review. Salt by Selina Thompson @ Progress Festival (Theatre Centre)

Selina Thompson’s Salt strikes you (and some Salt) from the first moment of the piece. It is a play, yes, and a performance — simultaneously highly theatrical through its representative nature, and anti-theatrical in its lack of performative qualities (don’t worry — this is a good thing). Thompson speaks to the audience as if there were only two people in the room, but also fills the space with her power and thoughts, with enough energy to pack an arena.

The piece is a re-telling of her journey by sea to re-claim the routes and places associated with the transatlantic slave trade; the colonial power exertion that built and maintains the structures of power in place today. This sounds heavy, and at times it was, but there was an overwhelming sense of lightness, too. Thompson is an expert storyteller, weaving the dark and rightfully angry with the light; some of my favourite moments were the contrasts between her painful struggle with history and her often funny, completely relatable struggle with explaining her present journey to her father, and ensuring he knows she is safe (when at times she really is not).

The direction (Dawn Walton) and sound design (Sleepdogs) were superb, and complimented Thompson’s script & performance perfectly. She has been touring this show for a couple years now, and I strongly recommend you see it if you can. It has now been over 2 weeks since I saw it, and certain images and moments continue to creep into my memory day to day. That’s evidence of a truly remarkable piece of art.

review. Top Girls by Caryl Churchill @ Alumnae Theatre

Full disclosure, I was offered a comp to this show by the luminescent Lisa Lenihan who played Isabella Bird / Mrs Kidd.

I remember the first time I read Top Girls. Admittedly, at that point I had not read many plays that weren’t Shakespeare or a musical, so something that played with form and reality and lucidity so actively was a shock to my system. In fact, if I am totally honest, I seem to recall not really liking it. Mostly because on the surface, I just didn’t GET it. University being what it is, I had to keep reading and thinking and working on it and as I dove into unearthing just what the heck was going on in this play, the more it grew on me and I came to recognize the images in the play as manifestations of things I had felt or experienced.

The Alumnae production began with some interesting directorial choices. Doors that had cut outs of powerful female shapes in the design, which were re-built into various set pieces; showing women as the literal building blocks of this world, but passively so. A young female dancer moving through the space off the top, and also between scenes provided lovely imagery, but it did feel peripheral to the storytelling for me.

The performances were at times strong, but at times it felt uneven…one of the challenging aspects of Churchill’s text is the overlap of talking. How does one achieve this feeling of natural female conversation, but without having the actors competing and shouty at one another? For a director this is a huge challenge, and one that only at times was conquered in this production.

The overall interpretation of the play felt quite literal, which is likely the source of the challenges I felt the production faced. Each actor did well enough with the work, it just failed to come together as a cohesive whole for me.

review. Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) by Ho Ka Hei @ Saga Collectif

I’m always here for a great adaptation or re-think of the ancient Greeks; the plays deal with such fundamental questions of family and legacy, and our relationship to a place, that it is impossible not to see the relevance to current times. Saga Collectif present the World Premiere of this new adaptation by Ho Ka Hei (Jeff Ho), which slims the myth down to 4 actors, including a chorus represented by one actor.

The update to the text is delightfully wry, with brilliant steps in and out of an ancient sounding heightened language, cut with a more modern contemporary heightened language of our own, as if sub-tweeting the text. Ho’s adaptation underscores the challenges of our relationship to and feelings of ownership of a place. We are invited (encouraged even!) to empathize with Iphigenia and Orestes in their re-unification, to the point where we forget that in order for them to succeed, those whose land they are on (and property they attempt to steal) will be victims, and the ritual neglected in favour of self interest. I could go on for quite awhile on the symbolic role of the pharmakos and the elimination (or displacement) of this scapegoat in contemporary thought…

I thought the script was brilliant and insightful, and best captured by Virgillia Griffith’s Iphigenia, who embodied the perfect blend of regal ancient Princess/Priestess and Instagram celebrity. The production was well served by the live sound design provided by Heidi Chan, creating a hyper-real world for the characters to inhabit. While I enjoyed each of the performances individually, I did feel as though there was a disjointedness from a style perspective; as if each character was representing their own style of performance. It is tough to say whether this was intentional, but for me, it didn’t quite feel overt enough to really work as an addition to the production (so much to say that if it is intended….REALLY underscore it — like in the moments where Orestes re-tells his instructions from Apollo).

