Tag Archives: theatre passe muraille

February 2025

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Before looking forward to next month I want to mention a couple of things this weekend that I haven’t previously noticed.  Saturday (Jan 25th) at 12.30pm there is a Met HD broadcast of new production of Aida with a pretty interesting looking cast.  Later, at 6pm there’s a rather special concert at the Arts and letters Club to celebrate the 100th birthday of Morry Kernerman (former assistant concertmaster of both the TSO and OSM).  The concert is presented by Canzona Chamber Players and wiull feature Trio Uchida-Crozman-Chiu. Continue reading →

Not a very funny apocalypse

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Erased; written and directed by Colleen Shirin MacPherson is currently running at Theatre Passe Muraille.  It’s a surrealist black comedy about a post climate catastrophe capitalist autocracy.  Unfortunately it doesn’t really hit the mark.  To be fair, black comedy with a serious core is desperately difficult to do and about the only person I can think of who could bring off a successful treatment of this subject is Arnando Ianucci.  This just isn’t in the ball park.

Kat Khan & Nancy McAlear- Henry Chung

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Reminiscencia

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Reminiscencia is a performance piece created during lockdown by Chilean playwright Malicho Vaca Valenzuela.  Valanzuela is the sole live performer and from his desk on stage he taskes us through series of scenes and themes using AV material on his laptop projected onto a giant screen.  It’s ultimately about memory.  How we create a footprint in history and how that does and doesn’t endure.  His examples are all taken from his home town of Santiago de Chile.

reminiscencia

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Slug Meal

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Slug Meal by Phil LatourSlug Meal, part of Summerworks, is a one woman show presented by Camille Huang at Theatre Passe Muraille.  It’s a sort of dance X performance art piece inspired by unfortunate childhood memories of her mother’s eggplant dish, Western ideas of immigrant food and the idea of “dirt” as “matter out of place”

The highly athletic Huang performs an hour long routine, occasionally talking to herself in (I guess) Chinese and accompanied by a soundtrack that ranges from body noises to a kind of Chinese muzak.  Along the way she: Continue reading →

McGill interns Turn the Screw

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The second performance of Opera 5’s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw on Thursday night was sung by the “apprentice” cast drawn from Opera McGill.  Curiously, it was an all female cast with women singing both Miles and Peter Quint.

Opera 5, The Turn of the Screw, Emily Ding Photography (Patricia Yates_ Peter Quint, Bri Jones_ Miss Jessel)

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A cunning Turn of the Screw

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It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why Britten’s chamber operas are not done more often by smaller opera companies.  They use a modest orchestra (13 players for The Turn of the Screw), have equally modest sized casts, no chorus and they are in English.  They offer the chance to perform a work as written at much lower cost than grand opera and without the compromises inherent in downscaling works written on a larger scale.

Opera 5, The Turn of the Screw, Emily Ding Photography (Asitha Tennekoon_ Peter Quint_Prologue)

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Iron Chef d’Orchestre

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The second Tapestry show this week which played Wednesday night at Theatre Passe Muraille was Jennifer Tung’s Iron Chef d’Orchestre.  Knowing Jennifer’s kitchen prowess I expected this to be at least as food inspired as the previous night’s Le Kitchen Party but it wasn’t.

1.keith-randy

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Le Kitchen Party

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On Tuesday night Theatre Passe Muraille hosted the first of two “music and food” shows curated by members of the Women in Musical Leadership programme under the auspices of Tapestry Opera.  Juliane Gallant trawled her Acadian roots to create Le Kitchen Party.fun.

TapLeKitchenParty-photobyDahliaKatz-4942

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Woking Phoenix

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Woking Phoenix is a play developed and performed by Silk Bath Collective.  It opened at Theatre Passe Muraille on Thursday night.  It deals with that perennial Canadian issue; the immigrant experience.  In this case it’s essentially a single Chinese mother with three children running a Chinese restaurant in small town Ontario.  So one has the usual dynamics of kids growing up coupled with being “different” in a very homogenous community.  It’s a co-creation of Aaron Jan and Gloria Mok , who also co-directed, and Besse Cheng who appears in the play as the elder daughter.

2024-04-11_TPM_Woking_Phoenix-1491

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April preview

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april24Here are some upcoming shows for April:

Music

  • First, a late March Show.  Yu Dun and Royce Vavrek’s Pulitzer winning opera Angel’s Bone, about human trafficking, comes to Harbourfront Centre Theatre March 22nd to 24th.  More information here.
  • On the 6th the Happenstancers have a concert; Being Pascal Dusapin, at Redeemer Lutheran.  We are promised a “a portrait concert in palindromic form” featuring music by Dusapin, Kaija Saariaho and Samy Moussa.

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