As the 25th Toronto Fringe Opens, let's toast the guy who got the party started!

Tonight, the 25th Toronto Fringe Festival opens.

The largest theatre festival in Toronto will have 148 shows in 35 venues, site-specific performances, an art alley, rocking parties, bands and a beer tent.

There will be new plays, revivals of classic texts, poets, clowns, musical theatre, dance, street performances and hybrids of some or all of the aforementioned.  It is a feast of theatre that is central, accessible, inexpensive, and a ton of fun.

Instead of previewing shows I think you might enjoy this week ( I'll do that in a day or so), I'd like to invite you to stop and thank the person who initially made the Fringe festival in Toronto possible in the first place.

As audiences and performers experience the large, (relatively) well-financed festival we have today, it is hard to believe this started with a few venues, 25 shows, very little money, and a guy who was crazy enough to give bringing the Fringe festival concept to Toronto a shot.

While he was still in his 20s, Gregory Nixon, a musician, producer, and actor got together with a few friends and decided to create an artist-driven theatre festival in Toronto.

Edmonton, Winnipeg, Victoria and Vancouver already had fringe festivals.  Bringing an unjuried and uncensored theatre festival to the largest centre for theatre production in the country (and one of the more conservative) was a gutsy and risky move that has brought enormous benefit to theatre practitioners and audiences alike.

In large measure, I write plays because of the Toronto Fringe.   I know I'm not alone in owing an enormous part of my career to the festival.  DA KINK IN MY HAIR, ONE MAN STAR WARS, THE DROWSY CHAPERONE,  Rick Miller, Mump and Smoot, Sandra Shamas:  the shows and performers who started at the Toronto Fringe are legendary.  

Commercial hits were never the point of the festival however.  The point was to give artists a venue for absolutely free expression.  That fine and laudable tradition continues to this day.  As long as you don't go over your time, you can do anything you want at the Fringe.

After five years at the helm of the festival, Gregory went on to contribute to the growth and development of other important cultural events, and institutions in Toronto including Nuit Blanche, Harbourfront Centre and the Toronto Arts Awards. He has made over 20 films about art, and artists from a range of disciplines, exhibited his photography, and served on the boards of directors of many arts organizations.

As we get our party on for the next twelve days, and celebrate all the great theatre we'll see this week, the generosity of the sponsors, and the hard work of the administration and staff of the festival, past and present, I think we ought to pause, and take a moment to thank the man who made all of this possible in the first place. All of us who have ever attended or made work at the Toronto Fringe owe a debt of gratitude to Gregory Nixon.

Gregory, we are all richer for your vision and your commitment to the arts community in the city.  Thank you.

"Blancnieves" - a dark, disturbing version of an old fairytale

Last Saturday night, I slipped off to the Varsity Cinema to see Pablo Berger's version of SNOW WHITE and THE SEVEN DWARFS.

Forget Disney and think Almodovar.  A great bullfighter has his life change in a flash.  His only child, Carmen is born at the same time.  Her family tragedy marks her life.  This is a black and white film bathed in blood.

Sent to live with her grandmother and a pet rooster after her father's remarriage, Carmen is desperate for her father's love.  There is music and dancing at her grandmother's house but never the longed-for parent. Carmen's longing for her father's acceptance and regard sets her up for disaster.

When the grandmother dies unexpectedly, Carmen  gets her wish and goes to live with her father and her stepmother in a palace in the countryside that is both splendid and terrifying.  This turn of events is simultaneously the best and worst thing that can possibly happen to her.

The film, gorgeously shot in black and white is epic:  a big, bad psycho-drama that reminded me of the kind of film Bette Davis or Joan Crawford did at the height of their careers:  think JEZEBEL or MILDRED PIERCE.

The step-mother is that rare creature in cinema these days, a great villainess: pathetically vain, socially ambitious, gleefully sadistic and massively insecure (don't those two always go together?) fantastically played by Maribel Verdu.

Carmen ( an utterly captivating Macarena Garcia)  is good, talented, beautiful, smart, resourceful, curious and punished for her gifts at every turn.  She eventually escapes the stepmother and finds professional success and happiness with a band of dwarf bull-fighters. Alas, her moment in the sun is brief and comes at a great price.

This is not a story about lasting happiness.  It is about how happiness gets taken away from good people by the toxic poison cocktail of greed and envy.  It's about the unspeakable damage selfish, amoral people inflict on the vulnerable, the trusting , the naive and the young..

