Leaving Home is a 1972 play by David French set in Toronto in the 1950s and centring on a Newfoundland family that migrated to Toronto at the end of the war. It originally played at Tarragon Theatre and it’s now playing at Coal Mine Theatre in a production by Halifax’ Matchstick Theatre.
Candrice Jones’ play FLEX got its Canadian premiere on Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre. It’s the late 1990s in small town Arkansas. The creation of the WNBA has provided another reason for young women (especially African American women) to try for one of the few escape routes from life in a town where the main employer is a prison. In the prison-industrial complex it’s a sports scholarship or the military.
The Masque of the Red Death is a an interdisciplinary theatre piece created and directed by Stella Kulagowski currently playing at The Assembly Theatre. At its heart is a cabaret show where each performer represents a Virtue “complementary” to the canonical Seven Deadly Sins that Poe riffed off in his original short story. Each Virtue is also associated with a colour in the rainbow Pride flag.
L to R back row: Rosalind Saunders, Parham Rownaghi, Rachel Manson, Joy Thompson, Rennaldo Quinicot
Middle: Bryna Bella, Eli Holliday
Front: Nailah Renuka, Stella Kulagowski
I attended the third and final performance of Aportia Chryptych: A Black Opera for Portia White by HAUI x Sean Hayes at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre on Sunday afternoon. It’s a very ambitious piece which has some really excellent ideas and scenes but perhaps bites off a bit more than it can chew.
Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2009 play Rockabye is currently playing at Factory Theatre in a production directed by Rob Kempson. It’s an odd play. Ostensibly it’s about an aging rock singer; Sidney Jones (played by Deborah Drakeford), who hasn’t achieved much for 20+ years and desperately needs her come back album to be a success before she’s written off as a has been. She’s also obsessed with adopting an African baby. We’ll come back to that. She’s at the centre of a coterie of personal staffers and hangers on who are almost as shallow and self obsessed as she is. There’s the manager; Alfie (Sergio di Zio) endlessly congratulating himself on sticking with Sidney rather than taking on a “hot sixteen year old”. There’s boy-toy Jolyon (Nabil Trabousi) who has curtain phobia, a U-boat fetish and a big dick. Sidney’s every wish is the concern of her plummy lesbian publicist Julia (Julie Lumsden) who races around to locate the absolutely vital Peruvian wheatgerm or to send to Uzbekistan for a swatch of cloth to repair a button. Only the cook/maid Esme (Kyra Harper) seems to have any connection to reality.
Almost exactly four years after Kye Marshall and Amanda Hale’s Pomegranate played at Buddies in Bad Times in a production by Michael Mori it reappeared at the COC in expanded form in a production by Jennifer Tarver. The basic plot hasn’t changed much so I’m not going to repeat what I wrote about that in 2019. The other changes are, though, quite extensive and I’m not convinced they are improvements.
What do we mean by “forgiveness” or “redemption”? Prodigal, written and directed by Paolo Santalucia currently being presented by the Howland Company at Crow’s Theatre asks us to consider just that. It’s a curiously structured play. On one level it’s a black comedy about a seriously dysfunctional elite family but there’s an intro to each act in which a preacher exegises on the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Parable of the Lost Sheep. We are invited to compare the characters we are about to see with the dramatic personae of Christ’s teaching. But are they really comparable?”
A version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters opened last night in a collaboration between Hart House Theatre and the Howland Company. It’s described as “Adapted and directed by Paolo Santalucia after Chekhov” . What this means is that is given a contemporary Canadian setting with changed character names and so forth. The structural purpose of each scene, pretty much each speech, remains the same but the words are not a literal translation. And, Alex Vershinin is a woman lieutenant colonel in the RCAF which gives a very different spin to her “affair” with Masha.
How far will people go in the effort to survive? How can they preserve some sense of self respect and dignity in that survival? I think these are the questions underlying George F. Walker’s play Orphans for the Czar which had its world premier last night at Crow’s Theatre in a production directed by Tanja Jacobs.
Last night was the one of only two chances to see Bicycle Opera Project in Toronto this year. (The other is tonight). It was a show in collaboration with Toy Piano Composers’ Collective called Travelogue and featuring four new works around the broad them of travel. The show was run without an interval but with each composer introducing their own work by reading, e.g., post cards from their travels or, hilariously, in the case of the absent Tobin Stokes, recordings of the voicemails he left apologising for not having finished the piece yet. Staging was, in the BOP way, minimalist but effective.
operaramblings 