Octet, by Dave Malloy, opened at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday evening. I guess it’s Crow’s big musical this year; a kind of follow up to Pierre, Natasha and the Great Comet, but it’s actually a very different kind of show. One major difference is musical. All the singing is a capella which puts extra demands on the singers (and isn’t unpleasantly loud). The whole cast; eight of course, are really rather good singers and pull off the solo and ensemble numbers extremely well. They can also act and they are backed up by a really effective lighting plot Imogen Wilson) and video (Nathan Bruce) that pretty much replace the set, which is pretty basic.
The internet is a monster
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All families, they say, have secrets. Few perhaps are as lurid as what came to light at 29 Kintyre Avenue, Toronto (about 2km from here) in the summer of 2007 when a contractor renovating the house discovered the mummified body of an infant wrapped in a 1925 newspaper. Incredibly, the CBC was able to track down the last surviving member of the household from that era, a 92 year old woman living in a retirement home in up-state New York. Her recollections, which formed the subject of a short two part radio documentary, provided a lot of context and background but few hard facts. Who the baby was and how it came to be under the floorboards remains very much a mystery.
operaramblings 