Results tagged “michaelrubenfeld”

Hello, Toronto! Drama Club has been taking it easy ever since a certain mid-July theatre festival, but we're back in action to give you the scoop on SummerWorks, August's indie answer to the Fringe. Some of you may remember how the festival got revamped and re-branded last year thanks to then-new Artistic Producer Michael Rubenfeld, who added such elements as a Music Series and a "Performance Gallery" at the Gladstone Hotel to the theatre festival, and also limited it to the Queen West strip. All this and more continues at the fest this year, and while we're not entirely sure about this year's roadkill visual motif (or the now annual tradition of sexist and kind of indulgent promotional videos), it's exciting to see the festival grow and develop.

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."

It's almost August, and some of us know that means it's almost SummerWorks. The juried theatre festival has taken a bit of a different turn this year, under the new artistic leadership of Michael Rubenfeld, and is branching out into music and performance art. In a shockingly tech-savvy move for the Toronto theatre community, it also has a blog. Last week, the blog started posting viral videos, including one where veteran Canadian actor/playwright Michael Healey yells for someone to "fuck his wide ass," and the video featured in this post, titled "Expression." In the video, playwrights Hannah Moscovitch, Tara Beagan, Claudia Dey, Rose Laborde, and Linda Griffiths discuss the travails of being "hot playwrights." The video, which culminates in a pillow fight, has already sparked a comments war on the fest's blog about its feminist implications.

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!)