Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance is playing at Soulpepper in a production directed by Frank Cox-O’Connell. It’s an enormously ambitious play. It takes the relatively banal setting of a pre-party for a high school 20th reunion and uses it to explore a wide range of issues concerning memory, personal growth (or not), what we keep and what we leave behind and, ultimately, our relationship with Death.
Theatre Gargantua’s Dissonant Species opened at Factory Theatre on Friday night. It’s written by Heather Marie Annis and Michael Gordon Spence and directed by Jacquie P.A Thomas. It’s a multi-disciplinary exploration of the idea that “everything is sound” and it also explores other ideas about waves; vibration, the notion that two people can be (metaphorically) on different wavelengths and it flirts with the idea that everything is “vibration” which is sort of true in a QFT way.
The Far Side of the Moon opened at Canadian Stage on Saturday evening. It’s a Robert Lepage production; written, designed and directed by him. It’s very Lepage with the strengths and weaknesses one might expect. We will come to that in more detail. It’s a homage to Lepage’s childhood obsession with the US and Soviet space programmes and to the moon in general. It plays out in two parallel narratives; the space programmes from Sputnik 1 to the Apollo Soyuz mission in 1975 and the tale of two brothers in Quebec City circa late 1990s. The older is an introverted nerd working on a doctoral thesis about popular perceptions of the space programmes and narcissism. The younger brother is a presenter for the Weather Channel and is shallower than the water over Dogger Bank at low spring tide. Their mother has just died and they are clearing out her apartment in an Old People’s Home.
Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play opened at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre on Wednesday night. The TL:DR version of this review is that it’s raunchy, extremely funny and rather disturbing. The more considered version contains spoilers so you might want to stop here if you are planning to see it soon.
The Green Line takes two story lines set in Beirut a generation apart and weaves them into a fascinating, sometimes mesmerizing, poetic and sad story about two families torn apart by civil war. It’s written by Makram Ayache and translated by Hiba Sleiman. It opened on Thursday night at Buddies in Bad Times in a co-production with Factory Theatre and In Arms theatre Company directed by the author.
Colonial Circus; currently playing at Aki Studio, is a hilarious and intermittently disturbing sideways look at colonialism. It’s a clown show performed by Two2Mango; Shreya Parashar and Sachin Sharma. So, we have two people of Indian origin in slightly bizarre white-face playing both “native” characters; a priest and his disciple, and representatives of the Raj; a British lady and her manservant.
It’s been 73 years since the first performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting. The play though has become an established icon of experimental 20th century theatre and millions of words have been written about it. It’s currently running at Coal Mine Theatre in a production directed by Kelli Fox. As far as I remember (and it’s been fifty years since I read the play) this production plays it straight and pretty much entirely according to the stage directions in the script. The set is a tree and a bunch of dirt. Nobody sits in a dust bin. So everything turns on subtlety and timing which is quite a challenge.
Chelsea Woodley’s Enormity, Girl and the Earthquake in Her Lungs, in a production directed by Andrea Donaldson for Nightwood Theatre, opened at the Jackman Performance Centre on Saturday night. It’s enormously ambitious and performed with great skill and energy but I’m not sure it entirely works.
Octet, by Dave Malloy, opened at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday evening. I guess it’s Crow’s big musical this year; a kind of follow up to Pierre, Natasha and the Great Comet, but it’s actually a very different kind of show. One major difference is musical. All the singing is a capella which puts extra demands on the singers (and isn’t unpleasantly loud). The whole cast; eight of course, are really rather good singers and pull off the solo and ensemble numbers extremely well. They can also act and they are backed up by a really effective lighting plot Imogen Wilson) and video (Nathan Bruce) that pretty much replace the set, which is pretty basic.
King Gilgamesh and the Man of the Wild opened at Soulpepper on Wednesday evening but I saw a preview on Sunday which forms the basis for this review. It’s an unusual and compelling show with a clever story line, some terrific acting (verbal and physical) and a Sufi influenced Arabic jazz band for good measure.
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