Toronto – This week sees the beginning of the SummerWorks Festival in Toronto, a growing theatre/music/multimedia performance expo from August 6th (hey, that’s today!) until the 16th. Centred mostly around the Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst), Theatre Passe Muraille (16 Ryerson Ave, near Bathurst & Queen), and The Theatre Centre (1087 Queen West), with performance gallery events at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen West) and a handful of events going on at a few other venues, SummerWorks is celebrating their 19th year by giving us a media pass. It’s also their second year under Artistic Director Michael Rubenfeld, he of the excellent production The Book of Judith. Did my favourable review of that show help facilitate our media pass? Eh, probably not, but I’m in a conspiracy-seeing kind of mood today…
Anyway, Panic Manual will have reviews of shows all festival long. Currently on my schedule is something like 18 theatre shows and a couple of music shows, this alongside a trip to Niagara Falls this weekend, starting tonight with a show called Montparnasse at Theatre Passe Muraille (if you’re going to it and you see a guy there by himself looking tired and daunted by just what he’s gotten himself into, come over and say hey).
Since these are all new shows, I’m not sure how many recommendations I can make. However, since this is primarily a music blog, you might be interested in The Nick Drake Project, a play with music and inspired by 60’s folkie Nick Drake. You may also be particularly interested in the music portion of the festival, which features, in order of performance: Miracle Fortress with Karkwa (tonight), Think About Life and DD/MM/YYYY (tomorrow), The Got to Get Got with Oh No Forest Fires (Saturday), Still Life Still and Kids on TV (Sunday), Boys Who Say No and Foxjaw (August 11th), Matthew Barber with Claire Jenkins (12th), The D’Urbervilles and Forest City Lovers (13th), Panic Manual favourites Sunparlour Players with Josh Reichmann Oracle Band (14th), and Germans and Great Bloomers (15th). All music shows take place at the Theatre Centre.
New this year is SummerWalks, a series of three Queen West walking tours leaving from the Factory Theatre courtyard both weekends of the festival. For only $5 you can get a guided tour of the area based on a different theme. Also, spend a day checking out the Performance Gallery at the Gladstone, a series of performance art events that are 5-8 minutes long, cycle throughout the night, and is pay-what-you-can.
As I said, a lot of these plays are new so I can’t really recommend many without seeing them, but some of the stuff I thought sounded most interesting from their descriptions on the SummerWorks website are Apricots, Toronto Noir, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Piano Tuner, The Middle Place, and I’ll Be There to Kill You, all of which are among the shows I’ll be seeing, so if you want some guy’s recommendations for things to see, keep checking in here for my show reviews.
Oh, one show you should see is Impromptu Splendor, put on by The National Theatre of the World. An improvised play put on by three cast members, the guy to watch for is Ron Pederson. A cast member of MadTV for a couple of seasons, I used to see Ron do improv every week when I lived in Edmonton with the city’s legendary live improvised soap opera Die Nasty. He’s a funny, funny guy.
Check out the SummerWorks website at www.summerworks.ca and keep watching this space for play and show reviews.
