July 2nd, 2009

Culture Clash

Strangely, this year the Toronto Fringe Festival runs from July 1 to 12, while the Scream Literary Festival will run July 2 to 13. Strange because these are both such amazingly awesome weirdy cultural events that appeal to so many of the very same people (both as attendees and likely as volunteers) that you’d think they wouldn’t want to compete. But who knows, in the world of schedules and venues, what hardships these two teams suffered from, so all we can do is thank our stars we at least have 2 weeks to jam in as much as we can.

If you held a gun/dayplanner to my head, I’d have to come out for lit over theatre, so I’ll be hoping to see you at Stet: Redacting the Redacted, the Joyland Joyathon (well, I’m participating in that!), and of course the big mainstage reading on July 13. But there should be world enough and time to sneak in at least 36 Plays about Hopeless Girls, if not a couple others.

Really, when you have to complain about having too many alternatives for fun, you are really scraping the bottom of the complain barrel. Oh, Toronto, you rule my heart!

Our home and native land
RR

September 15th, 2008

Moving Right Along

It is comforting to know, unless I actually spontaneously combust at tonight’s launch (note: highly unlikely; no need to wear anything flame-retardent), the world will continue to be amazing.

Emily Schultz’s lovely multi-city short-story web compendium, Joyland continues to be a joy, showcasing great and strange new stories by authors like Claudia Dey and Lydia Millet. And as of today, there’s also a story up there by yours truly. The piece is called Black-and-White Man and I’m really thrilled that’s being included in such an amazing project.

On Wednesday, I’ll be attending opening night of Atlas Stage’s production of George Walker’s Theatre of the Film Noir, which is exciting not only because I like George Walker and haven’t been to the theatre in a while, but also because the last time I talked to star Magdalena Alexander, her enthusiasm for the project was practically pyrotechnic. If you come to opening night, there’s a party afterwards at the Drake, but the show runs in Canada until Sunday (or, if you’re going to be in Poland, also in October…)

Ok, enough distractions, back to worrying about tonight.

Now that it’s raining more than ever / know that we’ll always be together
RR

August 6th, 2008

Rose-coloured Reviews *Avenue Q*

The musical Avenue Q has occasionally been compared to Jonathan Larson’s Rent except with puppets. Much as I enjoyed both musicals, I have to say this comparison is not apt; Avenue Q is a *parody* of Rent. Liking one is no guarantee of liking the other; in fact, if you are a terrifically intense fan of the dramatic, earnest change-the-world-one-block-at-a-time-ishness of Rent, it might really piss you off to see people and puppets waving their arms around and crooning, “Everyone’s a little bit racist!”

Not me (or at least not very much-the next line, “And that’s ok!” got me a little). The songs in Avenue Q are very very very funny, and often uncomfortably accurate. Like all the best parodies, Q loves its targets but doesn’t spare them, and that includes the audience. Songs like “Schadenfreude” and “There’s a Fine, Fine Line” (between love and wasting your time) make you cringe as you laugh, and that’s pretty impressive for puppets.

The other big comparison you hear for Avenue Q is with Jim Henson’s Muppets, and you definitely do see that in not only the fuzzy humanoid forms but also in the dexterity of the puppeteers. However, while Henson’s creations have at least a pretense of *not* being puppets, all I could think when the stage lights came up on Avenue Q is is “You can *see* the puppeteer!!!” It took me a while to adjust to seeing Kate Monster and Princeton, allegedly freely acting people, being trailed by actual people dressed in grey with their hands up the puppets’ shirts (none of the puppets have any legs). What’s amazing is how quickly my alarm disappeared. You really start seeing only one being in these units. It helps that the puppeteers are really actors, and give incredible performances with both their hands and their faces. When Kate Monster looks sadly down at the ground, so does her puppeteer, a concept that works amazingly well. I think all the puppeteers were moving their lips, but we had terrible seats (I could’ve stood on my seat and touched the ceiling [but I didn’t]) so this didn’t trouble me overmuch. The upside of seeing the people behind the puppets was more than worth it. The best moment of puppet-engineering is when the sexy bad-girl puppet leaves a room and, since the puppet has no lower body, the puppeteer swings her hips. Hilarious, and effective.

