The Tragedy of Hamlet; directed by Robert Lepage with choreography by Guillaume Côté is a 100 minute long dance work based on Shakespeare’s play. It opened last (Thursday) night at the Elgin Theatre.
Photo : Stéphane Bourgeois
This spring’s main opera production from UoT Opera is Britten’s Paul Bunyan. It is a really peculiar work. The libretto is by WH Auden and is, well, weird. It mixes up the (apparently) profound with the absurd and the downright silly. There’s a Swedish lumberjack fish slapping dance, talking cats and dogs, trees that aspire to be product and a philosophical accountant (*). There are also countless pronouncements from the off stage voice of Bunyan along the lines of the closing:
“Where the night becomes the day, Where the dream becomes the fact, I am the Eternal guest, I am Way, I am Act“
Walt Whitman meets Dr. Seuss meets a lot of drugs? One of those 1970s English public schoolboy prog rock bands?
Last Days is a staging of songs and texts from and about WW1. It’s directed by Tim Albery with music direction by David Fallis and it’s performed by students from the University of Toronto Opera Program. 
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