Moonlight Schooner, by Kanika Ambrose, is currently playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre in a production directed by Sabryn Rock. It’s set on May Day 1958 and a group of Black sailors have been stranded on St. Kitt’s by a storm. It being a holiday they decide to have a night on the town.
Hoody is a tongue in cheek reworking of Little Red Riding Hood. The schtick is that the characters have all fallen out of a copy of Perreault’s Once Upon A Time and ended up in Toronto. In the process they have changed form so that LRRH is now a very large man (Graham Knox) and the Wolf is now a woman called Lu (Lu, loup geddit?) with an unfortunate addiction to human flesh. It’s written by Dawna Wightman (who also plays Lu) and presented by Hoody Ink in the Solo Room at Tarragon as part of the Fringe.
My first venture to the Fringe this year was a very good one. The Sky Is The Limit Theatre’s Regarding Antigone playing in the Solo Room at Tarragon is one of the best fringe shows I’ve seen. It’s a one woman show written and performed by Banafsheh Hassani and directed by Art Babayants dealing with all the ways one can die tragically in a brutal, authoritarian state; beaten up by cops, stray bullet, “disappeared”, driven to suicide etc.
So what looks fun in March?
Monks is a two woman clown show. It’s that one day, every five years, when the abbot isn’t around and the brothers can take a day off from praying and counting lentils. Unfortunately they have lost their donkey which is a perfect excuse for every possible permutation of ass jokes.
It’s hugely physical and highly interactive with water sprayers, lentils (yes more lentils), musical instruments and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, not to mention writhing on the floor and hiding in lentil barrels. If you don’t want to engage in the antics sit right at the back and, above all, do not come late. The full wrath of the Catholic Church awaits the Satanic evil of the tardy. Continue reading
Koli Kari by Ganesh Thava opened at the fringe on Saturday evening. It’s presented by Pink Banana Theatre and directed by Sungwon Cho. It’s built around Ravi’s (Thava) attempt to use his mother’s secret Koli Kari (chicken curry) recipe to revitalise his flagging TV cooking show. The broadcast is invaded by figures from Ravi’s past; girlfriends (more or less), his present (his mother) and a mysterious magical chicken. At times it’s quite weird and disturbing but too much of the time it turns on the obvious cringeworthy humour in the interaction between a young gay Indian man (from Scarborough natch) and his immigrant mother who is disappointed he hasn’t become a lawyer or a doctor, married a nice Indian girl and produced grandchildren.
Hypothetical Baby; written and performed by Rachel Cairns and directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster for the Howland Company and currently playing at Tarragon Theatre, is about abortion… sort of. It certainly centres on one woman’s abortion; Ms. Cairns’ in fact and the somewhat weird and tortuous processes involved in obtaining what is, after all, a medical procedure in Canadian law. But it’s also about that loaded word “choice”. I think I’ve been hearing the slogan “A woman’s right to choose” all my life and I’ve never dissented from it but I’ve never though very hard about what “choice” was being implied. Rachel Cairns takes us there in all its complexity. Because one possible choice is to bring another human being into a profoundly problematic world. Can one afford to raise a child (because even in a rich country like Canada parents don’t get much help)? What is the carbon footprint of an extra human? What impact will it have on the lives of everyone concerned. What if one is a lousy parent?
I saw Fatuma Adar’s one woman show She’s Not Special presented by Nightwood Theatre and Tarragon at Tarragon Theatre last night. It’s an interesting blend of stand up, confessional and very loud music in a sort of rap meets rock vein. The comedy and the confessional element turn on the vagaries of growing up as a black Muslim woman in Canada who aspires to be a writer. Some of this stuff is familiar to anyone “in the arts”; the tick box nature of grant applications. “Tick, tick, tick… that’s sound of ticking the boxes… doesn’t work so well at the airport”. Some of t, like the throw away line there is much more about specific cultural experience. Also lots of jokes about “intersectionality”.
More May listings…
operaramblings 