Results tagged “davidfox”

For years, SummerWorks has been kid sister to the Fringe. Smaller, shier, not quite as well-known (if often more reliable thanks to its policy of juried play selection as opposed to Fringe's random lottery). But there comes a summer in every kid sister's life when she starts going through some "special changes" and suddenly all her older sibling's friends turn their heads when she walks by the pool in her tankini. We already started to discuss the direction in which new Artistic Producer Michael Rubenfeld has started to take the festival, which has now been re-branded as "Toronto's Indie Theatre and Arts Festival."

For patriotic theatre-going homosexuals (and really, is there any other kind?), there has been little downtime as of late. Pride, Canada Day, and now the mighty Toronto Fringe Festival have all bled into each other, separated only by a single Monday in which to nurse RuPaul-induced hangovers. Now in its twentieth season, Toronto's biggest theatre festival takes over the city as of 5:30 p.m. this evening. (And it's for straights, too!)

There is a moment near the end of the first act of Maureen Hunter's play Wild Mouth when Oliver Becker, playing the tortured Ukrainian WWI vet Bohdan, grabs Sarah Orenstein as proto-feminist anti-war Englishwoman Anna (pictured, left), douses her in pig's blood, and then rubs the animal's heart all over her face and body. It's a shocking and highly provocative moment, and seems to foreshadow a very dark second act. But that's not quite what we get. The play, very capably directed by R.H. Thomson, has some fascinating scenes as well as something genuinely profound to say about humanity's compulsion to war. But the second act seems somehow weak in its conviction, flirting with a darkness that is the logical conclusion of the events preceding it, and then backing away from it. You begin to think we're heading into Miss Julie territory, but we instead wind up in a typical rural Canadian drama.

A Good Idea (In Theory) is a new play currently running at Passe Muraille that, as its title implies, is trying to do things a little differently. For starters, in lieu of a program, audience members are given a soundtrack CD. As the play's website explains, the idea behind the project came from the question: "What would happen if an award-winning stage play by a young Canadian was supported by a group of independent...