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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Feud, what feud?

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.

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Revisiting The Master Plan

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.

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The Master Plan

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.

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