Tagged: theatrecentre

Toronto - I suppose that at some point in your career you might think of some conflict in your workplace in terms of a war. Maybe some passive aggressive type two cubicles over plays their music too loud, like they're firing a hail of bullets over your head, or there's a woman who acts abnormally sweet but is secretly hating everyone in the office and one day explodes like a grenade into screaming fragments of neuroses. It's not too difficult a metaphor to grasp. Combat drives it home by occasionally disrupting the action at a Shopping [...]

Toronto - On a hot, humid Saturday evening, inside the sweltering atmosphere of the Theatre Centre, Elora Gorge was a mystery show with a good enough hook to really reel me in, despite how much energy I had to expend to fan myself with the program. It got off to a good start, with nice usage of some hanging sheets as projection screens and some interesting lighting. Unfortunately, it's a mystery show with no payoff at the end, and as a result it's a rather frustrating play. In Elora Gorge, a man is discovered dead by [...]

Toronto - It is rare that an audience leaves a theatre with concern for an actor's safety. I think most people who left Theatre Centre Saturday night with that feeling also left feeling dazed and stunned by what they'd just seen. I certainly did. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a play written by Iranian Nassim Soleimanpour. It's a sort of monologue from the writer to the audience, and a way for Soleimanpour, according to his writing, can feel free, as his writing travels the world in a way that he can't, as he's unable to [...]

So here is the last of my latest batch of completely negligent classic concert reviews. This one's bordering on almost three weeks old now (as part of the Summerworks Festival ) but its interesting mix of the bizarre and spastic has enabled it to lodge itself comfortably in my brain so that the details are as fresh to me as if I had attended this one yesterday. Also The R.O.B. reviewed it on his blog and I just basically copied most of the details from him. The [...]

I realized the other day that while I've talked about the Sunparlour Players a lot, I've only written about a show of theirs once on this blog. Ricky reviewed their show at Pop Montreal a while back and I wrote about them as part of my Hillside Festival coverage, but that only had a couple of brief mentions. I've written reviews of a couple of plays lead singer/guitarist/banjoist Andrew Penner's been a part of, The Book of Judith and Reesor, I've mentioned them in podcasts, I've written comments about them on other posts...but no full-on show review. But [...]

• Sunparlour Players - Make A Sound

It was a muggy Toronto afternoon as my companion and I entered The Theatre Centre for two shows as part of the SummerWorks Festival on Monday. The first show, Red Machine Part Two, the second part of an ensemble piece supposedly about one story from the perspective of different parts of a single character's brain, had always promised to be kind of challenging, but though the second, La Señorita Mundo: An Operatic Allegory (promo picture above) started off much simpler, we left just as perplexed. Of course, Red Machine is [...]

Sometimes I think maybe it would be fun to go to an evangelical church service. Not like Billy Graham evangelical or televangelism, more like the fictional evangelical stuff that you see sometimes, like in Blues Brothers where the late James Brown is the preacher, he's in a room full of people with a band and a choir on a beautiful summer's day, and everyone is so into the sermon they randomly jump out of their pews to shout, sing, and dance. The Book of Judith , a play currently being staged in a tent [...]

Marylou Flamingo. So, I wrote a fair bit about Soundscapes in-stores last week . Since that post, they've announced three new dates: Feb. 4th - Bruce Peninsula (@ 7pm - These guys are terrific ), Feb 10th - Hylozoists (@ 6pm - also a very highly rated band), and Feb 24th - Gentleman Reg (@ 6pm - [...]

• Gravity Wave - Footprints
• Proof Of Ghosts - I'm Coming Home