Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hugh Russell as Figaro in Opera Hamilton’s production of The Barber of Seville.   In Opera Hamilton’s latest Il Barbiere di Siviglia, director Brent Krysa has created a freshly imaginative and hilariously detailed theatrical realization of Rossini’s comically exhilarating score. … Continue reading →

A good part of my musical lifetime flashed before my eyes recently at Roy Thompson Hall as I contemplated the cover of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s program. Of the ten conductors on display, I have experienced nine in live performance, … Continue reading →

In the Canadian Opera Company’s cerebrally insistent production of Rigoletto, now at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto, Quinn Kelsey in the title role asserts a commanding physical presence and a dynamic voice. Be he mean or gentle or haunted, … Continue reading →

As one might anticipate, after the COC’s stunning Orfeo ed Euridice directed by Canadian Robert Carsen last year, Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris, with Carsen again at the directorial helm, is equally bold and haunting in concept and realization. The minimalist … Continue reading →

“We come with the dust and we go with the wind” is one of the most haunting lines in the folk canon. It was penned by Woody Guthrie when he hitched a ride on the melody of Pretty Polly to … Continue reading →

One day, I think it was in the late 1980s, I was walking down London’s depressingly commercial Oxford Street and suffering from exposure to the garish blend of unforgiving gloss and inhuman shallowness that seemed an echo of the reigning … Continue reading →

Apparently. according to Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli, Maria Severa’s creators, hand-to-mouth poverty in the slums of 19th century Lisbon was certainly a happy gig to live. No matter the survival through prostitution and the humiliating class structure, it was … Continue reading →

At the end of Michel Tremblay’s play from the 1973, Hosanna stands before a nine foot three-sided mirror and declares “ Cleopatra is dead”  as she removes her makeup. Hosanna turns in full frontal nudity as Claude and is embraced … Continue reading →

  Like all great comedy, Moliere’s The Misanthrope, with its incisive take on social hypocrisy, amorous complications, and ensuing disenchantment, explores humanity’s darker side. Appropriately, sound designer Jim Neil introduces David Grindley’s production with the darker tones of viols, while … Continue reading →

The Homecoming presents a familial battleground in which conversation is a slew of verbal attacks and counter attacks. The family members, all male, are bound in toleration of one another. They sit apart like persons made of human debris. Conversations … Continue reading →