My review of William Christie and Les Arts Florissants’ Charpentier double bill that opened TSM 2026 on Thursday evening at Koerner Hall is now available at bachtrack.com.
Photo: Lucky Tang
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The small Northeastern Ontario town of Buttershire is being terrorized by a cheese pervert; a trench coat clad male who flashes women with cheese attached to his dick. The OPP are helpless (with laughter). Can local dairy heiress and top anti-vegan internet celebrity over 40 Priscilla Patton, recently returned from the big city (Sudbury) save the day?
Songs for Moby Dick from Ubuopera is more of a staged song cycle than an opera. There’s one singer/actor; Peter Thompson (who is also the composer), plus Erika Reiman on keyboards. The text is from the Melville novel and it’s used for a dozen or so songs and some short sections of linking narrative that condense the whole (very long!) novel into a concise 55 minutes.
Marla Torgerson’s one woman show Sinner is the story of her upbringing in an all white Evangelical community in Alberta and her subsequent break with that upbringing. It’s a succinct and very funny exposition of what this particular brand of Xians expect of girls; i.e. that they grow up hard working, unquestioningly obedient, slim but not too sexy, “pure”, ready to marry too young to know what they are missing.
Night Journey, by Martin Jones and Gregory Light, is currently playing at the Arts and Letters Club as part of the Fringe. An elderly professor is teaching a class on interpreting Homer’s Odyssey to four students in a basement storage room. All five are facing their own demons and are in the class for varied reasons. Slowly, despite pedagogy as ancient as the text, they find a way of finding meaning in the Odyssey, or at least in the actions of Odysseus, and begin to confront their own demons. So far so good.
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.
The funniest, ballsiest and most shocking episode was a description of his brother’s wedding in occupied Palestine and watching Israelis come out to picnic and watch the bombs falling on Gaza. Those truths need to be told and it takes guts to do it. So kudos for that.
So not really my thing but your mileage may vary. Love Thy Neighbour plays in the Deanne taylor Theatre at 10 : Video Cabaret until July 12th.
Justin Hay’s My Own Private Shakespeare is the perfect antidote to an overdose of goofy comedy at the Fringe. It’s directed by Mona Zaidi and written and performed by Hay. The starting point is Hay’s annus horribilis (to quote her late majesty) of 2024 which featured, within two months, the death of his (extremely problematic) father, a messy break up and divorce and a brain tumour. The story moves forwards and backwards in time fleshing out each narrative thread and illustrating/illuminating each narrative twist with a scene from one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It’s deceptively simple but beautifully constructed and very well performed.
Hay is a proper Shakesperean actor with a track record to prove it. He also teaches Shakespearian acting and it shows. His delivery is as good as anything I’ve heard in Canada, or indeed elsewhere. It’s properly paced (one can’t deliver 16th century English at 21st century colloquial speed) and properly enunciated to give full value to the text but it’s also nuanced. It’s packed with emotional punch in fact. And he has range. He’s equally adept at young; Hamlet in English and French, and old; Lear, male and female; both Macbeths. It’s all impeccable.
Continue readingEveryone knows the official version of what happened when God got pissed off with Sodom and Gomorrah but is that what really happened? Old Soles Theatre Collective’s God Save the Sodomites, by Aliyah Bourgeault and Emmet Logue, playing in Native Earth’s Minogitoon Workspace Giizis Studio, gives us a different version. God wants Sodom (and Gomorrah… look we all know what the Sodomites were up to but what’s with Gomorrah?) smited/smitten? whatever but Abraham has nagged God to save Lot; the one righteous man in Sodom (maybe?) and God is fed up of arguing with Abraham (who wouldn’t be). So he sends the Angel of Wrath Af (Emmet Logue) and trainee Angel of October (and genitals) Barbiel (Aliyah Bourgeault) to do the smiting with the proviso that if they can find five genuinely good Sodomites they can spare the city. Af is unwilling to complicate matters and argues for instant smiting but Barbiel persuades him to at least look for the five worthy Sodomites.
Potato, Potato is a pretty well known Toronto sketch comedy group consisting of Daniel Bagg, Callan Forrester, Rami Khan (not appearing in this show on account of becoming successful or being abducted by aliens), Ashlyn Kusch, Erika Rogstad, Lizzie Song and they are good at what they do; a blend of Canadian political satire and sex. For PPStW they create a kind of wrapper for their (more or less) standard show that’s funny in its own right and makes the whole thing just a bit more than seeing the group at a comedy club.
Yanik Gosselin’s solo show Brava: A Cabaret of Devotions is an intensely personal tribute to the women who have helped shape his musical life. It takes its cue from Peter Allen’s Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on Stage and takes us through the ways in which his two musical loving aunts and generations of musical theatre divas have shaped his musical journey with nary an opera singer or aria in sight, though the horrors of auditions get a look in.
operaramblings 