It’s the rub that makes the difference, not the sauce. Or so we are told by Fancy’s stepfather and uncle who now runs the family BBQ restaurant somewhere far south of Elsinore in James ljames’ Fat Ham which opened on Wednesday at Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street. Director Philip Akin describes it as an “overlay” on a well known play by Shakespeare and that’s probably as good a way of looking at it as any.
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.
shaniqua in abstraction is a one woman show written and performed by bahia watson that deals with her search for identity as a (light skinned) Black woman in Canada. It starts with a casting call and works outwards from there. She sings, she dances, she runs on the spot, She interviews characters who aren’t there and gets caught up in banal daytime TV shows. If you can have a kaleidoscope in black and white it’s a kaleidoscope of experiences.
Watching The Queen in Me at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre last night I thought to myself that this was probably the first time I’d heard Teiya Kasahara singing classic opera arias with an orchestra. Given how many times I’ve seen Teiya on stage that seemed really weird. And that, I suppose, is one major aspect of what this show is all about; how casting is so rigidly stereotyped that it demands that people become something other than themselves to get cast. A tall, muscular, tattooed Queen of the Night isn’t that much of a stretch but a tall, muscular tattooed Cio Cio San or Mimi is a bridge too far.
Photo credit: Gary Beechey
Last night Pomegranate; music by Kye Marshall, words by Amanda Hale, opened at Buddies in Bad Times. Inspired by the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii, it tells the story of two lesbian lovers. Cass has broken up with Suzy in 1980s Toronto. She visits Pompeii as a tourist and is carried back in time to meet her lover in a previous incarnation in the Temple of Isis. There’s a whole act dealing with the Mysteries, Cassia and Suli’s burgeoning relationship and the attempt by the Roman state to suppress the religion. Then Vesuvius erupts. Fast forward to Act 2 in a lesbian bar in Toronto. Suzy, an immigrant from some unspecified war zone is pressured by her family to break up with Cass. There’s a slightly surreal byt dramatically satisfying epilogue where modern Cass reunites with Roman Sulli in the ruins of Pompeii.
Even by the standards of Rossini comedies The Italian Girl in Algiers is a bit daft. Mustafà, bey of Algiers, is tired of his wife and plans to get rid of her by marrying her off to his Italian servant Lindoro. He wants an Italian girl because well squire, nudge nudge. He instructs his sidekick and commander of the galleys Haly to procure one or be impaled (a somewhat pointed joke that runs through the piece). He shows up with Isabella and her sidekick Taddeo. Isabella just happens to be Lindoro’s squeeze. She immediately starts to plot their escape and persuades Mustafà that to succeed with Italian girls he must become a Pappatacci which involves eating enormous amounts of food and not getting upset when his beloved gets off with other men. With Mustafà in a pasta induced near coma the lovers escape and Mustafà reconciles with his wife. Got that?
I really wasn’t at all familiar with Berlioz’ Béatrice at Bénédict before last night’s opening of a production by Metro Youth Opera at the Daniels Spectrum. All I knew was that it had something to so with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and a reputation for being rather tedious. For the record it’s basically the Shakespeare play shorn of all the darker elements; no Don John, no fake funeral, resulting in a RomCom in which the title characters, after much verbal sparring, are finally brought to admit that they are in love and get married along with Claudio and Héro. Further compressed a little (Somarone is axed) for this production it runs a pleasingly untedious two hours or so.
operaramblings 