Michael Healey’s Rogers v. Rogers directed by Chris Abraham opened at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday night. It’s a sort of follow up to The Master Plan in that it’s Toronto based and deals with corporate greed and incompetence coupled to governmental ineptitude and general inability to keep up with the corporate world. It’s different in that it’s two related stories mashed together and, more notably, in that Tom Rooney plays all the characters.
Liz Appel’s play Wights was premiered at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday night in a production directed by Chris Abraham. It’s a complex satire on Academia and academic relationships with a touch of comedy/horror; Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf with just a smidgeon of Shawn of the Dead. And it takes place in the immediate run up to the 2024 US Presidential Election. with all the hopes and fears for the future packed into that.
Crow’s Theatre opened the season last night with a production of Ibsen’s Romersholm in an adaptation by Duncan Macmillan directed by Chris Abraham. It’s not perhaps Ibsen’s best known play but it’s powerful and somewhat topically relevant and the production at Crow’s is excellent in every way.
The Master Plan by Michael Healey opened last night at Crow’s Theatre in a production directed by Chris Abraham. It’s based on Josh O’Kane’s book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy and deals with the tortuous relationship between Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, Waterfront Toronto and the various other stakeholders involved in developing the (relatively) small parcel of land, Quayside, at Parliament and Queen’s Quay and the wider future of the Eastern Portlands.
True Crime, a Castleton Massive production, by Torquil Campbell and Chris Abraham opened at Crow’s Theatre last night. It’s essentially a one man show featuring Campbell (not quite… composer Julian Brown provides musical backing throughout). It’s certainly a tour de force by Campbell who is on stage continually for 90 minutes and it’s hard to tell when he’s on script and when he’s improvising. He plays a raft of characters from himself, to his father and wife, an imprisoned con man, several dogs and a bunch of others. And he does it very well. He also sings (and barks).
Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is the sort of play that makes one wonder why the Russian Revolution didn’t happen much sooner. If the land owning class were living such miserable lives it must have been absolute hell for the peasants. Maybe they just couldn’t afford a guillotine? Anyway it’s playing at Crow’s Theatre right now in a production directed by Chris Abraham which runs until October 2nd.
operaramblings 