That quibble aside, I found the production to be thought provoking and intelligent. We could do with far more of this kind of theatre around here.

review. What I Call Her by Ellie Moon @ Crow's Theatre

Full Disclosure: I saw this show in the first preview, so aspects of the performances and staging may have changed since I saw it.

Ellie Moon follows up her verbatim play from 2017 Asking For It stepping out of the #metoo and Ghomeshi moment, and into a complex story of a family dealing with their history. The play centres on two sisters and their dying mother who we never see, navigating their relationships with one another, with her, and with the men in their lives. The only man we see is Kate (the older sister’s) boyfriend, though we also hear about their father, and their mom’s new husband.

I felt as though the first part of the play, setting up the relationship between Kate and Kyle, was sluggish and lacking in urgency. It lasted an extraordinarily long time and felt like it was trying to fit too many ideas in (I won’t give spoilers here…). It is when Kate’s sister, Ruby, arrives uninvited, that the play begins to sing. In my opinion, it could do with dramaturgical work that helps it cut to the chase sooner, because the complex tension between the sisters is what gets really interesting to watch, how their behaviour to one another and in the presence of one another is so clearly different than it is with others. Ellie Elwand sparkles with fiery intensity, and Michael Ayres is extremely likeable as the boyfriend stuck in the middle of the sibling hellstorm.

Director Sarah Kitz does well helping the actors navigate the density of the material and creating some nice relationships. The choice to use a thrust setup didn’t quite work for me; I could sense what she was going for…a voyeuristic sense that the walls have just fallen off this apartment, but with audience on 3 sides (though predominantly on 2) the actors had to serve too many angles, causing the blocking to come off as stilted. I think it could have benefitted instead from an alley, perhaps, giving the actors more freedom.

Overall I think there is a seed of an extremely interesting play in here, and I hope it will be uncovered through further development of the script.

review. Secret Life of a Mother by Hannah Moscovitch @ Theatre Centre

Hannah Moscovitch has teamed up with Maev Beatty and Ann-Marie Kerr to share an immensely personal, highly theatrical and yet viscerally real story of motherhood. The trials of becoming a mother, and then the intense, challenging, terrifying world of being a mother.

While the story is intriguing, it does not, of course, reflect everyone’s personal experiences. It couldn’t. Motherhood is a myriad of experiences, all slightly different than the other. But a good story doesn’t necessarily reflect one’s own experiences exactly; rather it triggers memories and thoughts about your own experiences. Things you had forgotten, or pushed away. Recognition of a sentiment. In this, Moscovitch is immensely successful.

Maev Beatty is a force. Her performances are known to be filled with emotional truth, and this is no different. What is truly fantastic here is the sheer range she displays in matters of minutes; jumping in and out of the character of Hannah to the character of Maev, performing performance, rehearsal, the reality of shifting focus in motherhood beautifully mirrored in the shape of the play and its performance.

Director Ann-Marie Kerr creates beautiful images; dangerous and vulnerable, while also incredibly strong. The inventive use of water and projection and audio/video recording, coupled with stunning lighting design by Leigh Ann Vardy created spaces out of nothing, evocative images and pictures in every moment. It created tension without being tense, and a specific feeling of community, amplified by the plexiglass reflection where the audience could somewhat, at times, see themselves on the stage, too.

My only dislike, would be the final few moments. While the images were beautiful, evocative of a womb, and then of reflection of the self, I felt that it lacked the same energy and purpose as the earlier moments…the urgency faded too quickly.

