Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park opened on Thursday night. This year it’s Marie Farsi’s production (adaptation?) of Romeo and Juliet. It’s given a Southern Italian setting in the 1930s/40s though any reference to Fascism or the war escaped me. It seemed largely an excuse to introduce some singing and dancing and some slightly forced humour into the opening scenes. That’s not the big problem though.
Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play Winter Solstice in an English translation by David Tushingham opened at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre on Friday night. It’s directed by Alan Dilworth of Necessary Angel theatre Company in collaboration with Birdland Theatre and Canadian Stage.
Sankofa: The Soldier’s Tale Retold is the latest and, probably, the last show from Art of Time Ensemble. It’s a bold and successful attempt at updating Stravinsky’s iconic work. The music is all Stravinsky but Titilope Sonuga’s libretto is new. It preserves the basic triad of Narrator, Soldier and the Devil but moves them to WW1 Canada. Our soldier is a Black Canadian of West African extraction who is trying to join the Canadian army, which rejects him because of his skin colour. His faith in his heritage, symbolised by the spirit bird Sankofa, with a little help from the Devil leads to the formation of the 2nd Construction Battalion, a non-combat unit, which was the only way Black Canadians could serve. He survives the war and returns from France to find that the same battles must be fought over (and over, and over) again.
Crow’s Theatre opened the season last night with a production of Ibsen’s Romersholm in an adaptation by Duncan Macmillan directed by Chris Abraham. It’s not perhaps Ibsen’s best known play but it’s powerful and somewhat topically relevant and the production at Crow’s is excellent in every way.
This year’s Dream in High Park production is Hamlet directed by Jessica Carmichael. Now Hamlet is an interesting choice for this format because it is, notoriously, a really long play and the High Park format demands something that comes in around two hours. A full blown Hamlet, as in the Branagh film lasts over four hours and even with the usual stage cuts it’s a three hour plus project. So getting it down to two hours rather meands that it’s almost as much Carmichael’s Hamlet as Shakespeare’s.
A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney by Lucas Hnath opened last night at the Young Centre in a production by Outside the March and Soulpepper. It’s one of those pieces that is perhaps easier to admire than enjoy. Technically, everything about it is excellent but sitting through ninety minutes of egotistical bullying is not a whole lot of fun.
To Crow’s Theatre on Sunday to see Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads; translated by Sasha Dugdale. It’s play set during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s extremely skillfully and well constructed in six vignettes. Collectively they explore aspects of the conflict; especially sexual violence and the dehumanising effects that war has on just about everybody caught up in it.
operaramblings 