When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

Yesterday, Ontario Tourism Minister Michael Chan announced that most of Ontario Place would be mothballed for the next few years while a John Tory-led advisory panel decides what to do with some of Toronto’s most desirable waterfront property. Apart from the fun of speculating about what might end up there (casino? condo? tent city?), the announcement and attendant process provoke some thoughts on the delicate relationship between city and province.

The shutdown was inevitable: attendance had been in decline for years, and it was costing the province upwards of $20 million annually to run the place. You can try to upgrade your ’70s rec room with an air hockey game and an XBox, but until you replace the wood panelling and the purple shag carpet, the kids won’t want to bring their friends over.

The reboot of the anachronism-on-the-lake is expected to come to fruition in 2017, having started back in July 2010 when the province issued a Request For Information, inviting ideas for redevelopment (the elapsed time is only one year less than that from the announcement of the US Apollo space program until the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon).

City Hall, of course, has considerable interest in the matter. Not only could the property be turned into a big tourism driver for Toronto, but the City owns the adjacent Exhibition grounds. However, it looks as though the closure may have come as something of a surprise to the Exhibition Place board, who had voted only back in December to work with their Ontario Place counterparts in aid of integrating the two attractions more closely.

Whatever prior communication did or didn’t happen, city councillor and Exhibition Place chair Mark Grimes (Ward 6, Etobicoke-Lakeshore) expressed his pleasure at the notion of a revitalized OP and the prospect of working with John Tory, who he hoped to hear from “in the next day or two.”

Tory waxed equally agreeable, saying “You wouldn’t develop one side of the street into something new and not talk to the people on the other side of the street.”

Perennial political bridesmaid Tory is a good choice to run the show. As former Progressive Conservative leader he has non-Liberal political cred, as former CEO of both Rogers Media and Rogers Cable he has business cred, and as a talk radio host he has, well, those other things. He’s also well-networked and well-regarded in both municipal and provincial circles.

Even so, it’s by no means certain that Toronto will get much input into whatever pyramid-building goes on down there. Ultimately the City of Toronto is, in the Igor-evocative jargon of political science, a “creature” of the province and subject to its whims. Whether we get a floating brothel or a scale model Taj Mahal made of popsicle sticks will ultimately be a decision made at Queen’s Park. And the province has more than once been fickle in granting its favours: it approved David Millers’ Transit City, subsequently clawed back some four billion dollars, cancelled the whole thing at Mayor Rob Ford’s (possibly illegal) request, and could be poised at any moment to dump buckets of money into light rail or scrap everything and buy us all personal jetpacks.

Ontario Place is a big, beautiful, valuable piece of Toronto real estate and Toronto history. It behooves Torontonians to make sure we’re actively involved in determining its fate.

A model of the planned Pan Am athletes' village and West Don Lands developments. Photo by Jamie Bradburn/Torontoist.

Five words were stressed throughout this morning’s press conference unveiling plans for the 2015 Pan American Games athletes’ village: “on time and on budget.” The promise became such a running theme that when Ontario Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Charles Sousa (who is also the minister responsible for the games) brought it up yet again near the end of the session, the audience laughed out loud.

And that is a problem.

The conference, held at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, revealed little more than was contained in the press releases we received on the subject. The numbers that everyone involved wants you to know: $514 million cost to the province; 5,200 direct or indirect jobs created; an 82,000 square foot YMCA; a 500-room George Brown College residence; 253 units of affordable housing; 787 units of market housing—all to be delivered (say it with us) on time and on budget. The legacy projects were the main selling point of those who spoke, as well as the fact that the games have accelerated the development timeline for the west Don Lands by at least five years. (Aside: based on the initial drawings, it appears there may be funding to restore the signage of the Canary restaurant.)

The most interesting speech was delivered by the city’s point man on the project, Councillor Mark Grimes (Ward 6, Etobicoke-Lakeshore). The bow-tie’d Grimes made several jokes about the fact-finding trip he and Sousa took to Guadalajara, Mexico during last year’s Pan American Games. After noting that Sousa made him pay for a meal there (Grimes: “I’d get him back on the transit file”) the councillor also stressed how Toronto’s ethnic communities would get behind teams from their native countries. “Imagine the Brazilian community showing up at the airport to welcome Brazilian athletes as they get off the plane,” said Grimes. “We can really get into these communities, into the Danforth, where they won’t have a team here, but maybe adopt a team.” He exited the stage with a cry of “Viva Toronto!”

But despite the repeated vow to have the facilities built on time and on budget, no details were provided as to how this would be achieved (apart from staggering payments to builder Dundee Kilmer), or on what penalties could be levied if construction falls behind. There also wasn’t any indication as to who would kick in money to cover potential cost overruns. While the feeling in the room was cheery, the answers to these questions may determine if Torontonians echo Grimes’s reaction three years from now.