On the whole, I appreciated the informality of the structure, the work that felt inherently female. This work has a momentum, an urgency, and an intensity. As the artists say in their notes, and in the script itself; there isn’t real work about motherhood. People don’t talk about miscarriage, or the reality of childbirth and its many permutations enough. They don’t talk about the anxiety of carrying first in the womb, and then in your arms. The struggle to continue to be a person and not just a mom, but at the same time, being shaped by motherhood every day. And if we consider how many audience members and theatre makers are women, that just doesn’t make sense. I applaud the artists for their courage in making and sharing this intensely personal and vulnerable story. It encourages me to share mine.

review. The Assembly: Episode 1 @ Crow's Theatre & Porte Parole

The Crow’s Theatre and Porte Parole have come together again for a new piece of politically charged verbatim theatre, The Assembly. The premise is to take 4 people with opposing viewpoints and experiences, who on the internet would rage at one another, bring them into a room and have them discuss some of the most polarizing subjects of our day. Being verbatim theatre, this is then edited, spliced, and sewn together into a narrative. I’m speaking vaguely in the below, to avoid spoilers for anyone who might see it in the coming days (it runs to Nov 3)

Among verbatim pieces, I feel this works quite well; the premise and the conversations themselves facilitate the editing, which I often find so problematic in this sort of writing. The style, snapping through different times, rewinding at times, is like a live on stage manifestation of scrolling through your Facebook news feed.

The actors shared polished performances, and director Chris Abraham’s choices to juxtapose the hyper-real with the non-naturalistic (at times) movement helped amplify this feeling of a disjointed digital world. The use of cameras to zoom in or out underlined, at times, the responses (or lack thereof) of the other 3 participants. One touch I really enjoyed was that the curtains were open to the street on some windows, so when we heard a bus or truck drive by (impossible to avoid in this space), we could also see them not only in the changing light, but also in the camera picking them up behind actors….an ever-present reminder of the real world that this play is situated in.

All of that said, I couldn’t help but wonder about what was missing; there was only one person of colour represented (the character Hope), which meant that during in-depth discussions of “Muslim immigration”, the voice of Muslims in North America was starkly absent. Similarly, there was no reference to indigenous issues (notably, there was no land acknowledgement in advance of the show) and although positioned with Canadians, the discussion was highly US-Centric (perhaps a bit tellingly truthful of our own lives and thoughts). But most importantly, I worry that despite efforts to remind us that theatre does not exist in a vaccuum (through the open window, etc) the play, at least in the audience I saw it with, did actually; the audience felt inherently against the Alt-Right character Valerie, laughing at her responses in a manner that they did not laugh at other characters. I think that efforts to show Valerie and Shayne (the self-identifying queer, Jewish, anarchist) as foils to one another fell down in the presence of an audience who (based on their responses at least) seemed quite liberal. I would love to see this play amongst an audience who wouldn’t normally see this kind of play; people like Valerie, or even James, who as the other conservative character gets lots in the scuffle between Valerie and Shayne.

A lot to keep thinking about here, for sure, and in many ways some of the most effective use of verbatim theatre I have seen…however if we keep telling these stories into an echo chamber, are we really changing anything?

review. Ghostbusters! The Movie Experience

The Secret Sessions have put together a fun evening for Ghostbusters enthusiasts, merging fandom, live performance, and the movie into an experience that enables visitors to interact and enjoy. Using the great brick-walled open space of The Redwood Theatre, they create a world that goes beyond simply watching the movie. In the pre-show interaction time, audience members can fill out their own paranormal activity reports, or interact with the performers, or just relax back and have a drink or snack. I would have liked to see a stronger device to make the interactions and navigation of the space a bit more clear for the un-initiated. . . attending on my own I observed some actors just talking (in character) amongst themselves while I lingered looking on.

For the performance itself, director Mandy Roveda did an excellent job with the cast, blending scenes from the film and live action perfectly, with just the right amount of adventurous theatricality. My only complaint was that in the cavernous space, sometimes actors’ diction was lost.

This is a super fun way to enjoy your annual Ghostbusters viewing!

review. The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe @ Howland Company & Crow's Theatre

The Howland Company and Crow’s Theatre have put together an exciting young cast to share Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer shortlisted firecracker of a play, The Wolves, with Toronto audiences for the first time. Centred on a girls’ soccer team, DeLappe’s play gives us what pretty much no other play has; young girls, in their own element, speaking as they do, overlapping, multiple conversations at once, simultaneously ultra-serious and completely silly. This play is an important landmark in playwriting. Reading it the first time, the structure and language reminded me of first encounters with Caryl Churchill….fiery, searing, powerful, and undeniably female.