It is a beautiful film, compelling, disturbing and grandly tragic. Image and music powerfully drive the relentless narrative forward in a way dialogue seldom does. Go - and take a hanky:  you'll need it.

THE ANGELS' SHARE

Gentle readers, I apologize for my absence.  Recently I  attended work in progress at HATCH! a festival of new work at Harbourfront and the remount of a show I have previously discussed here, I WON'T HATCH!

I decided not to write about of those two pieces.  It seemed redundant to review "I Will Not...." and unfair to comment on work in development.

Last weekend,  I  walked to to the TIFF Lightbox in downtown Toronto on a Saturday night to go get lost in a movie.  The Lightbox is a beautiful building and going there always feels special. But I digress...

The "angels' share" is a term used by distillery makers to describe the 2% of production of fine, barrel-aged single malt Scotch that vaporizes.  The theory is, the angels drink it.

Who could blame them? A "wee dram" of "Visge Beatha", the "water of life", one of Scotland's finest exports is a fine celebratory drink to share with a dear old friend over a long catch-up or to savour at the end of a long, tough night.

Robbie, our unlikely protagonist is introduced to the delicacy by Harry, his community service supervisor on the occasion of the birth of Robbie's first son.  Robbie thinks it tastes horrible and asks to have it diluted with Coke and ice.

Robbie is a working class kid.  Unemployed, hard-scrabble, dirt-poor he's from an inter-generational underclass. Toughs beat the crap out of him and he beats the crap out of others, especially if high or enraged.  Robbie has been high or enraged a lot. He has a knife scar on the side of his young face that advertises the kind of life he's led and that advert keeps him from being considered for employment.  So the vicious cycle continues.

The film starts with four offenders being sentenced to community service.  Robbie has beaten an innocent young man who accidentally bumped him with a car while parking.  As his long-suffering and heavily pregnant girlfriend Leoni watches, Robbie  is told his next brush with the law will land him a long prison sentence. The victim of Robbie's coke-induced wrath has been left blind in one eye.

The victim impact meeting is one of the film's most powerful moments. Robbie is rendered speechless and tearful with shame and guilt as he is confronted by the family of the young man he injured.  Then we see his girlfriend's father lay a beating on Robbie of equal severity for the crime of dating his daughter.

Not even a brutal father-in-law can deter Robbie. He loves his girlfriend and  his son. He is determined to turn his life around for the sake of remaining with her and for the sake of their new baby.

Loach is a great creator of social realism and he doesn't disappoint here.  There's a great scene where Robbie, who is living in a shared flat, is sitting on the bed in his room.  There's a wild party going on his house.  The crap stereo thuds through the wall. His bedroom furniture is a mattress on the floor.

The bond Robbie develops with Harry, who becomes a kind of father to him, the appreciation he develops for fine whiskey and the sheer desperation of his situation, lead him to come up with a plan with his new community service worker cronies to give them the cash injection and confidence boost they need to turn their lives around.

The charm and thrill of the second act caper had me rooting hard for for a pack of petty criminals who need a break.  Unobtrusively shot, well-acted, well-written and well-directed, this is a great feel good film from a fine old-school socialist. At the end, ( and I'm not going to tell you any more about what happens) you hope their luck holds.

A friend gave me a very expensive bottle of whiskey for a birthday gift this past year.  I decided to have one before bed, as a toast to Loach and his fine crew for an engaging story and a tribute to the appreciation of fine whiskey, "the angels' share."  Go and enjoy the film.  Like a single malt, it is special treat.

THIS is great acting but the script is not all that...

"Your problems are, what is that word you taught me? - dinky."

So says Christian, the only real grown-up in the room as he leaves the over-heated loft of Marrell and Tom, the thirty-something couple and their friends Jane and Alan in THIS, an articulate, well-acted, well-designed but unsatisfying exploration of the beginning of mid-life, currently on at The Berkley Street Theatre at Canadian Stage.

Let me begin by saying this production is worth seeing for the uniformly fantastic acting, the inventive re-design of the space by Astrid Janson and the cerebral direction of Matthew Jocelyn which is both one of the production's strengths and part of its problems.

The script, which while witty, articulate and well-observed was full of people I couldn't warm up to.  The acting made me care. The writing didn't. THIS is admirable to watch, but not easy to love.

Jane (a wonderfully angst-ridden and awkward Laura Condlln) is a poet and educator, recently widowed and left to raise a daughter we never see, though they have a scene together. Jane's best girlfriend since college, Marrell, decides Jane needs to "get over it" and her solution is to set Jane up with a guy she herself finds hot, Christian, a buff, French, single doctor who works for Doctors Without Borders.

