Results tagged “factorytheatre”

While most people cheered the announcement of Brendan Healy as new artistic director of Buddies, NOW pointed out (albeit a tad awkwardly) that this meant seminal queer Canadian writer/director Brad Fraser didn't get the job. These days, he seems to be more popular with Factory Theatre, where his newish play, True Love Lies, has just received its Canadian premiere and opened their fortieth anniversary season. And Fraser isn't the only one returning to Factory: he's bringing David, a regular character in his work often considered the author's own alter ego, along for the ride. In this show, David returns to Toronto and to the life of erstwhile lover, Kane, who has since switched back to hetero and now lives with his interior-design partner/wife Carolyn, and their two teenage children, Madison and Royce. When Madison tries to get a job at David's restaurant, it sets into motion a string of events that leads to old family secrets being unearthed, new ones being buried, and a big, sexy mess where a family used to be.

Since last week's Drama Club, two very interesting shows have opened near Queen and Bathurst. Katherine Mansfield opened at Factory on Friday, while Tijuana Cure had its debut at Passe Muraille on Wednesday. Both shows use very minimal props and costumes, often relying on physicality to aid their storytelling. Both shows are rentals from impressive local companies (if ones at different stages in their careers). Theatre Smith-Gilmour, whose current play is a reworking of last year's The Mansfield Project, have been critical darlings since the 1980s and have wowed audiences with their stage adaptations of Chekhov's prose fiction. Theatre Smash is a much younger company that's only been producing plays since 2006, but it has already started getting attention for solid productions such as Norway, Today.

Each week, we take a look at what's going on in Toronto's theatre scene and tell you which shows we think are worth checking out.

Drama Club is a new feature on Torontoist. Each week, we'll take a look at what's going on in Toronto's theatre scene and try to figure out which shows are worth checking out.

It is impossible to write anything about recent Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman (pictured, centre) and her play Scratch without mentioning her parents. This is a little unfortunate as it might seem to imply that the reason to pay attention to this actor and recent graduate of the National Theatre School's playwriting program is because she is the daughter of actor/director/writer/former Artistic Director of Passe Muraille Layne Coleman and novelist/journalist Carole Corbeil and not because she is a fabulous talent in her own right, which she very much is. But versions of both of her formidable parents appear as characters in Scratch. Although ostensibly a work of fiction, the play is admittedly semi-autobiographical, and the story of Scratch's Anna (played by Corbeil-Coleman) and her struggle with her mother's death as well as an especially prolific case of lice mirrors the playwright's own experience when her mother passed away in 2000.

With news of environmental disaster a daily reality, artistic response on the topic couldn’t be more timely. But instead of poe-faced polemics and dour finger-wagging, The Rumoli Bros. have concocted a delightful, fun, and super-smart musical. With inspiration from a certain Oscar-winning film with a remarkably similar-sounding name, An Inconvenient Musical, playing at the Factory Theatre’s Studio Theatre (it closes Saturday night), is shrewd for its simultaneous milking and mocking of both sides in the environmental struggle, while providing a clear message amidst the parody.

Performance Spring continues over at Factory with The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a play written by celebrated Canadian novelist Yann Martel (pictured). Roccamatios is Martel's sole dramatic work, and the script is actually adapted from one of his 1993 short stories of the same name. Eric Goulem is the performer in the one man show, in which he tells the audience the story of his friend Paul who, when they were both in University in the 1980s, discovered that he had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion. As Paul's physically condition rapidly worsens, the two young men decide to embark on an ambitious yet strange project together before he dies. Each day, they meet and tell each other a story about a fictional family, the Roccamatios of Helsinki. Each story metaphorically represents a major event in a consecutive year of the 20th Century, beginning with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.