This production, directed by Courtney Ching-Lancaster, makes use of a thrust setup and minimalist turf setting, showcasing the all female cast and giving them nowhere to hide. Off the top the energy is a bit over-the-top, but within a few minutes, as the overlapping chatter begins, the actors settle in and we start to see the girls as they are. There are lots of reasons to be nervy as a performer, with a lot of ball manipulation required throughout, and extremely challenging dialogue. A standout is Amakah Umeh as 00, the perfectionist goalkeeper, who simply radiates, despite the fact that we hear very little from her.

The scenes are divided by movement scenes set to abstract electronic music; I hoped for a bit more in these sequences, ultimately they felt like filler rather than urgent and necessary….they detracted from the forward momentum of the script. On the whole, I craved more movement that was representative of soccer bodies in space. While the performers did move a lot, it somehow felt static, and not necessarily linked to the pace of the play. The most compelling moment was 00’s fierce repetition of man-makers, until you feel like she might vomit; an honest portrayal of the fierce determination of these young women to succeed. The overall pace was decent, however I felt it lacking a musicality in the build-up and release of tension as the voices and conversations move over one another, then disperse, from density to sparsity so easily. As a result, some of the tension building in final moments was, for me, a bit lacking.

All that, however, does not detract from the overall necessity and importance of this show. I saw the production with my 14 year old, who herself is among the elite soccer players her age in the province. She has seen a lot of theatre, so has some high expectations; it has been a long time since I have seen her as captivated and engaged in a story. It is such a telling demonstration of what representing experiences on stage can do for someone. Please, please; if you can take a young woman in your life to this play, do.

Upcoming: #DAMNFINEPARTY with Lost & Gone Saturday October 27th

I’m extremely excited to be supporting Lost & Gone’s Halloween Event #DAMNFINEPARTY.

Saturday October 27
1214 Queen Street West
Tickets at www.lostandgone.ca

review. I Call Myself Princess @ Cahoots Theatre w/ Native Earth Performing Arts

I caught this on the closing weekend, and was quite looking forward to what was described as a “play with opera”. I love merging and blending forms of performance that might not normally mingle.

Director Marjorie Chen helps the cast elicit beautiful performances, both in the singing and acting, however the overall direction felt muddled. The staging, which required often overlapping time periods evocative of Stoppard’s Arcadia, felt clunky, and the set was indecisively between surrealist and naturalist. The costume design, however, was stunning; with such clear costuming, the stage design could have benefitted from a touch of minimalism, I think.

The story Jani Lauzon mines the script from is intriguing, following a young indigenous opera student attending the RCM, and his exploration of a turn-of-the-century opera about an indigenous woman. The play unveiled some of the beautiful tension that occurs when we view historical work with a contemporary lens, offering the historical characters an opportunity to talk a bit about their intentions, helping the contemporary viewpoint come even more clearly into focus. That said, the script unfortunately came across as heavily education-focused; it could have benefitted from some revision to make the message clearer through less exposition.

I think that in its current form it might make a very fascinating TYA script. Which, to clarify, is not necessarily a bad thing…I just did not get the impression that was the intention.

review. Bikeface @ Toronto Fringe Best of Fringe

I saw this quite some time ago, and it has taken me some time to sit down and write about it. Playwright Natalie Frija weaves an intriguing tale of adventure and feminism, drawing parallels between turn-of-the-twentieth century anti-cycling messages and contemporary experiences of female cyclists. I think that the script is definitely a niche; if you never cycle, you might miss pieces of the story, and definitely jokes. Overall, however, a strong feminist message stands out, as she highlights the differences in how we position adventure to young boys versus young girls.

Director Mandy Roveda handles the staging challenges well. How do you block a show that primarily takes place on a bike?! She does a great job managing a relatively stationary stage setup, using additional spaces well to create the many locations we visit. Performer Clare Blackwood is engaging, and really makes the material sing.

Overall, I think that dramaturgically this could have had a few edits to tighten up the message while simultaneously making it a little less didactic. That said, it is a great fringe show, and one I hope gets to some more audiences.

review. Women of the Fur Trade @ Toronto Fringe

I preface these thoughts with an apology for the extreme delay in getting them posted.....I had to bolt out of town the next morning and haven't really stopped since. 

