Medusa, by Erin Shields, opened on Wednesday night at Soulpepper. It’s a really interesting piece brimming with ideas but I wasn’t completely convinced it worked. If I’d seen it at a workshop my reaction would have been very positive but also a feeling that there was still work to do. I wish I was smart enough to know what that might be!
Echoes of the Underworld, from choreographer Emily Cheung, poet Diana Tso and the Little Pear Garden Dance Company, transforms Campbell House into the Underworld where souls (i.e. us) are guided in small groups through different rooms of Campbell House for a very “in your face” encounter with ghosts, demons and other restless spirits.
Soundstreams’ penultimate concert of the season at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Thursday evening featured “love songs” from a range of (more or less) contemporary Canadian composers under the overall direction of David Fallis.
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”?
operaramblings 