My first venture to the Fringe this year was a very good one. The Sky Is The Limit Theatre’s Regarding Antigone playing in the Solo Room at Tarragon is one of the best fringe shows I’ve seen. It’s a one woman show written and performed by Banafsheh Hassani and directed by Art Babayants dealing with all the ways one can die tragically in a brutal, authoritarian state; beaten up by cops, stray bullet, “disappeared”, driven to suicide etc.
Leaving Home is a 1972 play by David French set in Toronto in the 1950s and centring on a Newfoundland family that migrated to Toronto at the end of the war. It originally played at Tarragon Theatre and it’s now playing at Coal Mine Theatre in a production by Halifax’ Matchstick Theatre.
“…it’s weirder and less funny and less charming than the plays I like to write, and also I’ve taken out a lot of the conventions, conventions that I like, the ones that make us want to watch plays.” So writes Hannah Moscovitch about her 2024 play Red Like Fruit which opened at Soulpepper on Thursday night as part of Luminato in a production directed by Christian Barry.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Barrie’s Talk is Free Theatre so I was very happy to be able to catch one of their shows on tour in Toronto. The show is Tales of an Urban Indian and it’s playing in the basement of Hope United Church on the Danforth. I think the show originally toured on a converted bus which would explain the set up; which is a narrow space with a row of chairs either side (actually two rows on one side) so the space seats about thirty five. It’s been around since 2009 and has toured across Canada, the US and overseas nad, despite the things that have happened on the “Reconciliation” agenda since then it still feels fresh and timely.
Genrefuck is a double bill that opened on Wednesday at Buddies in Bad Times. It consists of two one performer shows; Reina written by Augusto Bitter and performed by Jaime Lujan, and Never Walk Alone written and performed by Julie Phan.
Comfort Food; written by Zorana Sadiq and directed by Mitchell Cushman, opened in the Studio at Crow’s theatre on Friday evening. Itdescribes itself as an exploration of “the delicacy of familial love” told via the intersecting stories of Bette (Zorana Sadiq) and her teenage son Kit (Noah Grittani). Bette is a single mother and the host of a TV cooking show that has seen better days. Kit is a high school student who is trying to be a climate change activist (mostly virtually).
A Taste of Hong Kong is a one man show written by anonymous and performed by Derek Chan as Jackie Z. Richard Wolfe directs. It’s a sort of tragi-comedy about the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong from the British. There’s a lot of audience interaction, especially at the beginning, so at first I thought it was going to be like a version of Monks but with fishballs instead of lentils but it gets much darker pretty fast.
Unbridled Theatre Collective, a new outfit, opened a run of Brecht/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera at Video Cabaret on Thursday evening. It’s in an updated version created for The National Theatre by Simon Stephens in 2016 and it’s so updated it might well be retitled The 1.25p Opera. It’s raunchy and contains sexually explicit language and action (including some rather disturbing sexual violence) that would never have made it past the censors back in the day.
Amanda Wilkin’s Shedding a Skin premiered at London’s Soho Theatre a couple of years ago. It’s now playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a Nightwood Theatre production directed by Cherissa Richards. It’s a one woman show about a young woman escaping from corporate Hell and her boat dwelling boyfriend and discovering herself. It’s set in contemporary London and Myah is black and very, very middle class; the daughter of successful immigrants with, as they tend to, ambitions for their children which Myah isn’t really living up to.
Candrice Jones’ play FLEX got its Canadian premiere on Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre. It’s the late 1990s in small town Arkansas. The creation of the WNBA has provided another reason for young women (especially African American women) to try for one of the few escape routes from life in a town where the main employer is a prison. In the prison-industrial complex it’s a sports scholarship or the military.
operaramblings 