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.
When you go and see Barrel Crank (playing at SummerWorks), do yourself a favour and sit towards the back of the theatre. The risers hum and vibrate to the bass-heavy rumble of a distant waterfall. It’s a wonderful effect, and it draws you closer and closer to the centre of the play: Niagara Falls.
The titular Barrel Crank is Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive the plunge over the great cataract. She was a fascinating and often contradictory woman, and by framing her story as a self-described “vaudevillian romp”, the company of four actors seeks to explore her motivations, her experiences, and some of the mystique surrounding the falls.
Dark Locks (running at the SummerWorks Festival) is a ripped-from-the-headlines take on the Shafia family murders, but–like a lake–it runs much deeper than we may assume. This isn’t shock theatre or exploitation, this is an earnest attempt to explore a uniquely Canadian tragedy through a uniquely Canadian lens.
As soon as I got out of Ally & Kev (playing at the TPM Backspace as part of the SummerWorks Festival), my phone rang and a friend asked about the plot. I summarized it for her:
It felt like a series of horrible and tedious things happening to a collection of horrible and tedious people.
Breathe For Me (playing at SummerWorks) is the story of Edna and Edith, best friends for over 50 years. Edith is utterly devoted to her long-time companion, but when Edna’s health finally begins to fail, things both of them have spent decades suppressing begin bubbling to the surface and threaten to tear the friendship apart.
They’ve been together for so long, it’s impossible to have one without the other: Edith, determined to make a martyr of herself, waits hand and foot on her utterly dependent friend. Edna, paralyzed and embittered, appears to leech off of Edith’s largesse. But this relationship is far more complex than it initially appears, and Edna is sick and tired of living in denial of her feelings. Continue reading Breathe For Me (Real Eyes Theatre) 2012 SummerWorks Review→