The problems here is Marrell wants to sleep with Christian as the sex in her marriage has gone down the toilet since having a baby that wakes up every 15 minutes. Yanna McIntosh made her character's sexual, emotional and professional frustration palpable.

Her husband Tom wants to sleep with Jane.  Jane wants to sleep with her gay best friend Alan, an alcoholic singleton with a career based on an eidetic memory, Alan has the hots for Christian.  Christian cops to being bisexual but finds Alan's solipsistic wit and drunkenness "irritating".

The problems with this play began, as they so often do in life, when actual sex rears its selfish and ugly head.

I really wish the one sex scene, so germane to the plot of this play, if you can use the word plot this loosely, hadn't taken place on stage, for all kinds of reasons.

As Tom, a self-pitying and selfish asshole of an underachieving husband, Jonathon Young makes a meal of playing a really unlikeable guy with a big chip on his shoulder.  The articulation of his desire for Jane was far more electrifying, dangerous and sexy than their awkward tryst. I am no prude about sex onstage.  There was plenty of it last week in ARIGATO TOKYO but is intrinsic and felt natural. Last night,  I felt sorry for the actors having to do that in front of us . It felt unnecessary and almost exploitative. I sat there thinking some things really are better left to the imagination. 

Then there are the things I wish Jocelyn had let happen on stage. I really wish that baby had screamed every 15 minutes in every scene it was in until the end.  I wish the writer had made the sullen, grief-stricken 9 year old an actual character.

Once you have kids, you have to grow up. You either give up being selfish or you become a really shitty parent.  That is the real struggle I see most of my late thirty-something friends engaged in, besides failed career expectations and overwhelming debt. I sure didn't see that struggle on stage in any substantial way last night. It gets hinted at, but never really happens.

Melissa James Gibson, the much-awarded writer said in the program notes she initially thought she was writing about infidelity, but really she was writing about mortality. THIS is a little about both, but really, about nothing much.

Maybe I'm too old for this kind of thing.  Or maybe it's too hard to watch a play about an affair in a group of friends when I've seen Pinter's BETRAYAL brilliantly done a few times.

I've had friends die too young.  I dated a man whose best friend committed suicide.  When he spoke of him, more than 20 years later, stone-faced and dry eyed, I felt the pain of his loss and his guilt for surviving, as though the death had happened last week.

There needed to be a hole in the room where Roy, the departed husband, used to be. He needs to be the elephant in the room and he is hardly there in the play.  Neither Roy, nor the hole left by his absence is made palpable by the writer until the end. It was Condlln's and Nashman's thankless task to try and deliver a pay-off emotionally that isn't on the page. They did a terrific job.

When I got home, I wished I'd had a copy of  GHOST or TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY or hell, BLITHE SPIRIT to watch. I found myself craving something about death where the writing was as good as the acting.

I was very glad to have seen the play for the wonderful acting, some of the inventive directing and the terrific set.  As for great writing:  I got that from Daniel McIvor last weekend.


 

Arigato Tokyo at Buddies in Bad Times and the Debate about How to Get More Bums in Seats

"All suffering is caused by grasping and illusion."  So say the Buddhists.

Canadian writer Carl Dewer is on a book tour in Tokyo, promoting his fourth novel to a room full of people who don't speak his language.  Dewar sees himself as free of attachment: a man for whom satisfaction is derived from the ephemeral sensations he obtains from coke, casual sex, booze and clubbing rather than deeper connection.

Then Dewar finds himself in Tokyo immersed in another culture and an overwhelming  love triangle with his translator, a woman who describes herself as "made of longing" and her brother, a Noh actor dedicated to physical and spiritual perfection in the service of the creation of his art.   When Dewar arrives in Tokyo he thinks he is beyond love. He learns that he doesn't know the first thing about it.

McIvor has written a beautiful play, a profound contemplation of the nature of human love and desire and the suffering that so frequently attends it.  The script is so filled with exquisite language, complex ideas and emotions that I wanted to re-hear it immediately.

The production  is wonderfully directed by Brendan Healy and performed on what may be the best-designed and lit stage I've seen this season.  Julie Fox and Kim Purtell deserve kudos for their excellent work.   Watch how the lighting shifts on the metal rear screen, suggesting a moon, a pool, a club, a sky. It's just beautiful.

