A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney by Lucas Hnath opened last night at the Young Centre in a production by Outside the March and Soulpepper.  It’s one of those pieces that is perhaps easier to admire than enjoy.  Technically, everything about it is excellent but sitting through ninety minutes of egotistical bullying is not a whole lot of fun. It’s very tightly written in the form of a screenplay about himself that Walt directs on stage.  So we get a lot of $dialogue, “camera closes on Roy”, Cut! which makes for a kind of staccato, unsett ..read more

Project Earth: The Blue Chapter is the first in a projected series of CDs from the Iris Trio (Christine Carter – clarinet, Anna Petrovna – piano, Zoë Martin-Doike – viola) dealing with environmental issues.  This one blends music by Florian Hoefner with poems by Don McKay.  The longest piece on the CD is the multi-movement Bird Island Suite inspired by the bird life of nesting islands around Newfoundland but really dealing with broader issues of how we interact with and influence the natural world for good or ill.  Usually the latter. It starts with a poem and smooth jazz inflec ..read more

Les Génies ou les Caractères de l’Amour is an opera/ballet of 1736 by one Mademoiselle Duval who was 22 at the time.  Almost nothing is known about Duval except that she was at one time a chorus member at the Royal Opera in Paris.  It seems reasonable to deduce that she was from a family of professional musicians and that’s how she got her training.  FWIW Les Génies was only the second opera by a woman to be produced by the Royal Opera.  It’s recently been recorded for CD under the auspices of Château de Versailles Spectacles. The work itself is quite conventional and has s ..read more

How different were sensibilities in seventeenth century England (at least after the Restoration) to contemporary mores?  Perhaps less than one might think.  Unless you are a woman.  And you want to be famous.  And you aren’t a queen.  All of which presents a problem for young Margaret who leaves her dull, impoverished, gentry family to try her luck at court just as Cromwell and co finally get around to giving Charles I a rather drastic haircut. In Rose Napoli’s Mad Madge; currently playing in a Nightwood Theatre production at the The Theatre Centre, we aren’t subjecte ..read more

Saint-Saëns Déjanire, of 1911, was his last opera.  The plot is basically the same as Handel’s Hercules.  Déjanire is infuriated by Hercule’s infatuation with Iole so he gives him a poisoned robe; itself a gift from the Centaur Charon, which kills him.  There are a few plot tweaks.  Iole is in love with Philoctète and agrees to marry Hercule to save his life.  But, basically classic, simple plot. Musically it’s tonal and elegant.  It was well received by the critics who, correctly, pointed out that it looked backwards to Gluck and Spontini and owed little or ..read more

shaniqua in abstraction is a one woman show written and performed by bahia watson that deals with her search for identity as a (light skinned) Black woman in Canada.  It starts with a casting call and works outwards from there.  She sings, she dances, she runs on the spot, She interviews characters who aren’t there and gets caught up in banal daytime TV shows.  If you can have a kaleidoscope in black and white it’s a kaleidoscope of experiences. It’s very funny, raunchy, highly sexualized and, in places, very uncomfortable.  It’s not like anything really awful happens.&nbs ..read more

All is Love, which opened Thursday night at Koerner Hall, is a remount of the 2022 Opera Atelier show which, for various reasons, nobody much saw.  It’s a staged series of quite eclectic (mosly) opera and ballet excerpts around the theme of “love”; which means pretty much anything goes. Most of the scenes are short and include both singing and dancing though there are a few pure ballet scenes and a couple without dancers.  The most memorable bits are probably where it strays most from traditional OA territory.  For example, we get the opening scene of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélis ..read more

Francis Končan’s Women of the Fur Trade opens tonight (Thursday) at the Aki Studio in a production by Native Earth Performing Arts.  I saw a preview last night.  It’s not an easy play to describe.  It’s a comedy.  But with several twists.  It has a historic setting.  But it plays fast and loose with time.  It’s funny, disturbing and relates events from a female point of view that rarely get seen that way. So, in a fort somewhere on a reddish river in Treaty 1 territory three women sit in rocking chairs playing word games and drinking tea.  One is Settle ..read more

The Toronto Symphony’s 2024/25 season is the usual mix of mainstream symphony/concerto rep, Pops, film music, kids’ concerts etc.  My sense is that it has got more “popular” since the pandemic and that therefore there’s been less that’s caught my eye.  That’s my story anyway! There are some concerts of interest to me though in the 2024/24 season though; curiously mostly in November.  The four that caught my eye were the following: November 6th and 7th: John Adams conducting a programme mostly of his own music including a vocal contribution from the excellent Anna Prohaska; the ..read more

Le siège de Corinthe is a 1826 reworking, for Opéra de Paris, of Rossini’s earlier Maometto II so besides, of course, being in French it is restructured as a three act tragédie lyrique with a substantial ballet in Act 2.  The plot is straightforward enough.  It’s the mid fifteenth century.  Mahomet II is besieging Corinth but unknown to him the king, Cléomène’s, daughter Palmyra is the girl he fell in love with during an incognito trip to Athens.  Cléone has promised Palmyra to his top warrior Néoclès.  After Corinth falls Mahomet promises clemency to the Greeks as lon ..read more