Tag Archives: brown

Pleasure and pain are impossible to separate

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“Pleasure and pain are impossible to separate” is the tag line for Bootycandy by John O’Hara. It’s a play about Black/Queer identity and it’s currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre. It’s complex, episodic, impressionistic, very funny and quite filthy. The notes by director Jay Northcott can basically be summarised as “Go with the flow and be open to what’s happening around you”. It’s great advice. Trying to find a linear narrative or “meaning” in Bootycandy is just a recipe for frustration.

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The Deeps Have Music

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The Deeps Have Music is a new record from mezzo Beth Taylor; a Cardiff Singer of the World finalist in 2023, and pianist Hamish Brown. It’s distinctly sea themed with songs predominantly in English with a few French and German numbers for variety.

It starts off with Hamilton Harty’s arrangement of My Lagan Love which is a rather lovely introduction to Taylor’s flexible but generally fairly dark mezzo. She is very versatile though as the next set; Hedwige Chretien’s Petits Poèmes du bord de L’Eau, demonstrates. These six short songs show that Taylor has a considerable palette of colours and moods. There’s some nice precise piano playing from Brown here too.

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Opera 5 interns in the RBA

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Opera 5’s interns for their Toronto Operas Festival gave a recital in the RBA on Monday.  It was a varied mix f opera, song and musical theatre; from Mozart and Strauss to Camelot and Spamalot.  Both the rep and the performances demonstrated the emphasis that the Schulich School; with which all the performers are affiliated, puts on musical theatre compared to some of its competitors.

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The Christmas Market works on several levels

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Kanika Ambrose’s The Christmas Market opened on Wednesday in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre in a production directed by Philip Akin.  At one level it’s a much needed critique/exposé of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program and at another it’s basically a very funny comedy of manners.  The two are extremely well integrated so that the horror of the TFWP is a bit of a slow reveal.

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Feud, what feud?

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Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park opened on Thursday night.  This year it’s Marie Farsi’s production (adaptation?) of Romeo and Juliet.  It’s given a Southern Italian setting in the 1930s/40s though any reference to Fascism or the war escaped me.  It seemed largely an excuse to introduce some singing and dancing and some slightly forced humour into the opening scenes.  That’s not the big problem though.

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Roberto Zucco

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Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Roberto Zucco (translated by Martin Crimp) is currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a production directed by ted witzel. It’s a piece from the 1980s, written as Koltès was dying of AIDS and set in the mean streets of the less salubrious part of a European city, perhaps Paris.

Roberto Zucco_photo of Daniel MacIvor and Jakob Ehman by Jeremy Mimnagh_set and costume by Michelle Tracey, lighting by Logan Raju Cracknell

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A Streetcar Named Desire

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Soulpepper opened a run of a revival of their 2019 production of Tennessee William’s A Street Car Named Desire at the Young Centre on Tuesday evening.  It’s a terrific production and performance but, as usually happens to me with Mr. Williams’ plays, I found myself admiring it more than enjoying it.  Showcasing dishonest, violent people living lives of noisy despair without any form of redemption, however brilliantly portrayed, leaves me wondering what the point of it all is.

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Pierre and Natasha

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Musical theatre is not usually my thing but given the consistently high standard of everything at Crow’s theatre in the last couple of years I was prepared to take a punt on Dave Malloy’s Pierre, Natasha and the Great Comet of 1812 despite knowing full well it was a Broadway musical.  The bottom line is I found it a very odd experience.  There was plenty to like and I kind of get why people like shows like it but It’s still really not my thing but I don’t think I’m the target audience.

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A murder at Crow’s

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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).

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