The performances are as restrained, sophisticated, elegant and evocative as the production elements. David Storch as the troubled Dewar, Cara Gee as Nushi Toshi, the translator who falls in love with him and Michael Dufays as her brother,  Noh actor Yori Toshi all give wonderful performances.

The company worked with a choreographer (Hiroshi Miyamoto) and a dialect coach (Eric Armstrong) and their detailed efforts at making the world of the play come to life have certainly paid off.  The actors did a great job of conveying another culture, another way of hearing and seeing the world, another way of expressing feeling and making art. The accents were terrific.

Special mention must be given to Tyson James as the lip-syncing nightclub performer Etta Waki.  This is a very difficult turn to do well and James nails it. Waki is both Dewar's lover outside of the triangle, and the play's narrator.  In a way, s/he is the embodiment of Tokyo: glamorous, decadent, dazzling, ageless and enigmatic.  "None of us are one thing...."

Brendan Healy, who is also Buddies in Bad Times artistic director has very publicly come out this week and said the show was struggling to find an audience.  There was apparently a meeting of artistic directors in town earlier this week due to concern about attendance levels at theatres across town this past season.

The City of Toronto could help the theatre make more money by changing a ridiculous liquor law that only allows alcohol to be consumed in the seats of a theatre with fixed risers.  If the risers are stable enough to support seated patrons, they are stable enough to support seated patrons with a drink in hand.  It's not like there will be beer hawked in the aisles.  Patrons will have, at most, two drinks during the course of the performance.  An extra $100 a night from the concession is an extra $1400 across the run, not a small matter to a struggling theatre company.

Buddies wasn't full last night and it certainly deserved to be.

Yes I know:  it is $30-$40 to go see a show on a weekend night. Spend less at the pub, take lunch for a week, eat dinner before the show at home, cut back on $4 lattes, ride your bike, walk or take the TTC, don't buy another crappy piece of clothing or cheap pair of shoes to sit unworn in your closet and go out and support your local theatre instead.  I was certainly glad I did last night. ARIGATO TOKYO is a great play and this is an excellent production.

AS I LAY DYING at Theatre Passe Muraille

Theatre Smith-Gilmour is one of Toronto's most treasured independent companies.  The company is well-known for unique adaptations of literature, grounded in a very French school of physical theatre and clown.  Rooting a piece that has its genesis in a text in the very body-focused language of physical theatre, clown and buffoon seems an unlikely marriage, but for the most part, Smith-Gilmour makes it work, and work very well.  They have many awards to prove it.

The company's current offering is an adaptation of William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING.  The Southern Gothic novel is chock-a-block with tragic and comic figures, strong compelling visuals and dramatic plot points.   I can certainly see why the company was drawn to the story.

Make no mistake: this is drama writ large.  Dying matriarch, floods, river crossings, fires, incest - and I'm just hitting a few of the page-turners.

Smith-Gilmour's production brings all of Faulkner's out-sized characters and epic drama fully to life. The pathos, tragedy and comedic moments are all wonderfully realized.

Dean Smith-Gilmour makes a suffocating monster of a victim-narcissist father fun to watch even as you want to hit him.  The scene where he uses guilt to manipulate his daughter out of ten dollars she desperately needs to hang onto, a "loan"you know he'll never repay is both funny and seat-squirmingly infuriating.  As the town doctor points out, he's the kind of man who would show up without a shovel to bury his own wife and then borrow one.

The rest of the cast was uniformly good.  All the Bundren kids stole my heart tonight. Daniel Robert's is a marvel as the young son. Nina Gilmour as the tragic Dewey Dell, Benjamin Muir as the damaged, angry Jewel, Julian De Zotti as driven-mad Darl and Dan Watson as the long-suffering and stoic Cash were uniformly terrific.  They all took on multiple roles tonight with great aplomb and fine character work.  They are a talented bunch.

With a great lighting design and sound score and a few simple costumes changes, the uniformly talented cast drew the audience into the story in all of its complexity.  Physically, the creation of character, scene and mood was impeccable.  Great, clear physical action made a burning barn, a raging river, a host of characters and an untamable horse palpable tonight.  Physically, this is a really exciting and dynamic show to watch.

Faulkner's heightened language is exquisite but complex and very challenging.   When the language is this beautiful, I want the words to count for as much as the physical action.  I want the play with the language to be as nuanced as the beautiful physical work.

The company's work with the text was uneven and their use of accents was inconsistent.

