If A Change is a Good as A Rest, Why Am I So Damn Tired?

Gentle Readers,

The Toronto Fringe ended and what was supposed to happen was this:  I was to get on a plane, go home, see my nephew and niece-in-law tie the knot, visit with friends and family and spend a week at the Winnipeg Fringe.

What actually happened was this:  one of my bosses ( I can't quit my day jobs and pay rent) decided it was preferable I holiday in August. If I went home it would be for two days, max.

Also, the Monday after the wedding, which would have been Day 5 of the Winnipeg Fringe, my worldly goods and chattel - well, most of it, at any rate -  which had come out of a storage locker in Winnipeg on the previous Wednesday arrived on my doorstep in Toronto.  I spent last week, not at the Winnipeg Fringe, but doing something I longed to do and dreaded doing, something I had both worked hard to make happen and avoided:  I unpacked my baggage and settled into one place for the foreseeable future.

My plans for celebrating my nephew and niece-in-law's joy (and my family's) and spending time with hometown friends and my Fringe buddies from all over the world got buried in a pile of paper and packing lists, as I re-established a permanent home in Toronto.

When I lived in Winnipeg, for a good part of the time,  I lived with my (now-ex) fiance.  I left that city and that apartment, in large part, because his ghost haunted every corner of the place.

I felt frozen in time.  Like a shark, I knew I either moved forward or died.

This week, as cards he wrote me and gifts he gave me came out of boxes, as I found a picture taken of us on the weekend of our first anniversary that used to sit on my dresser in our old bedroom, as I repositioned furniture we'd bought together in another city into different spots in my new singleton apartment, as I discovered I'd given him his books and my bookcases and kept my books and a few of his bookcases, I realized this:  no matter where I go or what I do, his ghost will haunt me for the rest of my life. Not in a bad way:  I just came to realize that no amount of moving was going to change what happened.  We were supposed to get married and we didn't.  We were supposed to spend the rest of our lives together and we won't.

Five years later, as I emptied box after box and positioned the furniture in my new, lovely apartment I also realized that I am not good at letting go of things - or people.   The surplus is in a pile in the hallway and I'm giving it away. It needs a new home that's not mine.

I also realized I now have a reasonably well-equipped kitchen again and one of the things that gives me joy: having friends over to dinner and cooking for them on a regular basis will be possible once again.  Books and art and sweaters I'd loved and forgotten about reappeared like long-lost friends.  For the first time in nearly three years, I slept in my own bed.  It felt right and good.

My dad has also been gone for five years now.  I put his picture in one of those bookcases and I heard his voice, " Sweetheart, it beats hell out of the alternative."  Yes Chief.  I think of him every day, hear his voice in my head every day.  I know I will until I die.

For the past three years, I have performed Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" at Dalnavert Museum in Winnipeg at Christmas.  It is a gig I look forward to with great joy.  At the end of the play, Scrooge says, " I will live in the past, the present and the future and strive to let the Spirits of all Three live within me."

As I unpacked, I was with Scrooge:  haunted by the ghosts of the past, dealing with the present and not really sure what the future looks like besides amorphous and somewhat overwhelming.

This week, I'm having dinner in my new home with a friend who has been instrumental in helping me make this move.  Like me, she went away and has returned to an uncertain and precarious future.  We are both trying to move forward, in late middle age, with purpose and hope.

I have work I like. I enjoy my health, a nice place to live, family, friends.  I live in a safe country. It's lonely sometimes and scary sometimes but it is not so bad.

I'll paint the furniture on my balcony that used to be in my kitchen and in the instance of the table, my grandmother's kitchen before that.  I'll plant more flowers.  In the mornings, I'll have coffee outside before I walk along the harbour to meet my colleague and her daughter to drive to work together for one more week before she moves from an apartment on the water to the house she and her husband have spent the summer renovating.  They moved back here too - from Chicago.

Not long after I returned here, I met a man who was similarly in transition.  His marriage and his last job were both over.  His dad had died the year before.

Like me, he  put everything in a locker and went away for awhile and like me, he came back here to start over, one more time.  For a while, we were both crashed out with friends, hanging out, two souls adrift.  Then our respective ghosts came between us.  We quarrelled and I lost track of him. I hope he can unpack the past, deal with present challenges and embrace the future with more joy than trepidation.  I hope he finds what he needs, whatever that may be.

I needed to stop moving.  I needed a home of my own again.

After two and half years, twenty-five beds here and on the road, some false starts and failed experiments, I am home, "home at last, home for good and all, home for ever and ever,"  to quote Dickens.

My ex said that to me when he moved in.  The future, I have learned, is an uncertain thing.

Me and my baggage, all of it, are for better or worse, once again in one place.  A few friends helped me do this.  You know who you are and I need you to know how grateful I am for your love, your faith and support.

That's not to say I won't go back on the road.  I will.  I will do it from a base of operation.  I am done with being homeless. I plan to stay here and to do my best to make that plan go forward.

I have two plays that need to get written, furniture that needs painting, pictures that need hanging and friends I want to cook for.  For the next while,  I'll stay home, cook, redecorate, plan my next production - and write. 

