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.
Tim Albery’s show; Garden of Vanished Pleasures, about Derek Jarman and his Kent coast garden was supposed to figure in Soundstreams 2020/21 season and we know what happened to that! So, it was reengineered as a film and streamed in September of 2021. I reviewed it at some length for Opera Canada. Now director Tim Albery has recreated it as a live show at the Berkeley Street Theatre.
1939, written by Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan and directed by Jani ,opened last night at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street theatre. The setting is a Residential School in Northern Ontario which is set to host the King and Queen as part of their 1939 tour of Canada. The Welsh, but fiercely anglophile[1], English teacher decides that putting on a production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well would be suitable fare for the royals.
The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (I’m going to abbreviate this to Shadow) is a theatre work created by Geelong based collective Back to Back Theatre. It’s currently playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre as part of Canadian Stage’s season. Back to Back is an unusual company. Its actors all have perceived intellectual disabilities but, collectively, they have created theatre that has been seen on stages all over the world, on film and on television.
Here’s a look at the start of 2024 in Toronto.
On the 7th and the 9th OPUS chamber music, who feature some of Canada’s best young chamber musicians, have a pair of concerts. The first is at Trinity St. Paul’s and features music by Rebecca Clarke, Leo Weiner, Anton Webern and Robert Schumann. The second is at the Arts and Letters Club and includes music by Tcherepini, Klein, Wegener and Beethoven.
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, which is currently running at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre has garnered impressive accolades since its 2001 New York debut. It’s won a Pulitzer and been named, in 2018, as “the greatest American play of the last 25 years” by the New York Times. It’s well written, dramatically well crafted and often very funny but, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t deeply engaged by it.
New, written by Pamela Mala Sinha and directed by Alan Dilworth, is a production by Necessary Angel Theatre Company in association with Canadian Stage and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. It’s currently playing until May 14th at the Berkeley Street Theatre. Now deals with the lives of Bengali immigrants in Winnipeg in 1970/1. The lives of three very different couples are turned upside down by the arrival of the young bride arranged for one of the men by his mother in India.
operaramblings 