Toronto: This sentence is the first sentence. This is the second sentence and it informs you, the reader, that this is a review for Red Machine Part 2, the second part of a theatrical experiment presented as part of this year’s SummerWorks Festival.
Toronto: I didn’t read the program notes before seeing Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry by Daniel Barrow (and part of this year’s SummerWorks Festival). So my initial impressions were quite far off base.
Toronto: Toronto Noir, a Cheeky Magpie production and part of this year’s SummerWorks Festival, is a smart evocation of film noir cast into the landscape of cotemporary Toronto. It tells three interwoven stories – kind of like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts for the stage. These stories were sourced from a collection of stories of the same name.
Vancouver: Powered by ecstatic dance, saturated with colour, and exquisitely staged, Bollywood Wedding is a unique midsummer spectacle. Featuring twenty-four dancers, thirteen actors, a full band, and three individual musicians, it was not only colourful but also a busy affair.
Toronto: Rabbit Rabbit, part of the ongoing SummerWorks Festival real-time two hander could have been dull and contrived, but a grungy premise and a appetite for verbosity on the part of playwright Amy Lee Lavoie keeps it attention grabbing the whole way through.
Toronto: When I was a small boy I asked my mother why we didn’t go to church like people on television. She answered that she stopped going to church when she discovered that the Bible contradicted itself on practically every other page. After a brief pause, I answered “okay” and went back to watching Star Trek reruns as my Sunday devotion.
Toronto: Playwright / performer Dave Deveau became obsessed with the story of Larry King – a 15 year-old gay boy who asked 14 year-old classmate Brandon McInerney to be his valentine. Two days later in first period computer lab, Brandon shot Larry in the head with a .22 calibre revolver. My Funny Valentine, part of the ongoing SummerWorks Festival, is Deveau's response to that tragedy.
Toronto: Taking audiences on an engaging yet bizarre journey, The Melancholy Play, produced by project undertow as part of the ongoing SummerWorks Festival, demands that viewers be willing to accept an absurdist, stylized approach. Sarah Ruhl's script offers a tale of deep transformation and its effect on others. With its outlandish, stranger-than-life characters, it must be what a Christopher Durang play is like.
Toronto: Beauty isn’t talent, says Amelia (Maev Beaty) to Margaret (Erin Shields), in Montparnasse an exploration of physical form, creation, perception and still-life and part of this year's SummerWorks Festival.
