and directed by Paolo Santalucia currently being presented by the Howland Company at Crow’s Theatre asks us to consider just that.  It’s a curiously structured play.  On one level it’s a black comedy about a seriously dysfunctional elite family but there’s an intro to each act in which a preacher exegises on the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Parable of the Lost Sheep.  We are invited to compare the characters we are about to see with the dramatic personae of Christ’s teaching.  But are they really comparable?”

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Fifteen Dogs

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I saw Marie Farsi’s adaptation for the stage of André lexis novel Fifteen Dogs at Crow’s Theatre last night.  I read the book back in the fall and was impressed.  It’s a clever, witty, perceptive novel and I was very curious as to how it would translate to the stage; especial since most of the characters are dogs.  Bottom line, it works wonderfully well.

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Martyr

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ARC’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2012 play Martyr opened at the Aki Studio last night.  It’s presented in an English translation by Maja Zade and directed by Rob Kempson.  I think it’s more than a just a direct German to English translation.  names have been changed for instance and there are definite shifts in directorial approach from the Berlin production.  I think the best way to understand what this is all about is to start with the original German version and how it may have looked to a Berlin audience and then look at how time, space and directorial decisions may affect audience reception.

1. Nabil Traboulsi and Adriano Reis_MARTYR_ARC 2023 Photographer_ Sam Moffatt

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The Birds

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The Birds, by Bygone Theatre currently playing at Hart House Theatre is loosely based on the du Maurier short story and the subsequent Hitchcock film.  The idea, the script and the direction are all the work of Emily Dix.  The concept, building on the uncertainties of the Trump era and COVID is to explore “how do you explain to someone outside of a crisis the things you did to survive it? How do you justify to the world, and eventually, even yourself, what “crazy” things you did, completely necessary and justified at the time, when afterwards much of the world seems determined to pretend that crisis never existed?” (Director’s Notes).  I’m not sure it really does that.

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Three Sisters

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A version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters opened last night in a collaboration between Hart House Theatre and the Howland Company.  It’s described as “Adapted and directed by Paolo Santalucia after Chekhov” .  What this means is that is given a contemporary Canadian setting with changed character names and so forth.  The structural purpose of each scene, pretty much each speech, remains the same but the words are not a literal translation.  And, Alex Vershinin is a woman lieutenant colonel in the RCAF which gives a very different spin to her “affair” with Masha.

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Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

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I guess when events are just too horrible to treat any differently one makes a comedy out of them.  The aftermath of the US led invasion of Iraq certainly fits that category and Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, currently being performed by Modern Times Stage Company at the Streetcar Crowsnest, is as black a comedy as you will likely ever see.  It’s also very difficult to write about without major spoilers.

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