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.
Michael Healey’s The Master Plan is currently playing in a collaboration between Crow’s Theatre and Soulpepper at the Michael Young Theatre. It’s basically the same production and mostly the same cast and creative team as at Crow’s last year so I’ll not repeat everything I said in my rather long review of opening night at Crow’s. There are two cast changes; Rose Napoli comes in as Kristina Verner and others and playwright Michael Healey replaces Peter Fernandes (who is off at Crow’s playing, appropriately enough, a dodgy real estate broker) as the Tree etc. It’s still staged, very effectively, in the round and the lighting and projections haven’t changed. What I want to concentrate on is how well does the piece stack up on a second viewing and in the light of other stuff that has happened/is happening in Ontario.
The Master Plan by Michael Healey opened last night at Crow’s Theatre in a production directed by Chris Abraham. It’s based on Josh O’Kane’s book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy and deals with the tortuous relationship between Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, Waterfront Toronto and the various other stakeholders involved in developing the (relatively) small parcel of land, Quayside, at Parliament and Queen’s Quay and the wider future of the Eastern Portlands.
operaramblings 