Medusa, by Erin Shields, opened on Wednesday night at Soulpepper. It’s a really interesting piece brimming with ideas but I wasn’t completely convinced it worked. If I’d seen it at a workshop my reaction would have been very positive but also a feeling that there was still work to do. I wish I was smart enough to know what that might be!
síofra, by Natalia Bushnik and Kathleen Welch, is Act II of the ‘Dark Mother Trilogy’, a series of three horror-theatre plays exploring fertility and motherhood through the folklore of three different countries: Romania (SAMCA), Ireland (síofra), and Germany (spilleHOLLE). It’s presented by Spindle Collective at the diminutive Red Sandcastle Theatre. I didn’t see SAMCA but it got good reviews so I was well prepared to give siofra a shot. Frankly I was quite disappointed and I shall attempt to explain why.
By the Word Productions premiered Franca Miraglia’s American Devotion in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre on Thursday. The playwright imagines what might have happened if Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe had invited Norman Mailer and his wife over for dinner or drinks at their Connecticut farmhouse.
In American Devotion Mailer shows up at the Millers having engineered a drinks invitation but leaving his wife behind. He has a cunning plan to use Miller’s upcoming appearance before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to their mutual advantage; Miller will be spared jail and Mailer will get the publicity his flagging career desperately needs. If Marilyn can be persuaded to cooperate.
Continue readingTiger Bride; which opened at Soulpepper on Tuesday is an adaptation of one of the stories in Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber. All of the stories take traditional folk tales but twist them to give the female protagonist a great deal more agency than in the original. The Tiger’s Bride, on which Tiger Bride is based, is in its turn a version of Beauty and the Beast and the adaptation, by Frank Cox-O’Connell (who also directs), Hailey Gillis and Andrew Penner has turned it into a sort of eclectic rock musical.
Primary Trust by Eboni Booth opened at Crow’s Theatre on Friday night. The protagonist is Kenneth; a thirty eight year old African-American living in a suburb of Rochester, NY. Orphaned at ten, Kenneth has worked in the same second hand bookstore since he was eighteen and spends his leisure time drinking mai tais at Wally’s; a tiki bar. He’s accompanied by his friend Bert; who no-one else can see, who was his social worker in the first days after he was discovered with his dead mother in a kitchen cabinet and then dropped out of his life.
I’m not generally a huge fan of Broadway style musicals though when they have more than average dramatic and musical depth I can be up for it. Cabaret and Candide are favourites for example; combining fairly sophisticated music with social content. I’m also, as regular readers may have noticed, intrigued by Yiddish music and Yiddish culture generally. So, I was really quite intrigued to experience Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish which opened at the Elgin Theatre on Thursday evening.
Artists exist to create Art. Why does the state of the world today make them question that purpose and has it always been so? Susanna Fournier and ted witzel have been asking themselves that, and why they keep trying to give up Art (and failing) for twelve years during which time the world has just got even more fucked up. The result is take rimbaud; a play by Susanna Fournier, directed by ted witzel currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times in partnership with the Howland Company.
This year’s offering from the Artists’ Studio of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company was Judith Weir’s The Black Spider. One doesn’t get many opportunities to see a Weir opera, let alone one composed for young performers, so this was very welcome. That it’s a very funny mash up of several gothic/horror tropes is a definite bonus. Throw in a lively production with whole hearted and skilful performances and it makes for a great show.
Karma, by Aksam Alyousef, is the latest in what seems to be a genre of plays about second generation Canadians or people who came to Canada at a very young age needing to return to their ancestral homeland to discover/resolve some mystery. See, for. example, The Green Line at Buddies last year.
Christina Anderson’s How to Catch Creation is a very cleverly constructed play that sucks the audience into it’s world of shifting relationships and coincidences that, at first blush, seem too pat. Along the way it explores what makes us creative and what makes us lose our creativity and, interestingly, how that’s related to the most basic act of creativity, biological reproduction. It’s currently playing at the Young Centre ina production directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu.
operaramblings 