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.
Toronto’s The Weaker Vessels present Would You Rather…?, a sketch comedy show that may have left the audience in stitches but still managed to fall short
I’m not a comedian. So in reviewing The Weaker Vessels, I brought one along.
We’ve covered these guys before, and they sounded right up my alley: clever, existential, absurdist and whip-smart sketch comedy. All five performers are pedigreed: the programme is literally filled with Second City This and Upright Citizens That. And tonight, we were promised an evening of good, not-altogether-clean fun, casting a jaundiced eye towards the theme of choice.
Jokes were told. People laughed. But on the whole, my guest and I both wished they’d made different ones.
Breathtaking voices fill this modern take on the classic opera Carmen playing at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
These are gorgeous photos, aren’t they? In fact, everything about Loose Tea Theatre’s La Tragedie de Carmen (which played at Buddies in Bad Times) sounds gorgeous – a sultry, 1930s chamber-scale adaptation of Carmen, one of the most enduring and popular pieces of western Opera.
And, luckily, the opera sounds gorgeous as well: Ryan Harper (Don Jose) and especially Cassandra Warner (Carmen) round out an excellent cast of singers. Musical Director Jennifer Tung (who accompanies on piano) has them in fine form, and the effect is helped considerably by how much fun the cast appear to be having on stage.
But though this is a production which sounds gorgeous. I found the experience of watching it to be somewhat less satisfying.
Show and Tell Alexander Bell (at the Lower Ossington Theatre) is a theatrical joyride, and the perfect antidote to some of the heavier shows this SummerWorks.
It’s rare to see something this eager, thoughtful and playful on a stage. I cannot overstate how much this show pushed my pleasure buttons from beginning to end.
And I cannot overstate how much you should see it.
Everyone in Wild Dogs on the Moscow Trains (playing the Scotiabank Studio as part of SummerWorks) is trapped; in a shitty apartment, in undesirable careers, in each other’s company, in hospital beds, in addiction, in alcoholism, but above all in a crumbling, smothering country which rejects the very idealism that people of their age and status are meant to embody. In this universe, success is given to those who keep their heads down, refuse to ask questions, and pay the right bribes.
In their own ways, all three characters rebel against this norm. And all three fail.
This isn’t a fun show, but it’s told well enough, and with enough clarity of vision, to be worthwhile.
Holy Mothers, playing at The Factory Theatre as part of SummerWorks, is less a play than a magic trick.
We are initially confronted by a perfectly ordinary show: a sort of domestic comedy-of-manners. Funny, but unexceptional.
But about five minutes into the second act, when the characters stand up and turn themselves into storytellers, you realize nothing was quite as it appeared–and the third act transforms it all yet again, with a whole new layer of meta-metatheatre which must be seen to be understood.
I was wobbly up until I figured this out; until that second-act revelation, I wasn’t sure what was going on. But as soon as I picked up on the thread, I loved it.
