Fringe: Day 3 review round-up

2009/07/03

Rave reviews for Moving Along, The Sicilian, Lysistrata, As You Puppet and more. Check www.eyeweekly.com/fringe every day throughout the festival for more reviews.

Of the Fields, Lately

2009/07/03

Soulpepper plus David French adds up to yet another great evening of theatre. For Of the Fields, Lately (1973), French’s sequel to his breakthrough play Leaving Home (1972), Soulpepper has brought back Jeff Lillico, Kenneth Welsh and Diane D’Aquila to play the same roles of Ben Mercer and his parents Jacob and Mary that they did for Soulppeper’s superb staging of Leaving Home in 2007. Adding to the realism, the action of Fields takes place two years after that of Home, so we and the actors have aged exactly as much as the characters.

Gruesome Twosome

2009/06/30

Derek McCormack and Tony Burgess launch the Scream Festival with dancing and rampant spirit fingers

This hour has two comedians

2009/06/30

Mashing up comedy with issues of the day, the monthly Panel Show puts two straight guests in the punditry ring with a pair of improv-ers, in character as recent newsmakers. Thursday saw Coyne and Montgomery, a writer for CBC's The Hour, book-ended by Sam Kalilieh as alleged Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and fellow Bad Dog regular Jan Caruana as Frau Barbel Schreiber, the high-rent wife of Karlheinz.

Screen Play

2009/06/30

The Bloor Cinema joins the Fringe with their shadow-cast program, The Silver Stage

It’s Different For Girls

2009/06/30

EYE WEEKLY's 2009 Fringe Festival coverage kicks off with Aurora Stewart De Peña’s intriguing entry, an existential opus on femininity without the vagina monologues. Plus: Fringe Festival Best Bets, Silver Stage Series preview and our annual Fringe review site, where we'll be assessing every single Fringe production and giving you the opportunity to write your own.

Fringe Best Bets

2009/06/30

Featuring: Red Machine — Part One, The Fever, The King’s Conscience, Moving Along, Chicken Licken, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, Artifacts, and Head First

Raising the dead

2009/06/24

A user’s guide to Scream in High Park 2009

Work, in progress

2009/06/24

Though it previously made its home at the Tim Sims and at Second City proper, Bruce Hunter's The Workshop has settled, for now at least, at Bad Dog Theatre. His well-regarded weekly experiment in long-form, sort of a skunkworks on stage, sprung from the classes Hunter used to teach while at Second City and is now part of the Saturday lineup at the improv house, running indefinitely into the summer.

Scene, not herd

2009/06/24

Looking for an art-kid hideout during Pride? Try P/E/D

The Burning Bush

2009/06/23

Jackie Mason has already given Tracey Erin Smith a thumbs-up on her concept for this one-woman show about a rabbi-turned-stripper, and no wonder: the result is both polished and provocative.

Loot

2009/06/22

Soulpepper’s production of Joe Orton's Loot (1965), though still set in the 1960s, proves to be surprisingly contemporary in its critique of unbridled authority.

Awake and Sing!

2009/06/19

Soulpepper’s current production of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! (1935) would do well to follow the exhortation of its title. The play is now recognized as one of the great American family dramas, but under Miles Potter’s direction none of the multiple tensions the play explores lights up the stage.

Growth spurt for sketch-com

2009/06/17

Has it been a year already since the first Sketch ComAgeddon, and five since the debut of its mothership, the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival? Apparently so, say organizers. The sketch-com competition not only survived its first year to come back for a second, but has hit a growth spurt.

Animal

2009/06/17

One of the problems involved in reviewing short stories is that everything becomes a spoiler, especially with a punchy writer like Alexandra Leggat. Just as she’s setting up riddles, the writer quickly switches to short-circuiting expectations. I’ll tread carefully.

Papa don't preach

2009/06/17

At first, Tracey Erin Smith’s obsession with Jackie Mason seems a little creepy. She’s in her 30s. The stand-up comedian, famous for his appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s and his one-man shows on Broadway, is 73. On a visit to Toronto, Mason agreed to meet over coffee and she told him she was working on a show called I Want to Marry Jackie Mason.

Carol Burnett @ Massey Hall, June 12

2009/06/15

One by one, from the floor and from the nose-bleeds, adoring fans asked the showbiz icon questions ranging from “What was it like working with Walter Matthau?” to “Can I show you the tattoo of you that I got?”

Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's 20th Century

2009/06/15

Morphine addiction, torment and persecution at the hands of Hollywood’s elite — Peter Lorre something like the Sid Vicious of his generation: both were fucked up miscreants with nothing to lose. And Friday night, we were ready to throw up the horns and salute Brooklyn punk band The World Inferno/Friendship Society's theatrical tribute to the cult icon. Instead, we almost fell asleep standing up.

5 O'Clock Bells

2009/06/12

At its simplest, Sleeping Dog Theatre’s 5 O’Clock Bells (playing as a part of Luminato 2009) is a warning against the dangers of child prodigies rising too quickly. At its most complex, it’s a one-man spectacular infused with live guitar and highly nuanced lighting. On the whole, though, this work about the life and unsolved death of Jazz legend Lenny Breau walks the high end of a middle road, almost tripping over its own structure.

Ripped: How the wired generation revolutionized music

2009/06/10

Greg Kot’s happy take on the music industry’s apparent apocalypse

Lie back and think of Texas

2009/06/10

Chris Trew — purveyor of air sex, which is like air guitar, except instead of pretending to play "Sweet Child O’ Mine," someone gets on stage and gives his or her best porn-worthy phantom humping to an invisible paramour — wants to be clear about one thing. It’s not that he’s against people acting out sex with invisible farm animals, per se — it’s just that he’s seen it so many times, it doesn’t immediately impress him.

Carmen & Skin Divers

2009/06/10

The National Ballet turns up the heat for Luminato with a double billing of the sensual Skin Divers and Carmen, where there’s no shortage of exposed muscle, making out and ballerinas gone bad. The two productions complete their run this weekend.

Peter Lorre: punk icon?

2009/06/10

Jack Terricloth and Jay Scheib present a new play about the legendary character actor

Body & Soul

2009/06/09

Say what you will about Body & Soul being sponsored by the “real beauty” hucksters at Dove — it’s unlikely that director Judith Thompson could have assembled her disparate group of performers without the power of her sponsor’s mass-market reach.

The Children's Crusade

2009/06/09

R. Murray Schafer’s latest opera The Children’s Crusade, now having its world premiere as part of Luminato, proves to be a disappointment. What seemed to be so fascinating in the abstract turns out to be less exciting in practice. Schafer’s insistence on presenting the work in promenade style in an unconventional venue is a major impediment to its enjoyment.