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.
There’s a change in both style and pace for part 2 of Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata. (See review of part 1). The stage band is gone and the whole back wall is given over to video screens. Sometimes the whole is used and sometimes just the top half; often using split screen effects. Hana Kim’s projections are front and centre in this instalment.
Mahabharata is one of the great epics. It’s long (my somewhat abridged translation runs 1400 pages) and it’s complex. To condense it into five hours or so of theatre and still have it retain its essential qualities is astonishing but, based on the first part which I saw at the Bluma Appel Theatre last night, Why Not Theatre’s production does just that.
The Masque of the Red Death is a an interdisciplinary theatre piece created and directed by Stella Kulagowski currently playing at The Assembly Theatre. At its heart is a cabaret show where each performer represents a Virtue “complementary” to the canonical Seven Deadly Sins that Poe riffed off in his original short story. Each Virtue is also associated with a colour in the rainbow Pride flag.
L to R back row: Rosalind Saunders, Parham Rownaghi, Rachel Manson, Joy Thompson, Rennaldo Quinicot
Middle: Bryna Bella, Eli Holliday
Front: Nailah Renuka, Stella Kulagowski
RED by John Logan is a ninety minute play about Mark Rothko and the Seagram Building murals. It premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in 2009 and it’s currently playing at the Theatre Centre in a production designed and directed by Kenzia Dalie. It’s a two person show in which Lindsay G. Merrihew plays Rothko and Brendan Kinnon plays his young assistant Ken.
A Public Display of Affection is currently being presented by Studio180Theatre in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre. Jonathan Wilson plays himself in monodrama-documentary directed by MarkMcGrinder about Gay life in Toronto before, during and after AIDS.
operaramblings 