Tag Archives: buddies in bad times

Coming up in December

Posted on by
Reply

december2024Here’s what’s coming down for the holiday season, as best I know:

  • December 3rd sees the Ensemble Studio performing a lunchtime concert in the RBA.
  • Soundstreams has a concert called Invocations on December 5th at the Jane Mallet Theatre.
  • Also on the 5th Oraculum opens at Buddies in Bad Times.  Previews are the 1st and 3rd and the run extends to the 15th.
  • On the 8th Opera Revue have BACH Humbug at the Redwood; the antidote to holiday music.
  • Confluence have their annual Young Associate curated gig at Heliconian on the 10th.
  • VOCES8 are appearing at Koerner Hall on the 13th.

Continue reading →

This Feels Like the End

Posted on by
Reply

Bonnie Duff’s This Feels Like the End premiered at Buddies in Bad Times on Thursday evening, directed by Michelle Blight, as part of Next Stage.  I caught the second performance on Saturday afternoon.  The premise is that the sun has failed to rise so the entire world is deprived of natural light and nobody can explain it.  It’s even more inexplicable in that there isn’t a drastic drop in temperature, plants still grow and the moon is visible but let’s not get hung up on the physics.  The play is about the different ways humans react to such a phenomenon.

10-18-2024-152117-3030

Continue reading →

Civilized

Posted on by
Reply

The Toronto Fringe Next Stage festival opened on Wednesday evening at Buddies in Bad Times with Keir Cutler’s Civilized.  It’s a one man tour de force in which John Huston plays a senior bureaucrat from Indian Affairs during the Laurier government who has returned from the dead to explain to contemporary Canadians why the Residential School System was entirely necessary and a Very Good Thing.

09-14-2024-034453-3135

Continue reading →

Roberto Zucco

Posted on by
Reply

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

Continue reading →

September 2024

Posted on by
Reply

sept2024Well late August has been a bit thin in terms of live performances but September. sees things back with a bang.

    • Opera Revue has a Verdi and Weill show at the Redwood Theatre.
    • Coal Mine Theatre is opening with Annie Baker’s Infinite Life which played to rave reviews in London and New York.  Previews are on the 6th to 8th with opening on the 10th.  The play runs until the 29th.
    • Crow’s opens their season with Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.  Previews run from the 3rd to the 10th with opening night on the 11th.  The run continues to October 6th.

Continue reading →

Pomegranate premiere

Posted on by
4

Last night Pomegranate; music by Kye Marshall, words by Amanda Hale, opened at Buddies in Bad Times.  Inspired by the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii, it tells the story of two lesbian lovers.  Cass has broken up with Suzy in 1980s Toronto.  She visits Pompeii as a tourist and is carried back in time to meet her lover in a previous incarnation in the Temple of Isis.  There’s a whole act dealing with the Mysteries, Cassia and Suli’s burgeoning relationship and the attempt by the Roman state to suppress the religion.  Then Vesuvius erupts.  Fast forward to Act 2 in a lesbian bar in Toronto.  Suzy, an immigrant from some unspecified war zone is pressured by her family to break up with Cass.  There’s a slightly surreal byt dramatically satisfying epilogue where modern Cass reunites with Roman Sulli in the ruins of Pompeii.

Pomegranate-photobyDahliaKatz-1363

Continue reading →

Pomegranate

Posted on by
Reply

There’s been a lot of new opera in Toronto at the moment and a lot of it has had either an Indigenous or a Queer angle; likely reflecting funding bodies trying to encourage diversity of various types.  The latest one to come my way is Pomegranate which will play at Buddies in Bad Times from June 5th to 9th.  It’s a lesbian chamber opera from librettist Amanda Hale and composer Kye Marshall and it’s a first opera for both of them.

Pomegranatescene

Continue reading →