Results tagged “summerworks2009”

Walking into Actionable, one of the first things you’ll notice is the Warner Brothers logo projected onto a screen…only the letters are reversed, spelling out the initials of performer Bob Wiseman. The backward order also represents the backward, frustrating ways of the music industry that Wiseman has experienced over the course of his career. Over the course of the stories and songs that make up Actionable, you’ll learn that lawyers from the major labels aren’t amused when you jokingly decide to pick up a name that a star is not using at the moment, claim relation to an industry executive, and drop the name of a major soft drink manufacturer when singing about 1970s Chilean politics. No wonder a former Rolling Stones manager once called the business “the industry of human happiness.” While often amusing, a melancholy tone underlies much of the material, especially during one song about personal identity.

Montparnasse is the name of an area of Paris (Left Bank, 14th arrondissement, named after Mount Parnassus) and also the name of a certain bit of Parisian mythology (early 20th-century epicentre of artistic productivity and site of correspondingly legendary bacchanalia). Montparnasse is the play at SummerWorks that explores these intersecting worlds, examining what it might take to make your way through them in both the practical and mythological senses. Co-authored and co-performed by SummerWorks veterans Maev Beaty and Erin Shields, Montparnasse tells the story of two American ex-pats, one diving headlong into the revelry and one pursuing the loftiest of artistic aspirations, both working as nude models to make ends meet all the while.

On the night of the Great Lightning Storm of '09, we were tucked away in the sweltering Theatre Centre on Queen West, watching Toronto Noir and wondering if the thunder was coming from inside or out. The dramatic weather paired perfectly with these moody tales of love, jealousy, and murder that were adapted from a collection of short fiction published last year under the same name.

In Daniel Barrow’s Every Time I See Your Picture Cry, the overhead projector is liberated from its usual role in tossing static images onto a surface. A kaleidoscopic parade of illustrations flow across the screen, as revolving overlays keep limbs and other objects in constant motion.

d'bi.young's new one-woman show benu is one of the strongest pieces we've seen at this year's SummerWorks. Although this production, directed by Natasha Mytnowych, is technically a workshop presentation, and young does perform the show script-in-hand, her thrilling performance style makes her play seem more put together than a lot of non-works-in-progress.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process, so we are often told, is full of missed opportunities. So too, unfortunately, is QuipTake's production of Apricots, which takes that process and the conflict that underlies it as its subject. There is no shortage of material to work with, and the play opens quite promisingly with duelling speeches by the leaders of Israel and Palestine, punctuated with interjections by a bombastic and self-congratulatory American president. The premise of that scene—in which the politicians say what is really on their minds, what we all know is really on their minds, but what protocol will forever prevent them from saying out loud—is precisely what a play on this particular topic calls for: using the truth as a tool to skewer the pretensions and prejudices of everybody involved.

This sentence is leading off this review. This sentence is intended to mimic the speech pattern that dominates the first segment, and recurs at transitional points among the other pieces, of Red Machine: Part Two. This sentence is telling you that this production is the middle portion of a trilogy that began at this year’s Fringe. This sentence hopes not to alarm as much as the sentence in the program where one of the two directors hopes that the audience will “let yourself be as curious and confused as we are” about this work in progress. This sentence won’t deny that we experienced curiosity and confusion while watching the three short pieces taken from the point of view of different pieces of a writer’s brain. This sentence is proof of how the language games of the first piece etch themselves in the brain, though it may be up to you whether this is appealing or, as repeated at the end of the production, if “this is a sentence” of the legal kind.

"Today, we're going to go from Manila, Philippines to Toronto, Canada," began Byron Abalos as he stood before a rapt group of about twenty SummerWorks tourists, ready to embark on the inaugural run of the Lola Lita SummerWalk ("Lola" means grandmother in Tagalog). "It’s going to be a very personal tour, looking at Queen West through the eyes of my Lola Lita."

What happens during the night shift? That's the simple question which provokes Suburban Beast's new docudrama show The Art of Catching Wild Pigeons by Torchlight. An off-site performance at Rolly's Garage on Ossington (note: a real garage, not the name of a hipster bar), Wild Pigeons invites you into a sleepover blanket fort—complete with flashlights—to listen to a group of actors in plaid shirts sing Neil Young songs and tell "ghost stories." The stories in the script, created by Jordan Tannahill, are all taken from real interviews the actors conducted with various night owls: a prostitute, an insomniac, night-shifters at Tim Horton's and Wal-Mart, a Nunavut prison guard, and many others. Each story is accompanied by a slide show, and occasionally a shadow play with the aid of blankets and flashlights (note to Suburban Beast: the shadow stuff worked really well, but there wasn't enough of it; more shadow puppets, please).

How lucky are we that the "artistic funhouse" (a.k.a. the SummerWorks Performance Gallery) is on for seven more nights (August 7–9, 13–16)? Yesterday, we took in the debut soirée at the atmospheric Gladstone Hotel, not knowing what to expect, and left agape at the stunning performances that are practically being given away for free (PWYC). On any given evening, as many as seven different five- to eight-minute shows are available for patrons to peruse at their leisure, taking place in the rooms (including the restroom) and hallways on the second floor. The doors to the balcony facing Queen Street are thrown open to the summer evening, letting the sounds of the city meld with the eclectic mix of performances that make up the Gallery. Below are some we particularly enjoyed.

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.