Great songs, great performers, cool puppets and stunts used to cool effect-what could be wrong? Well, in light of all that other stuff, it wasn’t *very* wrong, but, um, the story? Such as it was. Wondrous Fred recently called “Greatest Hits” musical storylines like *Mamma Mia* basically “song-delivery systems” and sadly so is the book for Q. The songs are pretty biting but also present the characters as semi-complex (well, it’s a musical) and confused. In dialogue, however, they are a seventh-grade guidance class on how to achieve maturity. The closeted gay guy has no motivation, the commitment-phobic guy has no motivation, the sloppy irresponsible guy has no motivation-eventually they just stop doing the self-destructive stuff they were doing. Oh, and the women just don’t have flaws to start with-except the slut.

This stuff wouldn’t be problematic, really (it’s a *musical*!) but towards the end of the second act, everyone starts squawking about how much they’ve “learned”. Couldn’t we have just left this as a cool entertainment with a few really insightful thoughts about social behaviour, without trying to crazy-glue a moral on it? Because, by my count, both major problem sets in the show were solved by money falling from the sky, and the last song (“For Now”, which is as brill as all the rest of the songs) is about making do with whatever you’ve got because it is what you’ve got.

Now, I’m totally recommending you see this show and I think you’ll love the whole thing, but really, *really* don’t try to learn too much from it. You might, actually, anyway, but that’s not much the point.

Back out on the car
RR

March 18th, 2008

I like

Am I ever going to get it together to review something? This is the extremely small question of the hour, which I mainly ignore. Until then, here are some things I’ve been uncritically enjoying.

Thom Bryce, of Free Biscuit fame, has a new play called *The Curative* being performed this week by the (pivotal)arts folks at the WriteNow! festival, in conjunction with three other plays that I haven’t seen, but if *The Curative* is a fair sample, are probably brilliant. (Warning: *The Curative* is not for the faint-hearted, in terms of both sex and violence. The word “chilling” comes to mind.)

The joyful music of The Choir Practice. I don’t know what I need more faith in, but this pretty music redeems it all.

Smoked tofu–it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, but it’s delicious (as tofu goes) and little known. Consider it.

Oh, and just to show I can dislike stuff, I didn’t think Lars and the Real Girl was very good, and, worse, gave a simplistic reductive portrayl of both women and the mentally ill.

But really, who am I to say?

You look so good with a gun / but that hat doesn’t suit you
RR

July 27th, 2007

A Good Day

Yesterday was an excellent day for the written word around here. In the morning, I finally sent awwaaaaay a story that has been bugging me. It may not, in fact, have been fine, but it was as fine as I was going to get it, and now it is out of my power to pick at it anymore. Then in the afternoon I met up with Kerry and we did the whole write-and-talk thing. For the more solitary-garret types, this may seem like an unproductive thing to do, but for me, with writers I’m in sync with, it’s quite lovely to have their insights, feedback and general creative auras. Plus Kerry actually solved a knot in the story I was working on, practically handing me the ending. That never happens. Thanks, K!

And then when I got home, the mail had brought me lovely volumes with a squirrel on the cover: the new issue of QWERTY. If you are a non-subscriber and not in New Brunswick, this one might be hard to find, but if you do spot an inland copy, I urge you to grab it. And not *just* because my story “Missing (MF)” appears on page 88. Also because there is a wealth of poetry and prose in here, by names famed and new. QWERTY is put together by the University of New Brunswick’s Creative MA students, whose program closely parallels the one I just completed, and they’ve done some wicked work here. And the squirrel is really cute, even though he’s holding a knife.

I much fear that my planned picnic at the Dream in High Park is about to rained out this evening. I am promised a floor picnic and videos if that occurs, though, so I can’t pout *too* much. Plus the embarrassment of riches listed above.

Ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl
RR