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Cabaret has cred

The sixth annual Global Cabaret took over the Young Centre last weekend (October 24 to 27), proving again that it provides a great opportunity to party.

We caught a number of the 15 hour-long productions that ran in rep.

Ins Choi gave real poignancy and lots of clever rhymes to his solo show, Subway Stations Of The Cross. Playing a homeless man with deep-set eyes who wanders onstage from the audience, Choi blends Handel tunes, politics, social commentary, hunger, 80s sitcoms, the Bible and Greek myth. His slam-poetry style bubbles over with internal rhymes and a playful humour of knock-knock jokes and sharp wit.

A mean musician, too, the writer/performer plays a ukulele and a shofar (a ram’s horn, used during the Jewish New Year) to great effect. Just as impressive is his version of Communion, using bread and wine in an unexpected way.

Mike Ross’s musical adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry cycle Spoon River Anthology was another rousing production by this master musician. The cast, directed by Albert Schultz, included current and former members of the Soulpepper Academy as well as Stratford’s Ben Carlson, who studied double bass before he turned to acting.

Based on the graveyard epitaphs of several dozen characters, many of whom are involved in adultery, the show is part sung, part spoken and always well performed, especially in its hot, hand-clapping, foot-stomping choral numbers. Every one of the 15 performers plays an instrument, and the result is an hour of fine entertainment.

Let’s hope both Subway Stations and Spoon River go on to full productions.

The cabaret is an impressive tryout ground for unusual musical and theatrical acts such as Patrick Garland’s Brief Lives, a collaboration between Toronto Masque Theatre and Soulpepper, with Soulpepper founding member William Webster as gossipy 17th century diarist John Aubrey. Directed by Derek Boyes, the production also features period music performed by Larry Beckwith, Katherine Hill and Terry McKenna.

Among the music-focused presentations, the Oh Canada Songbook took us across the years and across the country with tunes presented by Suba Sankaran, Retrocity, Dylan Bell, Denzal Sinclaire, Miranda Mulholland, Alana Bridgewater and the Young Centre City Choir.

Sharron Matthews, who knows how to act a song as well as sing it, presented material that she usually doesn’t get to perform, drawing on childhood and later memories as springboards for each number. Skilful with small talk and improv, she embraces the audience with a combination of send-up and warmth.

And the same team that brought life to the fascinating Bohemians In Brooklyn at last year’s festival reunited for The Judgment Of Paris, a music- and atmosphere-filled look at the contrasting lives of composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel through several decades in Paris.

Written by CBC’s Tom Allen, the show featured beautiful arrangements of works by both composers as well as evocative new compositions (by Allen, Kevin Fox, Bryce Kulak and Patricia O’Callaghan, all part of the band along with Lori Gemmell) riffing on themes in their life and music.

The fest’s one of the city’s most engaging, bringing together an eclectic mix of audiences and artists in intimate settings.

Fitful Sleep

Campbell House, the historic Georgian house at the corner of Queen and University, seems the ideal location for a chilling Halloween-timed production.

It’s worked as the site-specific venue for an award-winning adaptation of the ghostly Turn Of The Screw, and should have been as welcoming for Theatre Lab’s staging of You Can Sleep When You’re Dead, which closes tonight (October 31).

Matt Bird’s image on the program cover, a decrepit, falling-apart vision of Campbell House, strikes the right note: you expect decaying limbs of the not-quite-dead to beckon you inside, like the cover of a scary 50s comic book.

Theatre Lab’s co-artistic directors, Omar Hady and Michael Orlando, have collected five short plays by Glyn Bowerman, David James Brock, Graham Isador, Kat Sandler and Hady himself, helmed by the artistic directors and Tom Arthur Davis.

Each is a separate gruesome tale staged in a different room of the house. As we’re told at the start, some souls with unresolved issues haven’t passed over quietly several wander Campbell House, and we meet them as we travel from one tale to another.

