Candrice Jones’ play FLEX got its Canadian premiere on Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre. It’s the late 1990s in small town Arkansas. The creation of the WNBA has provided another reason for young women (especially African American women) to try for one of the few escape routes from life in a town where the main employer is a prison. In the prison-industrial complex it’s a sports scholarship or the military.
There was a certain amount of anticipatory buzz about Michael Ross Albert’s The Bidding War, directed by Paolo Santalucia, that opened at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday night. Crow’s has built rather a reputation for punchy, darkly humorous, Toronto-centric plays. This time it’s basically a satire on the Toronto real estate market and the sharp practices of the real estate and property development industries and for the most part it hits the mark.
The Wrong Bashir by Zahida Rahemtulla is currently playing at Crow’s Theatre in a production directed by Paolo Santalucia. The story is set in the Isma’ili community in Toronto and all the families concerned were among those kicked out of Uganda by Idi Amin. Quite a lot of the story concerns Isma’ili religious institutions and practices about which I am woefully ignorant. Not knowing doesn’t detract from the experience of seeing the play and I have used circumlocutions below rather than try and figure out the technical terms used in the play
operaramblings 