Results tagged “musicals”

You’re flipping through the entertainment options for a night on the town in 1980s Toronto. Let’s see...a cabaret musical about sex that employs a double-entendre for its title...and it has nudity...and it features tunes like "Fellatio 101" and "I'm Gay"...and it hasn’t been shut down by the morality squad yet.

When Dylan Thomas began writing Under Milk Wood, his famous "play for voices" about the sleepy Welsh community of Llareggub and its inhabitants, he intended it to be performed as a radio play with a full cast of actors. Over the years, the play has been both recorded and performed for stage in a variety of productions (including a film version with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole), sometimes with a cast as large as fifty. The Soulpepper version now playing at the Young Centre, a revival of last year's popular production, features a sole actor, Kenneth Welsh, performing every single role.

There are those of us whose parents started bringing us to the Dream in High Park when we were six, who have probably seen A Midsummer Night's Dream a half dozen times, studied it in school on a regular basis since grade five, and can probably recite Helena's "O, spite! O, Hell!" monologue from memory. We will not have any trouble understanding the RSC's production of Dream currently playing at Luminato. But for those of you who haven't brushed up on your Shakespeare, you might find the production a bit of a challenge—unless you're fluent in Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Sanskrit, that is. The multilingual production is a real treat for the initiated, but with only about fifty percent of the text spoken in the original English it's hard to know how easy it will be for the layfolk to understand.

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.

Happy: A Very Gay Little Musical is the latest show to open at Buddies and also the first musical by Sky Gilbert the theatre has produced in 17 years. And what a tricky little number it is. Essentially a musical about people writing a musical about people writing a musical, Happy tells the story of Bob and Dave, a married gay couple writing a musical about themselves, and Sue, Bob's dramaturg/faghag extraordinaire. Some scenes in the play are set within the heightened reality of the musical they are working on, and some in rather less glamorous reality. In both scenarios, things take a twist when an unexpected knock at the door reveals a young man who may be an actor, or a symbol for HIV, or just some guy Bob has been fucking.

When it premiered in the 1980s, Fire, a "jukebox musical" set to the music of Jerry Lee Lewis and some Christian spirituals, was considered something of a sensation. Twenty years later, CanStage has decided to revive the show, bringing the multi-talented Ted Dykstra (pictured) back to the role of Cale Blackwell, a fictionalized stand-in for Lewis. While none of this sounds like a terrible idea, the current production of Fire which opened last night at the Bluma Appel Theatre, plays like the theatrical equivalent of a "you had to be there" joke. The story is inspired by the lives of rock-and-roller Jerry Lee Lewis and his televangelist cousin Jimmy Swaggart and their respectives rises and falls. The musical turns them into brothers named Cale and Hershel Blackwell, two men bonded by blood, sundered by religion and driven by a passion for Jesus, an eager audience and the just-post-pubescent temptress named Molly they both love.

Evil Dead: The Musical has returned to Toronto. Again. It was actually all the way back in 2003 that it made its debut in the Tranzac Club. Back then, it was known as Evil Dead 1 & 2: The Musical, on account of the fact that it took the plot of both of the first two movies in the cult schlock-horror franchise. It was a quirky concept and the budget little-show-that-could found itself an audience. After some successful runs in Montreal and New York, it came back last summer with its new, abbreviated moniker to much fanfare, even winning itself a Dora (The Audience Choice Award). It was still in a venue where audience members could order a beer with the show, but their tickets were a bit pricier over at the Diesel Playhouse. Now, the show is back at the Diesel again, promising new cast members and special effects. Just when you think it's gone, it comes back again, more powerful than ever (much like a reanimated corpse possessed by an evil Candarian demon).