The Green Line takes two story lines set in Beirut a generation apart and weaves them into a fascinating, sometimes mesmerizing, poetic and sad story about two families torn apart by civil war. It’s written by Makram Ayache and translated by Hiba Sleiman. It opened on Thursday night at Buddies in Bad Times in a co-production with Factory Theatre and In Arms theatre Company directed by the author.
Devon Healey’s Rainbow on Mars opened on Wednesday evening at the Ada Slaight Hall at the Daniels Spectrum. It’s a co-production by Outside the March and the National Ballet directed by Nate Bitton and Mitchell Cushman with choreography by Robert Binet.
My first venture to the Fringe this year was a very good one. The Sky Is The Limit Theatre’s Regarding Antigone playing in the Solo Room at Tarragon is one of the best fringe shows I’ve seen. It’s a one woman show written and performed by Banafsheh Hassani and directed by Art Babayants dealing with all the ways one can die tragically in a brutal, authoritarian state; beaten up by cops, stray bullet, “disappeared”, driven to suicide etc.
This year’s Canadian Children’s Opera Company main show is a new production of Alice Ho and Marjorie Chan’s The Monkiest King which the company previously performed in 2018. This time it was at Harbourfront Centre Theatre which offered some additional opportunities and some challenges with its multi level configuration but also some sight line issues.
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.
Tapestry Opera are currently presenting a production of Sanctuary Song (music by Abigail Richardson-Schulte, words by Marjorie Chan). It’s a piece that premiered in 2008 and this revival, directed by Michae Mori, represents Tapestry’s first major production in the new Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Centre.
Diana Tso’s Carried by the River is currently playing in the Extraspace at Tarragon Theatre in a production directed by William Yong for the Red Snow Collective. It’s the story of a Chinese girl, Kai, who is abandoned by her birth mother because of the “one child policy”, adopted by a Hong Kong mother and brought to Canada as a baby. When she’s about twenty her mother dies unexpectedly leaving her with many unanswered questions. She travels to the province of her birth in search of.. do we ever know what we “are in search of”?
Blind Dates is an hour long one woman show written and performed by Vivian Chong and directed by Marjorie Chan. It’s a kind of odyssey in which Chong explores aspects of living with blindness via her experiences with dating and dating apps.
Wednesday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA was given by Ensemble Studio graduates Samuel Chan and Rachael Kerr, reuniting for the first time since ES days. Nowadays Sam is Fest at Theater Kiel and the recital was built around his attempt to probe his identity as a Chinese-Canadian performing Western opera for (mostly) Germans. Sam is a pretty deep, thoughtful kind of guy so it wasn’t surprising that this was an unusual and carefully curated recital. It was also quite wonderfully performed.
The Canadian Opera Company opened it’s “new to Toronto” production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on Friday night. It’s a production that’s been around for a while having premiered in Houston in 2010. It’s almost entirely traditional. The one concession to critics of Puccini’s rather sordid tale is that Butterfly’s age is raised from fifteen to eighteen. The original concept was Michael Grandage’s but it’s revival directed here by Jordan Lee Braun.
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