Oh yeah, and go to movies and the theatre.  When I come home from the shows late at night, I'll sit on the balcony and look out at the city skyline and feel happy and lucky to be here, to be home at last.

Next week, I'll write about something I've seen, I promise.

The 25th Toronto Fringe: The Site and the Shows in a Wet and Wild Year

The last time I lived through a summer this wet in Toronto was 1993.  It rained every weekend for two straight months.

One night I awoke and the top of my head was wet.  A big chunk of the ceiling above my bed had collapsed and fallen on my pillow while I slept.

The exterior concrete on my apartment building could not withstand the amount of rain we received that summer.  Water had seeped through the exterior walls into the building and was causing the interior ceilings to collapse.

The festival has suffered under a similar record-setting deluge this year.  The beer tent, which is so nice this year and really feels like a wonderful summer party and art space again was shut down Sunday night and Monday due to the rain.  When I walked through the grounds on Monday to try and find out which theatres were still up and running, many of the roofs of the tents had collapsed under the weight of the water.

By  Tuesday,  the intrepid festival staff had the site up and rocking, looking as if nothing had happened.  There was art, music, alley shows, food, laughter:  eating ,drinking, theatre and art-making, sharing, socializing and fun.  Well done!

The same festival staff magically turned  Honest Ed's  underground garage into a club on Saturday night - a hot, steamy dance club with bartenders mixing  Fringetinis, curtained walls, vintage festival posters, fancy coloured lights and a DJ.  Thanks guys - that was the most fun I've had working up a sweat in a while:)

The Factory Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille and the Annex Theatre lost power in Monday night's  rainstorm.  A board member told me last night that the Factory remained closed for much of Tuesday as staff struggled to restore power.

This is financially devastating to both the festival and the performers in the shut down venues.  They need every minute of every day to make back their costs.

Bridget McIntosh, one of the Toronto Fringe's many brilliant former administrators, made a great post on Facebook yesterday, encouraging festival patrons and supporters to "buy the festival a beer".

The Fringe is literally financed in large measure on revenue from the sale of alcohol (and other beverages) at the bar in the beer tent.  If every person who would have had a drink on Sunday or Monday night on the site put that $10 in a "tip the Fringe" can, we could all help finance what has, to date, been one of the best Toronto Fringes in years.

As to the performers, help them sell out this last Fringe weekend and make up their lost revenue.

Some shows I've seen this week and enjoyed include:
JEM ROLLS ATTACKS THE SILENCE!:   the circuit's poet laureate in fine form at the George Ignatieff. At least five seasoned Fringe goers have come up to me and said they thought it was his best show yet and that's a high benchmark.
THE HOMEMAKER:  Laura Anne Harris is closed now, but she did a delightful, then devastating turn as a 1960s French-Canadian Saskatchewan housewife married to both her husband and the bottle.
YARN:  Alex Eddington, in probably the nicest BYOV I've ever been to, inventively tells a story of a voyage of personal discovery in the Scottish Highlands.  I particularly loved his imaginative use of both a sheep puppet and a ball of yarn and his fabulous live soundscape.
ASSASSINATING THOMSON:  Incredibly talented Bruce Horak explores, art, creativity, ways of seeing and the death of Tom Thomson in a unique, engaging, and understated performance.
THREADS:  my favourite script so far this week by Tonya Jones Miller.  Miller's mother taught English at the Buddhist University in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, while living with her Vietnamese partner's family.  Miller's mother's history is fascinating, gut-wrenching, and completely unforgettable. She's in a 50 seat venue.  Get there before she totally sells out her run.
GOD IS A SCOTTISH DRAG QUEEN:  Mike Delamont may not be God, but he is a gift from God to comedy.  The last time I laughed that hard at a Fringe show was the year I saw HOOPAL, Chis Gibbs' former comedy duo. Delamont riffs on everything from homophobia to the afterlife with such pointed wit, candor and insight that he had the audience in stitches the entire time.

Stuff I'm planning to see before the festival is over:
THE ADVERSARY by Andrew Bailey, who is one of the best writers on the circuit
LOVE IS A POVERTY YOU CAN SELL:  Weimar cabaret always floats my boat.
KUWAITI MOONSHINE: I want to see what the charming Tim Murphy does with a tale that evolved out of his time spent teaching in Kuwait.
TEACHING HAMLET:  no Fringe experience is complete without a Keir Cutler show.
KIN: I know nothing about the script but I've heard great things about the acting
WEAKSAUCE:  I have tried twice to get into this show, and am hoping three is the charm. Sam Mullins isn't in the program but his last show, TINFOIL DRAGON was a hit, and I want to see his new work.
THE SOAPS:  National Theatre of the World takes on the Ford Nation.

I have seen the Dora-award winning MORRO AND JASP: GO BAKE YOURSELF, but if you haven't, go see Toronto's favourite clown duo in a BYOV.  

I am going to lose most of my Thursday night sitting around waiting for Bell to show up and fix my internet connection. After that's over with,  I will come down and party like it's 1989 at the festival's anniversary party.  Hope to see you there!

Happy Fringing and remember to tip the Fringe generously this week.  They've done a great job and they need the money.

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.