Some of the actors try to have a Southern accent and some don't. This was frustrating to listen to.  Given that Michelle Smith has never lost her strong French accent, I thought the entire cast should have just decided to forego the accents and focus on the other aspects of the text.

The actors could also have titrated their volume more, especially in the first act.  There are scenes where dialogue occurs over a loud soundscape but there were also monologues spoken in an otherwise silent theatre, where actors shouted through most of the entire speech.

The physical action of the production works beautifully.  Vocally it needed to be more specific and more pulled back. Dan Watson's last two speeches on the back of the wagon tonight were powerful and poignant in their nuance.  I would have liked to see more of that clean restraint, more pauses to let the ideas and word pictures breathe and less shouting so that the vocal work was as good as the physical work onstage.

I was very happy to have seen such a muscular production of a challenging text.  It is a fine production, well worth seeing.  I hope the company will revisit  it in the future with more attention to the words they have brought so powerfully to life in actions.

It's on at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto until March 31st.

Sexism: It's not just from men.

We are at one of my least favourite days of the year:  International Women's Day.

Let me explain.  About 20 years ago, I went out with a bunch of friends to The Rivoli Cafe in Toronto, a favourite old haunt of mine to an event to celebrate International Women's Day.

The Rivoli has three spaces:  a restaurant, a bar on the side and a famous backroom that is a club/performance space with a stage.

I went out with a group of men and women, gay and straight, coupled and single.  We grabbed a table in the bar, planning to see the show and attend the party in the backroom.  We were told by the organizers of the event (not, I hasten to add, the lovely people who run the Rivoli) that the backroom was for women only, so we, the women, would have a safe space.

I went back to my table of friends and explained that we couldn't take any guys into the back.  The men were all terribly good sports about it.  I went into the back with one of my girlfriends to check things out.  There was music and dancing and a lot of really, really, drunk women. One woman came up behind me and full-on grabbed my breasts.

I wheeled around, hands up, to see a woman, only a bit larger than me, drooling drunk. When I confronted her, she said, ( I'm not making this up) "Oh, you look so beautiful and I just wanted to talk to you."  I said, "If you were a guy, I'd have decked you, and by the way, that's no way to start a conversation with anybody."  She started to cry.  I left, and went back to my table of friends. I was there as a feminist, and a woman, and I'd just been sexually assaulted by a feminist and woman. I haven't been to an International Women's Day event since.

I went to a gender segregated school, and I was fine with that.  I like gender segregated bathrooms.  I host girls' night a few times a year.  I get that the vibe is different when the room is mixed company.

Excluding men from an International Women's Day celebration feels, well, sexist.

Yes, I get that gay women and gay men have clubs that exclude patrons who are not of the same sex to avoid trouble-makers and harassment.  Many gay bars however, are open to members of all sexes and persuasions.  I have had great fun dancing and chatting in gay bars all over the country. Certainly I never had any trouble like the kind I had that night.

An event  billed as an event for people who support women's rights should include men.  Otherwise, it discriminates on the basis of gender.  Women fought hard to break down the boys' clubs. I don't feel comfortable locking men out of a room they want to help me be in.

Drunk members of either sex groping me without permission don't make me feel safe.
 
I've worked for women who thought it was OK to pay me less than a man, I've heard women make comments about other women's bodies that were viciously sexist.  Women put huge pressure on other women around dress, weight and grooming. There are a lot of women on the editorial boards of those magazines pushing plastic surgery, hair dye and diets.

Then there are all those great high-status equal opportunity exploiters of female labour: Margaret Thatcher, Leona Helmsley and Imelda Marcos, to name a few.  Let's not forget Asma al Assad who seems quite content to shop in London, and stay silent of the subject of the distress of the people in her country, Syria, while women, men and children are murdered and forced to flee as refugees.

You don't have to be a man to exploit or abuse a woman, or indeed other people. You just have to feel entitled to do it.

I don't want an International Women's Day.  I  will not attend any "women's only" events tonight.

I want an equal number of  men and women in Parliament and the Legislature. I want a National Daycare Policy and I want equal pay for work of equal value, which the Supreme Court of Canada just ruled lawful - wait for it - in 2011. I don't want anyone of either sex to feel free to make free with my person without my permission, or degrade or exploit me in any way.  I would  like to see more women take to task other women who trash women, pay them less, judge them solely on their appearance or contribute to their one-down economic position in society by providing them with unstable, insecure, employment.

My International Women's Day includes men who support the above-mentioned values. Not including men in the fight to win our equal rights feels, well, sexist.