Paolo Santalucia’s first production as Artistic Director of Soulpepper is a pretty bold choice. It’s Frank Wedekind’s 1891 drama Spring Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen) and it’s presented in English in Santalucia’s adaptation; not in the form of the Broadway musical adaptation which is probably better known in the anglosphere.
Potato, Potato is a pretty well known Toronto sketch comedy group consisting of Daniel Bagg, Callan Forrester, Rami Khan (not appearing in this show on account of becoming successful or being abducted by aliens), Ashlyn Kusch, Erika Rogstad, Lizzie Song and they are good at what they do; a blend of Canadian political satire and sex. For PPStW they create a kind of wrapper for their (more or less) standard show that’s funny in its own right and makes the whole thing just a bit more than seeing the group at a comedy club.
Yanik Gosselin’s solo show Brava: A Cabaret of Devotions is an intensely personal tribute to the women who have helped shape his musical life. It takes its cue from Peter Allen’s Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on Stage and takes us through the ways in which his two musical loving aunts and generations of musical theatre divas have shaped his musical journey with nary an opera singer or aria in sight, though the horrors of auditions get a look in.
Medusa, by Erin Shields, opened on Wednesday night at Soulpepper. It’s a really interesting piece brimming with ideas but I wasn’t completely convinced it worked. If I’d seen it at a workshop my reaction would have been very positive but also a feeling that there was still work to do. I wish I was smart enough to know what that might be!
Tiger Bride; which opened at Soulpepper on Tuesday is an adaptation of one of the stories in Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber. All of the stories take traditional folk tales but twist them to give the female protagonist a great deal more agency than in the original. The Tiger’s Bride, on which Tiger Bride is based, is in its turn a version of Beauty and the Beast and the adaptation, by Frank Cox-O’Connell (who also directs), Hailey Gillis and Andrew Penner has turned it into a sort of eclectic rock musical.
Here’s what’s coming down for the holiday season, as best I know:
Soulpepper opened a run of a revival of their 2019 production of Tennessee William’s A Street Car Named Desire at the Young Centre on Tuesday evening. It’s a terrific production and performance but, as usually happens to me with Mr. Williams’ plays, I found myself admiring it more than enjoying it. Showcasing dishonest, violent people living lives of noisy despair without any form of redemption, however brilliantly portrayed, leaves me wondering what the point of it all is.
A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney by Lucas Hnath opened last night at the Young Centre in a production by Outside the March and Soulpepper. It’s one of those pieces that is perhaps easier to admire than enjoy. Technically, everything about it is excellent but sitting through ninety minutes of egotistical bullying is not a whole lot of fun.
De Profundis: Oscar Wilde in Jail is an adaptation by Gregory Prest of the famous letter that Wilde wrote, page by page, to Lord Alfred Douglas while he was in prison. It opened; a world premiere, last night in a Soulpepper production directed by Prest at the Young Centre.
WILDWOMAN, by Kat Sadler (who also directed), is part of the {{her words}} festival at Soulpepper and I attended the first preview performance on Thursday night at the Young Centre. It’s not usual to review previews but I’m out of the country for most of the run proper so there it is. It’s an interesting piece. It weaves together two (more or less) real stories that are quite tenuously related into a single integrated narrative that explores humanity, power and the role of women in society.
