I'll probably end up bundling too much into this one post, as I have neglected the blog for almost the entire month. This weekend is actually a fairly slow weekend for me. Two weekends ago, I went off to see Picasso Painting the Blue Period over at the AGO. I was able to take my son to the members-only weekend, and while it was crowded, I'm sure the following weekends will be even a bit more crowded (though controlled via timed tickets) until maybe mid November, which is probably when my wife will go. That said, it is quite a good show, and I'll post separately on it fairly soon. I would encourage anyone interested in Picasso to go obviously. We stopped in at 401 Richmond on the way back, and he really liked the Brian Harvey paintings at Abbozzo. I thought they were good but looked an awful lot like the type of artists at street festivals and outdoor art fairs. I was really taken by the one room with Naoko Matsubara prints. I probably won't ever buy one, but they are not outrageously expensive, so never say never.
Towards the end of the next week, I stopped by The Power Plant at Harbourfront, which has finally reopened. I'm glad it's open again, but I have to say the featured artist, Miriam Cahn, leaves me entirely cold and she takes up all 3 galleries! So I won't bother going back until 2022 when they rotate in another artist (or three). I was gearing up to go see a couple of plays in the Soulpepper Her Words festival, though in the end it turned out that the theatre was one building further east (where Farm Boy has just opened up in fact). I saw two staged readings* on Sat. and Sun.: Wild Woman by Kat Sandler and Queen Goneril by Eric Shields. Both were good in different ways, but thematically they were incredibly similar and Queen Goneril suffered in comparison to Wild Woman (and in fact I left at intermission because the staged reading was longer than advertised and I was just exhausted). They probably should have been programmed on separate weekends. I'll try to blog on this separately but may never get to it. One thing that put a serious damper on Sunday was that I had planned on biking out to MOCA (which has been open for a while) to see their new exhibit GTA21. In general it has been really windy, making biking fairly unpleasant, and what should have been a 40-45 minute ride turned into a 55 minute epic slog. When I got there, there had been some catastrophic problem with the doors, and the 2nd-4th floors of MOCA were completely locked down! I was severely pissed. While I may go back in November (calling ahead first!), I'm also just as likely to say that this was a sign I should take a pass.
There has been additional music at Crows' Nest but they have pushed it to 9:30 to not interfere with the current show (or rather a lecture on land acknowledgements*) and that doesn't fit that well with my schedule. I really had been planning on going a couple of times but one thing or another interfered, and I just haven't gone back. I did manage to get over to The Only Cafe to see live music, and perhaps I'll try to catch Allison Au at The Rex next week, though again I wish the shows started a bit earlier...
I'm not doing any real culture outings this weekend, though I do need to type up all the pages of my script (most of which was written out in longhand at various jazz shows or in the intermission at the Soulpepper readings), and this should be performed at SFYS on Nov. 1! So something to look forward to for sure.
* In fact, while this was the most satisfying live theatre I've seen in a long while, it isn't the first. I went to see the faux production of As You Like It, which was in fact a 90 minute monologue on everything that was wrong about land acknowledgements by Cliff Cardinal at Crows' Nest. I think Lynn Slotkin let this get under her skin a bit too much and her review was hasty, but it truly was disrespectful to flat-out mislead the audience and tell them they would be getting Shakespeare rather than a long lecture that tried to make them feel bad about themselves, esp. as for so many people it was their first night back out testing the waters. I'll see how the other plays go this season, but it definitely makes me a lot less inclined to support Crows' Nest. (If I want to go to theatre that makes me feel bad about myself, I can stick with Theatre Passe Muraille or even The Theatre Centre most nights.) This could definitely lead to its own post, but I know I don't have the energy for it.
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