Forty years after its first appearance Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Shakespeare mystery comedy, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is back at CanStage in a production directed by Alisa Palmer and starring the playwright as Constance Ledbelly. It’s a strange but rewarding and very funny play. It takes two iconic Shakespeare heroines and tells their stories as they might have wanted to see them told. It’s part academic/literary mystery story with elements of panto including an impressive number of double entendres. It also mixes actual Shakespeare text, pseudo Shakespeare and something much more demotic to great effect. There’s been some mild updating since the 1980s but it’s not intrusive.
Monday was the 100th birthday of the great Canadian soprano, advocate of new music and voice teacher extraordinaire, Mary Morrison. It was also the first day of a week of events celebrating that milestone organised by the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. I’m not going to write a tribute to Mary because others have done so, and done so better than I likely would. Larry Beckwith and the Confluence crew have a 
Cicada Woods is a fairly recently formed Toronto based group consisting of Suhashini Arulanandam – violin, Esme Allen-Creighton – viola, Sybil Shanahan – cello and Shannon Wojewoda – double bass. Their first recording titled Seasons is of two works based on the four seasons. The first is an arrangement of Astor Piazolla’s Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires). This was originally scored for bandonéon, violin, electric guitar, piano, and double bass and the arrangement aims to match Piazolla’s sound world as much as possible through the use of extended technique etc. Of course this four movement piece is tango based and that comes over clearly in the arrangement and I think the four acoustic instruments manage to sound like a tango ensemble. There are some particularly effective percussive effects for example in the third movement “Primavera”.
Pursue Peace; Contemporary Chamber Music by Canadian Jewish Composers is the first recording by the Jewish Music at York initiative of Toronto’s York University. It features three works by living Canadian Jewish composers; Sid Robinovitch, Noam Lemish and James Rolfe. 
