This year’s CanStage Dream in High Park presentation is Twelfth Night adapted and directed by Gregory Prest. He takes a pretty straightforward approach. He has added a sort of prologue in which Feste speaks of the relationship between Love and Madness (and makes a few jokes about the audience and their picnics). The Love and Madness thing seems to be the central concept as far as there is one. The first two scenes are reversed too. We first meet Viola on the beach before Orsino gets to make his famous “If music be the food of love” speech. And, of course, there are cuts to fit it into the Dream time slot of 90-100 minutes. None of this really makes a whole lot of difference. The show comes across as a well acted, crisply directed, perfectly intelligible comedy and hurrah for that!
The Imagined is a new album of piano music by Alice Ping Yee Ho played by Christina Petrowska Quilico. There are four works. The first is Pictures from an Imagined Exhibitiion which riffs off pictures by Hong Kong ink master Wesley Tongson and Christina Petrowska Quilico herself. There are four movements. “Free Strokes” is kind of minimalist with arpeggios and repeated figures. It sounds weird to say it but it sounds “watery”. “Distant Drums” is similar in some ways but faster and with some much darker passages. “Mystical Mountains” by contrast is slower and darker with a kind of doom-laden quality. Finally “Dancing Colours” is bright and playful with, I think, some modal elements. It’s all quite virtuosic with occasional distinctly “non-western” touches.
I’m not the biggest fan of stand up comedy and Andrew Silverwood’s Love thy Neighbour didn’t change that. Like all stand up shows (IMO) it spends far too much time trying to shock without actually being particularly shocking. Maybe in the context of a rowdy comedy club that can work but with a typically polite Fringe audience it seems forced. Offering breath mints as communion wafers is mildly funny and shenanigans about a shared olive tree have their moments.
operaramblings 