There was a certain amount of anticipatory buzz about Michael Ross Albert’s The Bidding War, directed by Paolo Santalucia, that opened at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday night. Crow’s has built rather a reputation for punchy, darkly humorous, Toronto-centric plays. This time it’s basically a satire on the Toronto real estate market and the sharp practices of the real estate and property development industries and for the most part it hits the mark.
Mark Leiren-Young’s Playing Shylock opened at Canadian Stage on Wednesday night. It’s a one man show featuring Canadian stage, film and TV icon Saul Rubinek and directed by the equally venerable Martin Kinch. And it’s back where it all started for both of them in what was then Toronto Free Theatre on Berkeley Street (once, appropriately enough, a gas works).
How different were sensibilities in seventeenth century England (at least after the Restoration) to contemporary mores? Perhaps less than one might think. Unless you are a woman. And you want to be famous. And you aren’t a queen. All of which presents a problem for young Margaret who leaves her dull, impoverished, gentry family to try her luck at court just as Cromwell and co finally get around to giving Charles I a rather drastic haircut.
Daniel MacIvor’s Here Lies Henry is the other half of the pair of MacIvor one man shows currently playing at Factory Theatre. It’s quite different from Monster. For starters Damien Atkins plays a single character, Henry “Tom” Gallery rather than the multiple character of Monster. The only things we know for sure about Henry is that he is a liar and he wants, for some reason, to tell us his life story, or rather several versions of it. The only thing he says that we can be fairly sure is true is that you are born, then you do stuff and then you die.
Joel Ivany
Korngold’s Silent Serenade is, to put it mildly, odd. The plot could have been taken from Dario Fo and the only possible excuse for the schmaltzy music is that Korngold initiated many of the saccharine clichés he relies on. Last night the students of the Glenn Gould School under the direction of Joel Ivany and the musical leadership of Pieter Tiefenbach bravely tried to rescue it from well deserved obscurity.
The plot concerns a dressmaker who is accused of breaking into the bedroom of, and trying to abduct, one of his clients; an actress who happens to be engaged to the Prime Minister. In Naples this is a hanging offence. Meanwhile someone has made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the unpopular Prime Minister with a bomb. The king is dying and, we learn from his confessor, wishes to make a great act of mercy before he finally snuffs it. He wishes to pardon the bomber. Unfortunately the police don’t have a suspect. The solution is obvious. The dressmaker must confess to both crimes so that he can be pardoned and hanged for neither. Unfortunately the king dies before signing the pardon and so the dressmaker must hang. Following this so far? Fortunately for him the unpopular Prime Minister is killed in a popular uprising and he is installed in his stead much to the annoyance of the anarchist who did plant the bomb. They agree that the dressmaker will return to his salon and the actress, who has now fallen in love with him and is, conveniently, no longer engaged. There’s also a subplot concerning a newspaper reporter and an aspiring actress.
operaramblings 