Frances Koncan's new play, Women of the Fur Trade, was shared in an early-ish form as part of Toronto Fringe, ahead of what I understand to be a subsequent full length version coming to Native Earth. The simplicity of the fringe production was enjoyable; 3 rocking chairs, 3 action figures, and a simple bunting of envelopes clipped to a string created a space for the 3 women to interact, allowing their similarities to shine, while their differing circumstances became increasingly apparent. 

What I loved about the script was the anachronism, with contemporary pop culture references interwoven with historical fact and circumstance. By positioning the 3 women in between history, it served to illustrate their absence from recorded history and the decisions that affect their lives historically, and through to today. By objectifying the male characters both intellectually, and literally with the use of the 3 action figures, the women begin to regain some power. 

The 3 performers (Liz Whitbread, Haley Vincent, and Joelle Peters) were delightful in their performances, clearly distinguishing the hierarchical relationship amongst the women. The pacing could have been tighter and more dynamic to provide a sense of movement in the piece, which grew a bit stationary at times (both verbally and physically). 

I'm very intrigued to see the full production, and can't wait to bring my Louis Riel obsessed Manitoba-born daughter. It seems the perfect vehicle and context for young women to relate to and learn about a historical event which still affects us today. 

review. #kanderandebb by Ryan G. Hinds @ Toronto Fringe

Ryan G. Hinds is an absolute delight. His one-man homage to iconic musical theatre writers Kander and Ebb (of Chicago, Cabaret, Kiss of the Spider Woman...you know, all the good musicals) is a 60 minute tour de force. Hinds is magnetic as he shares personal stories of a life obsessed with and then living the dream of performing musical theatre. The show is fun and silly while also being serious musical theatre performance. Hinds really showed his skill, when after noticing in the first song the mic wasn't working, he adapted quickly, vamping with jokes while the tech team ran a corded mic cable, then picked up as if NOTHING had happened. You would have sworn the show was always performed mic-in-hand.

The show has been to a few festivals now. If it comes to your city, I can guarantee there isn't a better way to spend an hour. 

review. Everyone Wants a T-Shirt by Madeleine Brown @ Toronto Fringe

This smart, funny, and unpretentious comedy about the perils of chasing success is just what we need. The 4 performers deftly navigate a multitude of unique characters in space and time, aided by some smart choreography in the direction. This is a world sort of like our own, but stretched from reality, and all aspects of the production are smartly guided to this logical imperative by director Aaron Jan. 

The pace is spot on, and the play carries a message without being preachy. Kudos to this young team for fine work! The production is perfectly fringe-y. 

review. The Mating Game by Dennie Theodore @ Toronto Fringe

I'll be honest; I am not the intended audience for this show, as a millennial in a long-term (15+ year) relationship, dating, new relationships, and middle age are foreign to me. Dennie Theodore's The Mating Game is an exploration of returning to and navigating the "dating scene" after some time away. This two-hander is well performed by Luc Nogna and Nawa Nicole Simon (who is utterly charming) however the material and the staging leave something to be desired. 

There are a few scenes that are directed clunkily with slow changes in space, and a stilted attempt at a few intervals for audience participation. Each actor plays a plethora of roles, but it is challenging to glean a perspective on any of them. There are some bizarre lighting choices (including one scene where one actor is in the dark for almost the entire scene...) and some awkward voice overs, all of which combines to make it difficult to connect to the characters and material. 

The idea is great, but I think more a fruitful and engaging script could come from mining the material we just got to at the end of the play. 

review. Wagon Play by Ben Hayward and Owen Fawcett @ Toronto Fringe

Toronto company Theatre By Committee bring us a delightfully fun piece about the celebrity and following along with their participatory piece, Wagon Play. From the second the gate opens, the audience are invited to engage with the performers, setting the tone for the remainder of the hours. The gentle setup serves well to help the performers gauge participation, and also to allow the audience their own pace to engage with the piece. Smart, silly, and irreverent, the performers are engaged 115%, with surprising staging choices, and a shocking attention to detail (kudos to the designer!!). The team don't fall victim to the pitfalls I see in a lot of immersive or participatory performance. 

I don't want to say too much, as Amber says it is best if you can experience a re-setting on your own, as you learn to live your truth.

