Spelling Bee is a funny reminder of middle-school awkwardness playing at Toronto’s Randolph Theatre

Full disclosure: Spelling Bee (playing at the Annex Theatre) is one of my favourite shows. Everything about it–the affectionate parody of middle-school awkwardness, the cringe-inducing audience participation, the surprising depth–hits the right buttons. Clever, but not dickish; emotional, but not melodramatic.

Set in a suburban gymnatorium, nine spellers (including several audience volunteers), each having conquered their own school’s competition, have advanced to the county final. The winner of today’s bee will move onto Washington’s national championship. The stakes are high, and as the spellers get picked off one at a time, we get brief glimpses into their worlds: Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, who wants nothing more than to make her two moms proud; Leaf Coneybear, trying to prove himself good at anything; William Barfée, whose only friend is the dictionary.

What makes this show unique is how readily it mixes the frivolous with the serious, and how wholeheartedly it embraces both extremes. “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry” is a tremendous cliché, but yes: an audience member did, in fact, piss herself laughing.

And, yes: moments later, several people were daintily rubbing the tears from their eyes.

What a show, eh?

Continue reading The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Randolph Academy) →

007-themed improv and sketch take Toronto’s Comedy Bar stage in Provocateur

Provocateur (playing at the Comedy Bar) knows how to have fun. Set in the Spy Universe — James Bond, Sydney Bristow and Sterling Archer walk into a premise — and high on camp, this mostly-improvised-partially-scripted show explores life after a pandemic which has wiped out North America. British Intelligence is aggressively pursuing quarantines and a cure; the Russian agents have secrets to keep; and aside from hitting a few pre-written plot points, nobody really knows how the story ends.

Continue reading Provocateur (Bad Dog Theatre Company) →

After Miss Julie is a visually and intellectually sumptuous production playing at Toronto’s Storefront Theatre

After Miss Julie (Red One Theatre Collective) is, literally, the story of the twelve hours immediately following VE Day, as set in an English servants’ cottage. The end of the war was many things to many people, and three characters–a stern northern cook; an aggressive, proud chauffeur; a young noblewoman–work through these changes in their own ways. They love, they hate, they fuck, they kill, they make a mess on the carpet.

The tricky thing about this show is that, by all rights, it shouldn’t work. The script has a number of clunky lines, the symbolism runs to depths normally associated with Very Very Very Serious High School Plays, and the story turns on developments that contemporary Canadian audiences probably can’t be expected to intuit. (Audience member to her date: “Who’s Clement Atlee? Wait, who was Winston Churchill again?”)

But work it does. These talented, talented actors; this gorgeous, gorgeous set; director David Ferry’s delicate, delicate slow-burn touch.

Continue reading After Miss Julie (Red One Theatre Collective) →

The evolution of young love is served up in Mature Young Adults playing at Toronto’s Videofag

Walking into Mature Young Adults is, itself, an experience. Videofag has been transformed into an urban forest straight off Portlandia: rough-hewn wooden picnic tables; a cobbled-together, grown-up-sized swing set; functional lamps strewn across the stage; fairy lights in the sky.

It’s exactly what you’d build if you were trying to create a wooden playground for grown-up children. The script is playing a similar game: young love, served up by adults.

But the hinky thing with nostalgia is that, artificial and saccharine as it may be, it still punches you square in the gut.

Or, in the case of Mature Young Adults, hugs you and hugs you and promises to never let go.

Continue reading Review: Mature Young Adults (Aim for the Tangent) →

George Brown theatre program brings Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband to vivid life at Toronto’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts

An Ideal Husband (at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts) opened at just the right moment: as our own chief magistrate tumbles further and further down what appears to be a bottomless well of tawdry personal scandals, Oscar Wilde’s play is especially prescient.

Set in the 1890s, a promising young politician–Sir Robert Chilthern–is blackmailed by the villainous Mrs. Cheveley, who has acquired evidence of an earlier, devastating indiscretion. Aided by the dandified Lord Goring, Sir Robert must obtain the evidence before everything–his marriage, his career, his freedom–is destroyed.

Continue reading Review: An Ideal Husband (George Brown College) →