Mike was that kid who walked into the high school stage crew booth, saw the lighting board, and went ooooooooooooh. Now that he’s (mostly) all grown up, Mike keeps his foot in the door as a community-theatre producer, stage manager and administrator. In the audience, he’s a tremendous sucker for satire and parody, for improvisational and sketch-driven comedy, for farce and pantomime, and for cabaret of all types. His happiest Toronto theatrical memory is (re) Birth: E. E. Cummings in Song.
In the first few minutes of Three Men in a Boat, three upper-class twits make a promise: the show we’re about to see is utterly devoid of merit or intellectual sustenance, and exists strictly and exclusively to entertain.
And as they venture up the Thames, they do just that, filling the hour with clockwork-choreography movement, tightly-written scenes, lovely teamwork, and recurring musical elements. Three Men (based on a real period travelogue) is an hour-deep pocket full of Wildean humour, and will tickle you in places you didn’t know you had funny bones.
Soulpepper’s A Christmas Carol is “pressing, relevant and critical”
You’ve heard of Soulpepper’s A Christmas Carol, yes? Back for its seventh season, Michael Shamata’s adaptation is increasingly part of this city’s holiday furniture: Nutcracker at the National Ballet; a surfeit of Messiahs great and small; a star-billed rock musical in one of the commercial theatres — and over in the Distillery District, they bring out their Dickens.
Nobody seems to have an unkind thing to say about A Christmas Carol: critics and audiences alike are singular in their endorsement, and have been for nearly fifteen years. But isn’t fifteen years an achingly long time? Surely, by now, it’s begun to creak, just a little?
Improvised show, different every night, is “unstoppable” on the Toronto stage
Bad Dog Theatre is no longer an underground phenomenon: they’ve established themselves as the place to be if you’re young, kinda broke, and want to hang out with some friends. Beer is sold by the bucket, tickets are dead cheap, and the place is positively bursting at the seams with scruffy twentysomethings.
This is the second year they’ve graced us with The Pageant, and it’s a damned good thing they’ve brought it back. By the end of it, audiences are pissing themselves with laughter, awkward first dates are visibly going smoother, and the energy in the room tells the whole story: Bad Dog are onto something great.
Stones in His Pockets has more charm than politics, now on stage in Toronto
Written in the aftermath of the early-90s Irish film boom, Stones in His Pockets (now on stage at the Alumnae Theatre) is a big script in a little package, balancing broad parody of Irish stereotypes with a deeper tale about the colonial mentality, intergenerational poverty, and the Irish identity.
A film has come to town, and the locals are cast as extras, with two actors (Stephen Farrell & Mark Whelan) playing about 15-16 roles. After a local disaster brings all sorts of tensions to the surface, the people of the village begin to examine just what they’re selling to earn their 50 pounds a day.
The Storefront Theatre’s The Castle, playing now in Toronto, has great acting but a poor script
Howard Barker’s script for The Castle is notoriously extreme, and has been described as actively hostile to its audience: not only opaque and twisted, but calculated to unnerve, upset, distress and bother. When he heard I was seeing it, a friend of mine (who had worked on it in university) even warned me off: “The Castle is a protracted excuse for men to say the word cunt a lot of times with impunity.”
The good news is that The Storefront is, as always, a singularly good acting company, here supplemented with a dazzling array of local stars. A cast of this caliber can work miracles, and often they do — but the script is such heavy lifting that by the end I was regretting not ducking out at intermission.
In the first few minutes of Three Men in a Boat, three upper-class twits make a promise: the show we’re about to see is utterly devoid of merit or intellectual sustenance, and exists strictly and exclusively to entertain.
Soulpepper’s A Christmas Carol is “pressing, relevant and critical”
Improvised show, different every night, is “unstoppable” on the Toronto stage