Results tagged “theatresmithgilmour”

It was only a matter of time before someone did a clown show about the financial crisis. We always had the feeling the recession was actually the set-up for a really good joke, and SPENT, the new play created through the joint efforts of TheatreRUN, Why Not Theatre, and Theatre Smith-Gilmour, promises to deliver the punchline. It sounds like a good idea: the show is created and performed by Ravi Jain and Adam Paolozza, two of our favourite young theatre artists, with the assistance of Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour, two accomplished old hands at physical theatre. Yet somehow, even though this is a subject we would all surely love to be able to laugh about, SPENT doesn't quite give us the giggles we were looking for.

There's a moment in Small Wooden Shoe's Dedicated to the Revolutions, which opened last night at Buddies in Bad Times Theate, where Erin Shields talks about the Scientific Method as she remembers it from her high school education: Hypothesize, Experiment, Observe, Report. For Small Wooden Shoe, this show represents their own version of the "Report" stage. In 2006, the company began work on a series of shows, each devoted to one of seven scientific/technological revolutions: Gutenberg, Copernican, Newtonian, Industrial, Darwinian, Nuclear, and Information. This new show is a culmination of those other shows, bringing together everything they've learned about how these revolutions have shaped our society with the help of dry-erase markers, some string-cup telephones, and a ukulele.

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.

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).