Twelfth Night in the park

This year’s CanStage Dream in High Park presentation is Twelfth Night adapted and directed by Gregory Prest. He takes a pretty straightforward approach. He has added a sort of prologue in which Feste speaks of the relationship between Love and Madness (and makes a few jokes about the audience and their picnics). The Love and Madness thing seems to be the central concept as far as there is one. The first two scenes are reversed too. We first meet Viola on the beach before Orsino gets to make his famous “If music be the food of love” speech. And, of course, there are cuts to fit it into the Dream time slot of 90-100 minutes. None of this really makes a whole lot of difference. The show comes across as a well acted, crisply directed, perfectly intelligible comedy and hurrah for that!

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The Bidding War

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.

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A Streetcar Named Desire

Soulpepper opened a run of a revival of their 2019 production of Tennessee William’s A Street Car Named Desire at the Young Centre on Tuesday evening.  It’s a terrific production and performance but, as usually happens to me with Mr. Williams’ plays, I found myself admiring it more than enjoying it.  Showcasing dishonest, violent people living lives of noisy despair without any form of redemption, however brilliantly portrayed, leaves me wondering what the point of it all is.

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De Profundis

De Profundis: Oscar Wilde in Jail is an adaptation by Gregory Prest of the famous letter that Wilde wrote, page by page, to Lord Alfred Douglas while he was in prison.  It opened; a world premiere, last night in a Soulpepper production directed by Prest at the Young Centre.

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