Tag Archives: luminato

June – festivals and more

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Here are some shows to take in in June:

Opera, music etc

  • Opera 5’s Toronto Opera Festival at Theatre Passe Muraille. The double bill of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi runs June 3rd to 7th with casts including Rachel Krehm, Krisztina Szabó and Greg Dahl. June 12th to 14th is the world premiere of Cecilia Livingston and Duncan McFarlane’s Parélios.
  • June 11th to 14th the TSO is performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall. Soloists are Golda Schultz, Ema Nikolovska, Saimir Pirgu and Jongmin Park. Gustavo Gimeno conducts. The Friday performance will be livestreamed to Sankofa Square with a singalong option for the Ode to Joy.
  • June 16th to 21st, COC, Tapestry Opera and Luminato are presenting Rene Orth’s Ten Days in a Madhouse at the Bluma Appel Theatre.
  • June 22nd is Against the Grain’s Opera Pub (Pride edition) at the Tranzac.
  • June 27th and 28th Toronto City Opera presents a fully staged version of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld with orchestra. It’s at Trinity St. Paul’s.
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An Oak Tree

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Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree has been around for 20 years and has been performed about 400 times and it still feels very experimental and rather weird in a good way.  It mucks about with time and space and identity while layering on multiple meta-theatrical elements that create an experience that is simultaneously engrossing and somewhat disorienting.

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Immersed

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Immersed is an audio-visual performance piece created by Justin Gray.  There are visuals but the raison d’etre of the piece is recorded music.  The whole thing was written to be recorded and then played back using Dolby ATMOS to create a three dimensional moving soundscape.  I got to experience it on Saturday night in the TD Music hall at Massey Hall which has a thirty eight speaker array for doing just this kind of thing.  It was playing as part of Luminato.

There were thirty eight musicians involved in the project…

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Queen of the Night Communion

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There was a time when site specific productions were very much part of the Toronto opera scene but, like much else, they seemed to disappear with the pandemic.  So it was especially pleasing to see Tapestry Opera, Luminato and Metropolitan United Church combining for just such an event.

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Nigamon/Tunai

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Nigamon/Tunai is part ritual, part performance, part narrative.  It’s based around the fight of an Indigenous group in the Colombian Amazon to prevent a road being built through their land in order to exploit a copper deposit but it interweaves this with water lore and creation myths from all over the Americas.  It’s playing in the Ada Slaight Hall at the Daniels Spectrum as part of Luminato.

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Red Like Fruit explores the stories we don’t tell and why we don’t tell them.

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“…it’s weirder and less funny and less charming than the plays I like to write, and also I’ve taken out a lot of the conventions, conventions that I like, the ones that make us want to watch plays.”  So writes Hannah Moscovitch about her 2024 play Red Like Fruit which opened at Soulpepper on Thursday night as part of Luminato in a production directed by Christian Barry.

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Looking ahead to June

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Things slow down just a little bit in June but with both Luminato and Opera 5’s Opera festival it’s not that quiet.  Here’s what’s coming down:

  • June 5th to 7th at Daniels Spectrum there’s Nigamon/Tunai; an exploration of Indigenous perspectives from North and South America (part of Luminato)
  • June 6th at Metropolitan United Krisztina Szabó leads in Queen of the Night Communion, another Luminato show.

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Dragon’s Tale

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Dragon’s Tale; music by Chan Ka Nin, text by Mark Brownell,  premiered at Harbourfront last night.  It’s a rather clever mash up of two stories which, taken together, address how we face the future without abandoning the past or, alternatively, getting stuck in it.  The first story concerns a young Chinese Canadian woman in Toronto, Xiao Lian, whose widowed father is dying.  She is torn between her desire to “get a life” and his obsessive insistence that the “old ways”, meaning essentially here looking after him, come first.

TapDragon_sTale-photobyDahliaKatz-0059

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June is almost upon us

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june2023June is fast approaching and, as ever, it’s one of the odder months in the performance calendar.  Here’s what has caught my eye (so far).

  • June 1st to 25th at Crow’s is Alex Bulmer’s Perceptual Archaeology (Or How to Travel Blind).  This is a show for blind and sighted people about, well, travelling blind (literally).  Since blindness is my worst fear I don’t know whether I can do this one.  We’ll see.
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I have a Japanese carving

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Hell’s Fury(*) is a two man show about Hanns Eisler conceived and created by Tim Albery.  It’s focussed on his time in the United States and, somewhat, on his return to the DDR.  It combines songs from the Hollywood Songbook (poems by Brecht and others set by Eisler), dialogue and projections to tell the story of Eisler’s arrival in Hollywood, his work in the US, his deportation as a result of the “work” of the House Un-American Activities Committee and his return to the GDR and struggles to come to terms with the Stalinist culturecrats leading ultimately to drink, depression and death.

Russell Braun in Hell's Fury The Hollywood Songbook_Photo by Trevor Haldenby (2)

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