Category Archives: Performance review – Theatre

Energetic, fun and weird… in the best possible way

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Tiger 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.

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Primary Trust is gentle, funny but a bit bland

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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.

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Fiddler in Yiddish is thought provoking and fun

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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.

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Is Art even possible?

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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.

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Spiders, vampires, curses?

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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.

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Karma with a twist

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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.

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How to Catch Creation is a very smart, cross-generational take on relationships and creativity

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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.

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The Division; personal, honest and very, very brave

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Andrew Kushnir’s new play, The Division, currently playing in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre, is both a very personal story and an interrogation of some very uncomfortable aspects of Ukrainian history.  It’s told, in the present, as a letter to Kushnir’s nephew to be read in maybe fifteen years time when, perhaps, it will be easier to divorce history from current events (and then maybe not…)

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Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary is an interesting concept that doesn’t really come off

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Erin Shields’ Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary is currently playing at Crow’s theatre in a production directed by Ellen McDougall.  It aims to shed new light on the Gospel stories by seeing them through the eyes of four Mary’s; the mother of Jesus (Michelle Monteith), Mary Magdalene (Sabryn Rock), Lazarus’ sister (Belinda Corpuz) and the mother of James and Joseph (Nancy Palk).  It doesn’t really provide much illumination.

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Bread and Buddha?

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Clyde’s, currently playing at the Bluma Appel Theatre, is so much more than a play about ex-cons making sandwiches.  There are layers of meaning here that I’m only beginning to unpack.  But let’s take a step back and summarize.  Lynn Nottage’s play is set in the kitchen of a truck stop owned by Clyde; a woman with a short fuse, a sharp tongue and a thoroughly jjaundiced view of the human condition.  The kitchen is led by the enigmatic Montrellous who seeks to create the perfect sandwich and is making progress.  His calm enthusiasm captivates the three other ex-cons who work the kitchen and who aspire to meet Monty’s standard of sandwich excellence while coping with their fractured lives and keeping out of reach of Clyde’s wrath.

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