All posts by Mike Anderson

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.

THIS PLAY WINS (The Shaker Secessionists) SummerWorks 2015 Review

This Play WinsTHIS PLAY WINS is a SummerWorks experiment. The company has devised nine scenes built around a combination of acting games, the whims of the performers, and — so far as I can tell — kick-ass titles that demanded a sketch be written around them. But at every performance, audience members are asked to collectively vote a scene off the island: mark your card, single out the weakest piece, and cast it off to the slushpile.

And audience fingerprints don’t end there. Participation is sought at all times and at all levels, from introducing themselves to the audience personally, to — at the end– inviting us to join them on picnic blankets, nibble on an assortment of gummies, and probe what we’ve just seen.

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Aperture (The AMY Project) 2015 Summer

ApertureOne of the best things about SummerWorks is how it continually surprises us — and how often these surprises come from the unexpected places. The AMY Project‘s Aperture is just such a surprise. The opening-night audience was blown away by the depth and emotional intensity on display: how uncomfortable, yet how included, the audience was made to feel.

In a festival all about exploring, stretching, reconstructing and questioning, these young artists are punching above their weight.

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Review: Timber! (PANAMANIA/Cirque Alfonse/Théâtre français)

Photo from Timber! playing as part of PANAMANIA

Cirque Alfonse brings circus artistry with a razor edge to Toronto’s Fleck Dance Studio

At opening night of Timber!, playing as part of this year’s PANAMANIA festivities, the theatre was swarming with excited francophone children and frazzled francophone parents, equally keyed up for 90 minutes in the dark with Cirque Alfonse. This lumberjack-inspired cirque thrilled and terrified in equal measure — the poor kid behind me was beside himself more than once: “S’il manque le cible, il cassera son tete!” — and blew the top off the Fleck Dance Theatre. What’s not to like?

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4 Things we Loved About Fringe 2015; 4 Hopes for 2016

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FringeKidsPhoto by Catherine Jan

We Loved: FringeKids!
Last year, FringeKids got good, acquiring their own club especially for young audiences. But this year, things got awesome, with all-day activities rocking right next to the FringeKids venue — finally out of the library and into the George Ignatieff — unifying both halves of the FringeKids program. In two years, FringeKids has gone from being a bit of a drag (walk to a show; walk back to Bloor for lunch; walk to a show; walk back to Bloor to kill 45 minutes…) to a daylong destination, and with all the consternation over declining audiences, we’re please as punch to see the festival getting this right.

 

LotteryPhoto by Dylan George

We Hope For: More Venues!
This year, nearly 700 companies entered the lottery, and this is one of the festival’s biggest successes — but they’re only drawing 130ish winners, and that figure gets more and more disappointing every year. There’s definitely an administrative and technical overhead associated with looping in more venues, but adding the Tranzac — remember the Tranzac? — would bring an additional 10-11 shows to the festival; scoop up the Storefront, that’s another more-or-less dozen, and there’s more where that came from. (If you’ve got the Storefront, the Comedy Bar has two spaces about a block away, and Bad Dog now has a little shoebox, too…) Obviously, we’re never going to get anywhere near 100% participation, but with the Fringe growing every year, can we find room for more?

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Butts in Seats: the 2015 Fringe Venue Roundup

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If there’s one thing theatre writers are good at, it’s sitting. From Robert Cushman to the lowliest blogger, our butts are what unite us. And don’t think we’re joking: we’ve sat in the plushly-appointed Princess of Wales, on benches at Theatre Passe Muraille, on blankets on the lawn in High Park, on virtually every flat surface in Toronto — and a few which aren’t.

As Fringe winds down, we’d like to share some of our wisdom with you. We’ve assessed every mainstage venue for comfort (will you regret sitting there?), utility (sightlines, proximity, etc.), charm (is it a nice room?), amenities (toilets, snacks, transit…) and access. Then we use this information to generate a score between 1 and 5 moons — after all, Mooney on Theatre doesn’t give star ratings.

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