Suffice it to say this is probably the most fun, and the most re-set you will feel after a Toronto Fringe performance!

review. RAGE AGAINST The Complacent by Daniel Bagg @ Toronto Fringe

RAGE AGAINST The Complacent presents an allegorical story of young and idealistic journalism students who attempt to fight against "the complacent" mainstream junk-food media a la Buzzfeed and BlogTO. Staged on a blank space, with a lot of mime and chorus-like speaking from the 5 performers, the characters speak at length about how they want to change things, while their actions rarely go further than some internet-activism. 

The didactic script is not helped along by the style of direction, which despite some strong individual performances from the actors, lacks a cohesiveness in its vision and rather than showing unity among the characters, comes across as half-baked. The ideas aren't new or exciting, nor is the staging, yet it is all presented to us as if it were. 

It isn't all for nought; the young performers are earnest and engaging, but they are failed by the weak material and poor direction. I hope to have the chance to see them in something else down the road. 

review. The Grass is Greenest at the Houston Astrodome by Michael Ross Albert @ Toronto Fringe

Toronto Playwright Michael Ross Albert's first Toronto production of his acclaimed play hits some great notes. Staged in a gallery, surrounded by smashed artwork, the production immerses the audience in the world of the play immediately. Starting the dialogue snappily, we are brought along on the journey of these friends and their tumultuous relationship filled with pride, envy, and a bit of spitfire. The snappy dialogue and searing pace set up for a great release as the major dramatic crux is revealed, allowing the characters to spin out as they reel from this information.

The performances were strong at moments, but also at times felt rushed; there was a sense of uneven direction which was to the detriment of our engagement with the story as some text was glossed over. Each performer alternately had fantastic moments, and weaker ones, which was a touch frustrating. Nonetheless, the performers got some great laughs out of the audience, and we felt a distinct voice from each. 

Found spaces can be a challenge, and I felt the direction used the space well, although there were some lighting choices toward the end which limited the full engagement with the space and the choice of staging it in such a manner. 

This has been a hot ticket already, and with good reason; definitely worth grabbing an advance ticket for the small space!

review. Hamburger by Ciarán Myers @ Toronto Fringe

Kitchener-based company Informal Upright take over The Hideout at College and Bathurst with Ciarán Myers' new two hander, Hamburger. Staged in the bar (with drinks and food available during the show!) the play shares the story of two coworkers as they grow in their careers and as people, but always in some relationship to one another. It explores themes of workplace romance (and the propriety or welcome of advances) along with aspirations and the politics of working in a kitchen while building a career as a young female. 

Although it is a mainly light story, there is a darkness to the play as we see hints of frustrations for the characters, specifically Lib (subtly and intelligently performed by Mina James). Zach Parsons plays Arie admirably, particularly knowing that he joined the cast as a replacement only a few days before this preview. 

The use of the space is interesting, if not always effective, and the pacing of the show doesn't do the best to show off the script through the build and release of tension, however some of this is likely due to the last minute cast change, thus not to be judged as a tick against them. All in all, an interesting story, well performed, and under some dire circumstances. Definitely worth putting Hamburger on your list. 

review. Bug by Yolanda Bonnell - Manidoons Collective @ Luminato

This is a difficult story. Yolanda Bonnell's solo show, bug, is a daring construction which weaves creation story with real life and esoteric worlds to create a moment in which we witness all the joy and pain, hope and despair of a young indigenous woman. She is many women. Women whose babies are taken, or whose daughters and sisters and mothers and aunts disappear or are killed. The women Bonnell shares with us, however, have hope. Hope that they can and will do better. 

The physical work in the play is beautiful. Haunting images of Bonnell dancing, creating shapes to transform the space, throwing herself on the ground, or reaching oh so gently for the little ladybug. Situating the audience in a sharing circle, Bonnell connects eye to eye with many of the audience members. This isn't simply a performance, it is a shared story, which does not allow the audience to sit back. It is difficult viewing, but intentionally so. 

Director Cole Alvis does a great job pacing the production to build tension and release just where we need it. The production team's choice to share the creation story of the top, and also to bring a spiritual healer to each performance is a wise one. Despite the hopeful tone, the real pain of the characters is palpable, and audience members are visibly shaken. 

This is a challenging, emotional piece of theatre, and one that needs to keep living across the country.