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Forced Expectations

Is the word ‘seminal’?

sem·i·nal adj
1.    highly original and influential
2.    containing an idea or set of ideas that forms a basis for later developments
3.    relating to, containing, or carrying semen or seeds

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Andrew Laurenson
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Sad Quizoolians that Andrew and Lucy couldn't join them: photo Hugo Glendinning
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Given the box office breaking success of Studio 58's forty-second season, it's a shame that the fourty-third season opener does not align with the theatre's previous acclaim. Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Ash Girl is a modernization of the classic Cinderella tale, but with the seven deadly sins and the emotion of sadness tossed in for additional intrigue.

Lindsey Angell is Ashgirl in the Studio 58 production of The Ash Girl by Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Do you suffer from heartache? Are you currently treating your symptoms with goblets of red wine, tearful texting, repetitive telephone conversations, or reckless ventures into e-dating?

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and her many personalities take the stage in Nick & Juanita

Those of us not willing to brave the Cobalt(Girls! Girls! Girls!) can go to Western Front for Fake Jazz Fridays, to see what our neighbours are up to in the experimental, DIY, punk-crossed-with-noise-and jazz music scene…

Fake Jazz

Touring artists are Canada's affordable diplomats

There are dozens of reasons why Stephen Harper needs to support and promote arts funding, especially when it comes to federal cash for touring grants. One of the reasons is this: artists on tour perform acts of low-level diplomacy with people that Harper and trade ministers will never meet. Touring shows form a creative interface between countries that gives Canada a more positive position in global dynamics.

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Meg Walker
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Tricia Collins in Gravity's hold
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Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No."

Gormenghast: Krissy Jesudason, photo by: Tim Matheson

As I try to describe this show, I feel like one of the old nuns in the Sound of Music that sing, "How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?" They were talking Maria; I'm talking about water and the endeavour of a group of artists to make a show all about its "extraordinary life."

A Few Little Drops, complete with rope for navigating the depths

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast is, at least in my opinion, one of the towering achievements in modern literature. He presents a fully created world that is charged with vitality and is a celebration of raw imagination.

gormenghast, Kevin Stark, Jocelyn Gauthier and Maryanne Renzetti; photo by Tim Matheson

Richard Nixon was famous for his intellect, bad language, viciousness, sweating and, oh, Watergate. Much to my surprise, in Peter Morgan’s Frost Nixon, we get a Nixon who doesn’t swear, doesn’t seem too vicious (except with the intensity of his avarice) and even the sweating – constantly referred to throughout – was missing as Len Cariou seemed quite dry and relaxed, mostly. As for the towering intellect, there wasn’t much of that either.

Frost Nixon: I am big. It's the theatre that got small.

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