So pleased to have run into Lydia Zadel at Caitlin Murphy’s performance Meconium/Montreal tonight. Turns out they worked together just recently, performing Daniel MacIvor’s See Bob Run at the Montreal Fringe Festival to some pretty good reviews.
By the way, Meconium, despite its name (although it is apt), is my favourite show of the Fringe so far, closely followed by Theatre Soup‘s Wake.
I was disappointed that I’d have to miss Kristin Sweetland‘s performance next weekend due to my attempt to see all of the shows at the Fringe… until I spent the evening watching the first five performances at The ARTS Project and saw that she’s there in spirit (that’s actually a pun) as part of the associated visual arts exhibition called VisualFringe.
For those who read Planet CBC, there have been a few recent changes. After adding a number of Flickr feeds several months ago, I’ve pulled the lot of them. I’ve also added three blogs—Blake Crosby‘s, Jesse Hirsh‘s, and Emm Gryner‘s—and removed one: The Tea Makers is gone, now that it’s being run by a non-CBC person.
That was a lot less awkward than it could have been.
Dr. Horrible killed my sound card.
I was about five minutes into Act Two tonight when the audio started to crackle—not a great thing at any time, but especially not for a musical. I restarted the browser: crackle. Logged out and in: crackle. Rebooted: clear! but then, more crackle. Rebooted again.
Nothing.
Reloaded the drivers. Nothing.
Reconfigured the audio daemon. Nothing.
Rebooted.
Rebooted.
Rebooted.
Zip. Zilch. Nada.
Curse you, Dr. Horrible! Why did my poor, defenseless little onboard sound card have to die, just to put you over the top for the Evil League of Evil? What other nefarious plans do you have for unsuspecting hardware whose only crime is playing back free internet musical miniseries?
It’s been mentioned more than once that my music-related posts have tended to be about female performers; for whatever reason they’ve generally been the friendlier bunch, even if they’re recently incommunicado or completely MIA. But it’s long past time to give the guys their due, and since it’s Canada Day I’ll focus on some of the Canadians.
Ironically, the first set of guys… aw heck, enough has been made of their name. I’ve been a fan of Barenaked Ladies since near the beginning; not quite the Pink Tape days, but I do have an original copy of the Yellow Tape. The Brothers Creeggan, a side project by current member Jim and former member Andy, are also high on the list.
Moxy Früvous is another since-the-beginning band: I’ve got the self-titled indie tape (featuring Green Eggs and Ham). In fact, I’d have to give Mike Ford credit for re-invigorating my interest in comics through a chat at an in-studio performance at CFNY.
I’ve only seen Bruce Cockburn perform once, and in a fairly non-traditional folk venue at that: Montreal’s Theatre Maisonneuve, during the 1997 Montreal Jazz Festival. Still, his Waiting For A Miracle collection is one that I turn to regularly, and his cover of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life always cracks me up.
Pete O’Connell, before his life as “a feature film compositor and visual effects instructor”, performed as/with a one-man band. His CD The Back Tire, recorded with one-woman-band player Andrea Bonetto, is the only thing I’ve got from those days.
Mike Ford, formerly of Moxy Früvous, and Nathan Caswell, formerly of Nathan Caswell, both perform extremely Canadian songs. They both write songs that alternate between the humorous (Nathan’s Einstein’s Brain; Mike’s Huge on the Luge) and the personal (Mike’s Crossroads (Song for Jane Jacobs) and Nathan’s This Old Farm), and they’ve both got a real sense of place (Nathan’s Pulp Town and Mike’s Tooker (La Monde à Bicyclette)); Mike’s take also leans toward the historical and educational on the two volumes of Canada Needs You and Stars Shone On Toronto.
There are more, but this post is getting a little long; Spirit of the West, John Mann, Gowan, Kurt Swinghammer, Hugh Marsh and others are going to have to wait—although hopefully not until next Canada Day!
It’s surprising how much theatre goes on in this city, and equally surprising how little people outside the theatre community seem to be aware of it. “Mainstream” venues like the Grand Theatre or the JLC do well at pulling crowds, but they account for only a fraction of the productions that are performed here. There are big events like Fringe—which is, I believe, the fourth-largest festival of its kind in Canada—and long-running independent productions, all the way down to two- and even one-night runs. Many of the performances are of original scripts written by local artists; quite a few others are works by Canadian playwrights, like Michel Tremblay and Daniel MacIvor.
I’ve come to more fully grasp the extent of local theatre in the past few years, notably after joining the Brickenden Awards adjudication committee last spring and seeing well over 70 performances in ten months. (I’m up to 24 so far this year.) But the thing that made me realize just how much goes on is a project I started recently.
Just over a month ago I took ownership of Theatre in London, a long-running website about… well, theatre. In London. (Ontario, don’tcha know.) Since then I’ve been busy refreshing its look, replacing the static HTML pages with a more dynamic back end (based on WordPress), reworking the existing content, and adding a bunch of new features including discussion groups and a podcast version of a radio show that Jeff Culbert and Simon Goodwin, the previous owners of the site, have started on CHRW.
Oh yeah, and writing original articles, doing interviews, getting in touch with various contributors and theatre companies and organizations, and arranging for some other things that aren’t quite at the point where I can say anything more about them.
(Did I mention I’m also working 9-to-5 at TVWorks and editing a third book?)
It’s great to have an active “side project” that engages the right brain. I’m sure it will be less fun at some point, but right now I’m having a blast. And I hope that in some small way this will help to shift all of the great work that the local theatre community is putting on stage a little further up in the local collective consciousness.
This will disappear as soon as the Phoenix Mars lander does, but it’ll be fun (and perhaps inspiring) while it lasts.
