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Urban Planner: November 16, 2009
Urban Planner is Torontoist’s guide to what’s on in Toronto, published every weekday morning, and in a weekend edition Friday afternoons. If you have an event you’d like considered, email all of its details—as well as images, if you’ve got any—to [email protected].
The Rockettes performing their signature high kicks. Courtesy of Holmes Creative Communications.
DANCE: Kicking off the Christmas season with some stylish stockings, the three-day run of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular starring The Rockettes starts today. This seasonal family favourite promises all of the high-kicking can-can spectacle of the original Christmas Spectacular at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City, complete with a dancing Santa and his reindeer, a scene from the Nutcracker, and a “living nativity” scene. Air Canada Centre (40 Bay Street), 7:30 p.m., $35–$84.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Canadians always complain that Canada, as a nation, is such a hard thing to define (at least when compared to the uber-identity of the States), but it’s not for lack of defining moments. Mark Reid, editor of The Beaver: Canada’s History Magazine, has assembled an impressive collection of photos that depict defining moments in Canadian history (including Terry Fox, Vimy Ridge, and Pierre Trudeau to name a few) called 100 photos That Changed Canada. Today Reid will appear at Indigo Bay and Bloor for an interview with CBC’s Don Newman and a signing. Indigo Bay and Bloor (55 Bloor Street West), 7:30 p.m., FREE.
THEATRE: The Burning Bush!—Toronto actress Tracey Erin Smith’s one-woman, two-act show—is a former Fringe darling that will soon be making its way to Off-Broadway. But before she goes, The Burning Bush! will have one more performance in Toronto. The show is a comedy about a female Rabbinical student who, by chance, finds her true calling counselling others while giving lap dances at a strip club. The show was originally built in two parts, the first of which, The Burning Bush!, won the 2006 Best of the Toronto Fringe Festival, and the second, Two in the Bush!, won the 2007 Best of Toronto Fringe. Young Centre for the Performing Arts (55 Mill Street, Building 49), 8 p.m., $25 ($12.50 for Seniors, Students, Arts Workers, Exotic Dancers, Clergy).
MUSIC: The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra is in Toronto for a one-night-only show at Roy Thomson Hall in partnership with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. This historic orchestra—the oldest and best-known ensemble of its kind in Asia—will be performing Modest Mussorgsky‘s “Dawn on the Moscow River” from the opera Khovanshchina, Sergei Rachmaninoff‘s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Qigang Chen‘s Iris dévoilée. There will be a special appearance by virtuoso pianist Yuja Wang, as well as a pre-concert discussion with the CBC’s Rick Phillips and some of the performers. Roy Thomson Hall (60 Simcoe Street), 8 p.m., $29–$128.