Sexual Practices of the Japanese opens with actresses Manami Hara and Maiko Bae Yamamoto entering the stage as giggling schoolgirls, their pink kimonos open to reveal their wet dream school uniforms. They come right out to the audience and begin an informal survey based around the question "What are some things that come to mind when you associate the word 'sex' with the word 'Japan?'" It's a bold, funny and very successful piece of audience interaction that beautifully sets up the concept of the show which, through a collection of inter-connected scenes, monologues and musical numbers, explores the various idiosyncrasies of Japanese sexuality: the myths and the realities.

Well, the snow has melted, which means it must be about time for Factory to remount another George F. Walker show. This year, it's 1974's Beyond Mozambique, which hasn't been performed by Factory in thirty years. As the title implies, this early piece by the seminal Canadian playwright is many miles away from more popular, recent Walker plays, such as the Suburban Motel and East End Plays cycles, which typically focus on working-class Torontonians inhabiting a gritty and realistic, if darkly funny, theatrical world. But don't be fooled into expecting a didactic political work exploring a foreign tragedy.

Alec Scott wrote a piece for this month's Toronto Life called "Flop Culture" that heavily criticizes the Canadian theatre scene. In the piece (which was strongly rebutted by Factory Theatre Artistic Director Ken Gass over at BlogTO), Scott notably snipes that if he has to "watch another mime-inspired adaptation of a Chekhov short story, [he] may spontaneously combust." This is almost certainly a dig at Theatre Smith-Gilmour, who have for almost a decade produced a series of... mime-inspired adaptations of Chekhov short stories (and usually to great critical acclaim). So, it's kind of amusing that the show they premiere the same month as this dig is the first non-Chekhovian work they have performed in this country since 1999's Chekhov's Shorts (last year, a work they created based on the writing of Lu Xun premiered in Shanghai, but it won't make it's debut here until 2009).

Marjorie Chan's A Nanking Winter is a show about the 1937 genocide of the citizens of Nanking committed by the Japanese army. The atrocity, which claimed the lives of at least 300,000 Chinese, is an often-overlooked tragedy, and Chan's story focuses on a young woman named Irene who has written a book exposing the truth about the massacre. Chan's play is inspired by Iris Chang and her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, which was a best seller in 1997. Chang suffered from depression and, in 2004, she took her own life. The first act of A Nanking Winter is set in the home of Irene and her Japanese husband on the eve of her Rape of Nanking-esque book's release. She is visited by her flighty sister, her publisher, Julia, and a mysterious guest that Julia brings along. The second act thrusts the action back into the past and explores the lives of two women, both named Mei, struggling to survive in the middle of the Nanking massacre.

Sarah Lazarovic––curator of the garage-based Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada––is painting a portrait of a Torontonian (be they dog walkers, donut makers, or Dan Levy) every day for one hundred days. Each Monday, we'll feature one of those portraits here.

Here's something to clear away your post-NYE doldrums: the Fringe, everyone's favourite early-summer theatre festival (don't worry, SummerWorks, you're our favourite late-summer theatre festival) has had a baby. Aw! Last Wednesday, something called The Next Stage Theatre Festival began at Factory Theatre. Next Stage really is like a baby Fringe: a smaller festival of only 8 shows running in rep at a single theatre, complete with a heated beer tent.

"March of the Penguins" by BrynJ.

Photo by + Photendo + from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The Trinity-Spadina Make Poverty History group is helping jump-start discussion about the issue of child poverty by holding an All-Candidates' Meeting to discuss child poverty issues. All four provincial parties are going to be represented by their respective candidates from the riding, who will be able to talk about their plans to eliminate child poverty in Toronto and beyond. The meeting is being held tomorrow (September 19) at 7:00 p.m. at the Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst St.). It's being hosted by David S. Craig, a local playwright.

As the Luminato Fest continues, two more George F. Walker plays open at the Factory. Escape from Happiness is the sequel to already-opened Better Living, while Tough! is another one of Walker's East End Plays, focusing on a different group of characters. The entire play, which is only about an hour and twenty minutes long, is composed of a single scene: a confrontation between three young people in a park. Tina knows Bobby cheated on her at a party, which makes her especially mad because she's pregnant with his child, something Bobby is about to discover. Tina brings her friend Jill along for back-up, who has a long-standing grudge against Bobby and could happily "kick him to death".

