Mike was that kid who walked into the high school stage crew booth, saw the lighting board, and went ooooooooooooh. Now that he’s (mostly) all grown up, Mike keeps his foot in the door as a community-theatre producer, stage manager and administrator. In the audience, he’s a tremendous sucker for satire and parody, for improvisational and sketch-driven comedy, for farce and pantomime, and for cabaret of all types. His happiest Toronto theatrical memory is (re) Birth: E. E. Cummings in Song.
Improvised Shakespeare, with audience input, took Toronto’s Second City stage in Slings and Errors
Slings and Errors (playing the Second City) is improvised Shakespeare — an idea with some pedigree, but which hasn’t yet reached a wide audience. And this company, drawn from all over the place — Second City improvisers, stand-up comedians, Canadian Comedy Award-winning sketch artists — make a game attempt to bring it home.
There are laughs. In fact, there are lots and lots and lots of spill-your-drink laughs. But while this cast is talented and this concept is promising, I found that opening night had a few format kinks holding the project back.
The Greek myth is given a thoughtful, sophisticated, age-appropriate retelling at Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre
Minotaur (at the Young People’s Theatre) is a big project with even bigger goals. Playwright Keven Dyer explores mythology and legend, destiny, family, identity, and trust, and the effect is not entirely unlike being trapped in a labyrinth: the plot turns and swerves and convolutes, piling on top of itself until one can’t help but feel a little lost. Where are we supposed to look? What are we meant to understand? Where does this tunnel lead?
But don’t be put off: Dyer’s script is richer than this. He does his young audience the kindness of assuming that–again, like Theseus–they’ll find their own way, cobbling together what they’ll understand, asking and exploring the questions which interest the most, latching onto the symbols and messages which speak to them. And while his labyrinth is filled with monsters and menace, he’s left us with no dead ends. Everywhere leads to somewhere else, and when the paths eventually converge, the payoff for persevering through these twisted halls makes the journey more than worthwhile for grown-ups as well as young people.
Toronto’s Second City returns with Sixteen Scandals, their spring mainstage revue
Sixteen Scandals, the latest concoction down at The Second City‘s Mercer Street madhouse, is everything a comedy revue ought to be: snappy, witty, wacky, topical, fast-paced and very, very funny. On opening night, the laughter from the back row alone was shaking the foundations and frightening the pigeons.
And this show’s unique Toronto focus is especially refreshing. The Second City is one of our city’s most under-appreciated theatrical institutions: something we know about, but something we associate with tourists and corporate parties and station wagons full of Red Hat Ladies who want a few laughs but need to be in bed by eleven. That this show is so freewheeling and tight in its focus makes this an unusually good time to make the trip down King Street, if you’ve been putting it off.
The pomp and circumstance of the pageantry world takes to Toronto’s EnWave Theatre in Major Tom
When you see Major Tom (playing the EnWave Theatre as part of WorldStage), you don’t watch Victoria Melody perform nearly so much as run into her at a dog park: she smiles in recognition, and you start chatting. She has the sort of personality which, with nothing more than a wink and a well-chosen anecdote, brings you into her world. Vicky’s going to talk, and you’re going to listen–and you’re going to enjoy every minute of it.
And this particular story is fascinating: she walks us through more-or-less a year in the life of a dog fancier who, feeling it unfair that her basset hound (the titular Major Tom) must be primped and trained and perfumed and tweezed into a perfect specimen in order to compete at dog shows, decides to begin entering beauty pageants herself–with all the attendant weight loss, relationship strain, pink-ribbon runs, spray-on tans, and charity calendar shoots.
