by Dorianne Emmerton

I’m not sure how The Wrecking Ball was not on my radar before, being both a theatre buff and a person with political sensibilities. I’m certainly glad I know of it now.

The concept is: the playwrights have one week to write a short script, around ten minutes. The actors have a couple of days with the script, and are on book for the performance. They do tech the day of: this is stripped down theatre. The plays are to be politically relevant to current events. Each show runs one night only.

The promo for Monday night’s show read:

On Tuesday December 7th, the new Toronto City Council including 14 new city councillors and His Worship Mayor Rob Ford will meet for the first time.

The night before this new era of civic governance, The Wrecking Ball presents the works of six Toronto writers who consider the question, “Now What?”

Given this, I expected six short plays depicting a bleak Fordian future but only one of them could really be described as that. They were quite diverse in their approach to the subject. Continue reading Review: Now What? (Wrecking Ball Theatre) →

If you suspect your best friend and your wife are in love with each other, what are you to do about it?

If you’re a successful screenwriter and producer you might just make a film where you cast the two as hot-and-heavy lovers.

Wide Awake Hearts is set staunchly in the world of film, and in being a play about film it is also intrinsically about theatre. It is about writing what you know, or what you think you know; it is about playing a part and trying and failing to divorce yourself from that part; it is about the exquisite manipulation of characters who just might be real people.

As the play opens, credits are projected as if it was a film. The graphics and music are reminiscent of a horror and you know that since you are unlikely to see pure genre on the stage, what you are about to witness will be dark and demented. Continue reading Review: Wide Awake Hearts (Tarragon Theatre) →

by Dorianne Emmerton

Homeland, by Godot Art Productions, is a multi-media piece. On one level it is a documentary film featuring interviews on the concept of “home” with people who now live in Toronto but originally came from somewhere else. Some of them consider Toronto their home now and some of them will always consider their native land home.

Homeland is also a music and dance number. Composer Reza Moghaddas has crafted a lush soundtrack of electronic and live music, performed by himself and Lorenzo Castelli. The dance is performed by Megan Nadain, a lovely young woman with admirable physical prowess.

Megan enters the stage through the audience which is very intimate given the small venue of the Theatre Passe Muraille backspace. This entry signifies a journey, foretelling the stories of travelling to Canada we then see, projected onto a crumpled screen hung on the stage.

Megan’s outfit is a similarly crumpled white, adorned by a crude rope around her waist. Reza and Lorenzo wore similar shirts, however the effect was compromised for me by the fact that both men wore contemporary casual jeans and shoes. Continue reading Review: Homeland (Godot Art Productions) →

by Dorianne Emmerton

The Girls Who Saw Everything is presented by Ryerson Theatre School with a cast of their fourth year graduating class and guest director Ruth Madoc-Jones. Madoc-Jones has been involved in some of the most intriguing new theatre in the city so I was intrigued to see both her work and the fresh crop of actors about to be loosed into the Toronto theatre scene.

Ryerson’s Abrams Studio (46 Gerrard St E) can be a little hard to find, so if you’re heading there be sure you know it’s on the north side of Gerrard in the Ryerson Theatre School academic building, second floor (across the street from the large Ryerson theatre.)

Before the play even started I was impressed with the simple and elegant set. Wooden cross beams at odd angles allow the audience to see into a hallway running along the back of the stage. Large wooden crates provide levels and surfaces used to make different scenes within the play but which also evoke the feeling of a warehouse, the setting of the main action. A corner draped with coloured scarves is an exotic portal where mythical elements of the play enter and exit. Continue reading Review: The Girls who Saw Everything (Ryerson Theatre School) →

by Dorianne Emmerton

When I first walked into the Walmer Centre Theatre to see Birdland Theatre’s SoulSeek I wasn’t sure what I was seeing: was the back of the stage covered in a multitude of different sized crosses because the building is a repurposed church or was that part of the set?

Turns out it’s part of the set.  It must have been a lot of work to prepare: there were hundreds of white crosses suspended to cover the entire back wall. It is just one example of the massive amount of preparation that was obviously put into SoulSeek. Director Stefan Dzeparoski has embraced multi-media to an impressive extent for a non-profit theatre company like Birdland Theatre.

Continue reading Review: Soulseek (Birdland Theatre) →