George F. Walker, one of the country's most prolific and most produced playwrights, not to mention the creator of the sadly defunct CBC drama This is Wonderland, hasn't written a play since 2000's controversial Heaven, and he claims he may never write one again. But that doesn't stop him from getting produced at Factory about every year. This year, as a part of the innaugural Luminato Festival, Factory will be producing three of his East End Plays—Better Living, a remount of last year's Escape from Happiness, its sequel, and a workshop production of Tough! with a cast of 12 multi-racial young actors.

Sound poetry is not really cool. Oh sure, maybe it was cool. In the Da-Da salons of Paris, it was avant-garde. And in a bedroom at bpNicol's cottage, spouting out sound poems between long drags on the hookah was probably genuinely far-out, man. But somewhere along the way, sound poetry became hokey. As much a hippy-relic as Patchouli and beaded vests.

Award-winning Toronto author (and emergency physician) Vincent Lam will give his first public reading since winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize this Wednesday as Diaspora Dialogues teams up with the Harbourfront Centre’s International Reading series.

It seems ironic that, given the recent preponderance of plays in this city which employ film and video elements for no particular reason, Directors Cut, the new Crow's Theatre rental in the Factory Studio, a play entirely about the making a movie, has none. Instead, Directors Cut attempts to convey a filmic feel by enclosing the action on the stage within a big rectangular window. You can see what they were going for, but it doesn't quite work - which could also be a comment on the play as a whole.

When it comes down to it, we should all be glad Niagara Falls exists. Yes, it’s a gash in the landscape surrounded by tack, but on the other hand, it’s a guaranteed day you don’t have to look after your friends or relatives when they come to visit. Just put them on a bus and forget about them. The George F. Walker penned film, Niagara Motel could probably do some damage to this tourist trafficking, featuring Glaswegian (and Drew Carey renegade) Craig Ferguson as a drunken janitor, lamenting the death of his wife, who fell off the Maid in the Mist. Intriguingly, the film faces direct competition from Escape from Happiness, the George F. Walker penned play starting on Saturday at the Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst) that has far better reviews.

Tall Poppy Interview: Terry Woo, Author

Well, fear not! You're just a hop, skip and a jump away from Super Queen Market, the convenience store located at 596 Queen St. W. Conveniently close to both Theatre Passe Muraille AND Factory Theatre (still showing Claudia Dey's faboo Trout Stanley), Super Queen Market is one of a dozen or so places where Western Canadian immigrants and the men and women who love them can procure Old Dutch Chips in Toronto. A full list of these stores follows, but it should also be noted that you can order a box full of Old Dutch chips online at www.olddutchfoods.ca and get it delivered right to the door of your basement apartment.

Of all the shows that have opened in Toronto in the past week or so (Bea’s Niece, Little Dragon, Swimming in the Shallows), none have received as consistently good notices as Trout Stanley, the new play by Claudia Dey on at Factory Theatre. "It's like meeting a spellbinding person at a party and finding that you can't get them out of your mind the next day," writes Richard Ouzounian in the Star. (And that’s one of the less positive reviews, see: Globe and Mail, National Post.)

And speaking of Canuck women and theatre, if you happen to be popping by London, England, in the next little while, Kim Cattrall is about to star in a play about euthanasia called Whose Life is it Anyway? directed by British stage legend Peter Hall. Casting the actress best known as Samantha from Sex and the City as a paralysed woman who has no feeling below her neck has got to be the ultimate in casting against type, no?

the target audience for this let's-discover-Sondheim cabaret.)But wait! That's not all. Come January, Holmes is shuffling over to Factory Theatre to direct Claudia Dey's Trout Stanley.

Questions we suspect are not answered in include: “Why does every theatre artist who had a strict Catholic upbringing have to write a play about the religion he/she has left behind?” and “But is it bigger than Dick Cheney?"