‘The Flick’ is “captivating, funny, and real”.

It’s true that, for the three-hour-and-fifteen-minute running time of Outside the March’s production of Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick, not very much actually happens. It’s also true that, were its characters working those three hours, each of their paycheques, minimum wage in Massachusetts, would total only about $25.

Baker’s play, dealing in empty space, desultory popcorn-sweeping, and freewheeling conversations, details the interactions between three employees at one of the last theatres to use 35mm film projectors instead of going digital. Not much happens, and yet, it’s a genuinely thrilling theatre experience that deals humanely and sensitively with the kind of people whose lives never appear on the big screen.

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Yaga is a 3-dimensional exploration of myth as a cyclical being that lives forever.

We are steeped in a culture that tends to categorize women in one of three ways: the sexy young ingénue, the nurturing mother, and the invisible crone. The last category can be frustrating, but also very freeing: once a woman is no longer seen to be consumable, she can finally begin to consume. Kat Sandler’s Yaga, now playing at Tarragon Theatre, takes the Slavic legend of Baba Yaga and turns it into a supernatural small-town detective story, with delightful results.

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Racial tensions run high on Princeton’s prestigious campus in Actually

When I was accepted to Princeton, a family friend I’d perhaps met once took it upon himself to send me a message. He urged me not to go, despite my dreams, due to the school’s less-than-stellar history with minority students and Jewish students in particular. Believing that the events he referred to were in the distant past, I disregarded his note and matriculated, and I fell madly in love with my school and the brilliant people populating it. That didn’t mean, however, that the journey was completely smooth.

Take an elite college full of self-reflective, high-achieving teenagers under pressure to succeed, mix in insecurities, alcohol, hormones, and class tensions, and you have a recipe for angst and bad decisions. It was with that background that I was eager to see Anna Ziegler’s Actually, a production by the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company in association with Obsidian Theatre Company, now playing at the Greenwin Theatre at the Meridian Arts Centre in North York.

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Egyptian musicians wind up in a small Jewish town in The Band’s Visit at the Ed Mirvish Theatre

“You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important.” That’s the tagline to the events of the David Yazbek/Itamar Moses musical The Band’s Visit, now playing on tour at the Ed Mirvish Theatre. The show, based on a 2007 Israeli film, won 10 Tonys in 2018, and comes highly celebrated for such a supposedly small story.

In 1996, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, from Egypt, gets invited to play a show at Petah Tikva, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Instead, due to a miscommunication, they wind up at Bet Hatikva, a (fictional) small desert town where absolutely nothing ever happens. As they wait for the next day’s bus ride out, the band members accept the initially-wary townspeople’s offer of their homes, hospitality, and the potential for unexpected, fly-by-night connections.

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We lose approximately 4,000 Canadians to suicide each year. Many of us have felt the heartbreak that comes from a friend, family member, or colleague’s very final action taken in response to a struggle with mental illness. Comedians Stand-Up to Stigma is a comedy event supporting a wonderful organization, Distress Centres of Greater Toronto, which is the recent result of a merger between Peel’s Spectra Helpline and Toronto’s Distress Centres.

The organizations’ crisis lines are open 24 hours a day, trained volunteers fielding more than 118,000 calls and texts, while 60,000 outbound calls are made a year to at-risk seniors, and volunteer grief facilitators support families and friends through their losses. As September 10th was World Suicide Prevention Day, the Thursday event felt timely and urgent, and it was good to see a large crowd at the Royal Cinema.

Continue reading Review: Comedians Stand-Up to Stigma (Distress Centres of Greater Toronto) →