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.
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.
Slug 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are some upcoming shows for April:
Music
Charlie Petch’s No One’s Special at the Hot Dog Cart is a one man show about his experiences as a hot dog vendor in Toronto and his subsequent life working as a 911 dispatcher, on the front desk of an ER and as a hospital bed allocator. It’s currently being presented by Theatre Passe Muraille and Erroneous Productions.
Collage and poster design by Emily Jung | Pictured: Charlie Petch
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