Soup Can Theatre selects a 1920’s Berlin cabaret as the setting for their contribution to the Toronto Fringe Festival, Love is a Poverty You Can Sell, a musical revue focusing on the legacy of composer Kurt Weill. Space gets a little tight in Bread & Circus with a ten piece orchestra providing accompaniment, but rubbing elbows with the conductor does cultivate the atmosphere of the underground cabarets of old.
While I love Shakespeare, I’m not always comfortable with the unquestioning adulation that he’s accorded in our culture. I don’t for a minute buy the argument that somehow he created modern consciousness (as Harold Bloom contends). Nor do I believe that every word he wrote is somehow sacred. So many people (mostly academics) spend so much time trying to get to the definitive Shakespeare text, yet it’s an impossible task and virtually a fool’s errand. In part because of the forms of transmission we have for his texts are so unreliable (whether it was people frantically copying them down during...
What do you mean they don't have chemistry, Andrew? John Murphy and Jennifer Lines back into love at Bard.
Last week I was asked to review the world premier of Herr Beckmann’s People by Sally Stubbs, produced by Touchstone Theatre. It was the second week of its run and I felt it behooved PLANK for me to not just repeat what had already been made known in other reviews. Taking a look at some of the other reviews I mused about a ‘cut & paste’ job that would include the compliments and criticisms identified by each so I could meet my overnight deadline. Then I read our own interview with Ms Stubbs and realized such glibness...
Most of us know the bare bones of the tale of Madama Butterfly: American Naval Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton takes a Nagasaki bride, one Miss-soon-to-be-Madama Butterfly (also known as Cio-Cio-San). Their Japanese marriage becomes the centre of the fifteen-year-old ex-geisha's existence, while to Pinkerton it is merely an exotic interlude, a kind of delirious mock-up of the real thing, which can only exist in the West – someday in the future-West, when he has finished sewing his wild oats. Pinkerton eventually abandons Butterfly, returning to Nagasaki three years later with a “real” American wife,...
The venerable PLANK Panel return with their take on the Canadian Opera Company's recent production of Gaetano Donizetti's Maria Stuarda
Justin: It may be strange to start a opera review with a note about a work’s libretto - one of the unmodifiable elements of any Canadian Opera Company production - but it is still a key part of the artistic experience and as such a legitimate topic of discussion. The thing that strikes me most about Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda is the drastically unfamiliar treatment Queen Elizabeth I receives in this work. Compared to the moderate and headstrong...
Simone Osborne as Anna Kennedy and Serena Farnocchia as Maria Stuarda. Photo credit: Michael Cooper
Fenulla Jiwani’s trite comedy 30 Dates, currently at Canadian Stage in a Fenstar Production, follows Priti (played by Jiwani) through one brutal year of ambitious dating. It’s been called My Big Fat Greek Wedding meets Sex and the City. Sure, it’s about the hope, humiliation and heartbreak of searching for love. The difference is, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is funny. And Sex and the City has SJP.
The first thing to note about Eddie Izzard’s latest comedic offering, Eddie Izzard: Stripped is that the content of the show has nothing to do with its title, or if it does, only in the loosest of terms. Any member of Izzard’s recent Massey Hall audience expecting a raunchy set, or a soul bearing purge would have been surprised, but not disappointed, by the performance and the performer.
What a great concept for a play. Harry Partch was an American composer and instrument maker who, according to Wikipedia, “was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit (43-tone) just intonation”.
Linda Quibell looking for the boy; photo: Chris Randle