The show is a large-scale endeavour involving some 40 people, but the writing and acting are variable despite the frisson of the intimate action. In one episode, a governess confronts her employer over her young charge in another, a priest conducts an exorcism with a stubborn minion of hell, and in a third the audience becomes part of the action around a dinner table.

The two best works are by Sandler and Brock. In the first, a grieving family – or are they? – await the reading of the paterfamilias’s will, but a surprise visitor shows up to take what’s legally hers. Sandler’s expert at blending tart, bitchy comedy and gruesome action.

In the second, the most creepy of the five, a cook prepares a meal for a demanding family as two men, whose relatives are known for their good taste, offer various ingredients for her dishes. Turns out she has an alternative idea for a source of victuals. That scene also features the evening’s most subtle performances, by Erica Overholt as the cook and Colin Edwards as the young fellow who eagerly offers to help her.

See listing.

Improv aces

Autumn is turning out to be comedy festival season. JFL42 recently wrapped up, and this weekend sees the beginning of the Dark Comedy Festival. But for the past couple of weeks we’ve been caught up in the Big City Improv Fest, which showcased some of the continent’s best off-the-cuff comedy.

By its very nature, improv comedy is different each time, depending on audience suggestions and the collaboration between performers. Two of the best are Mark Little and Kyle Dooley, two Picnicface members who are so attuned to each other’s sensibilities that they can make any scene fly. Their show involved a composer, a son who skipped over the years between six and 17 and a war involving farmers. Verbally nimble and with a great use of space, the pair had as much fun with their scene as the audience – a hallmark of the best improv.

Dooley was a standout another night as part of the Bad Dog Repertory Company’s set. The talented troupe came up with a scenario about a brackish lagoon, two highways that didn’t intersect and a tree with mysterious powers. Company members like Etan Muskat, Colin Munch, Kirsten Rasmussen and Paloma Nunez showed great imagination and a sense of play.

Other highlights of the week included the all-female singing improv troupe Stacked, the terrifically theatrical duo Jet And Holly, the sharp and high-stakes troupe the Bitter End, the fresh and energetic all-female troupe Hawkins and the group Sex T-Rex, who take on genres by grounding their scenes in authentic and very funny details.

All booked up

We’ve always maintained that the best performer of a script is the playwright.

That’s one of the reasons it’s exciting to attend the seasonal launch of books by Playwrights Canada Press, hosted again by NOW’s Susan G. Cole and Jon Kaplan.

Reading this time around are Joan Burrows (Willow Quartet), Jordan Tannahill (Age Of Minority: Three Solo Plays), Keith Barker (The Hours That Remain) and Linda Griffiths (Maggie And Pierre and The Duchess).

Also on the bill is a reading by Jenny Young and Gordon Bolan of Catherine Léger’s Opium_37, translated by Leanna Brodie.

The free event – complete with nibbles, a cash bar and, this year, a raffle of scripts from the press – is Monday (November 4) at Buddies in Bad Times.

See listing.

Winners’ circle

Another organization, the Playwrights Guild of Canada, held its annual awards on Monday (October 28), recognizing some of the best new scripts and honouring long-time contributors to Canadian theatre.

The Carol Bolt Award went to David Yee for carried away on the crest of a wave, premiered at the Tarragon Theatre see NOW’s review here (http://www.nowtoronto.com/stage/story.cfm?content=192271).

Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s Come From Away received the Stage West Pechet Family Musical Award, while Lucas Foss’s Little Voices got the Stage West Pechet Family Comedy Award.

The winner of the PGC Post-Secondary Playwriting Competition was Geoffrey Simon Brown for Still Still Still Britney Tangedal was runner-up for No Smoking In The Living Room. Both writers attend the National Theatre School.

The Guild also presented playwright Linda Griffiths with a lifetime award for her body of work, while an honourary award from the PGC went to outstanding dramaturge Iris Turcott.

For more, see playwrightsguild.ca/news.

stage@nowtoronto.com

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