Summer dreaming - Stratford and Shaw

This post will actually cover a few other companies that have announced their summer seasons (for 2015) or even their 2015/16 seasons (I believe Canadian Stage is one of the few to be quite so far ahead of the curve*).  In many ways, this is simply a continuation of this post where I started tracking things of interest.  I'm about halfway through that list, and indeed went to roughly 3/4 of the events through Dec. 2014.  So this is a bit of a continuation in a slightly different format, focusing on theatre events happening 5 to 6 months out (when it should be a lot nicer).  As it turns out tomorrow is supposedly the last day for general discounts on tickets to Stratford though they extended discount pricing at Shaw by another week (through Feb 8).

I won't list everything that one could see, just the things I actually went ahead and got tickets to (now that I can no longer be scooped...).

Shaw
Caryl Churchill Top Girls
Tony Kushner The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide...

Stratford
Hamlet
Taming of the Shrew
Love's Labour's Lost
Oliver Goldsmith She Stoops to Conquer
Friedrich Dürrenmatt The Physicists
John Mighton Possible Worlds

I am really tempted to come back and see Jonson's The Alchemist, though I've seen it a couple of times already** and I dropped enough ducats at Stratford for one season.  The Alchemist will probably turn up at a UT Hart House production before too long, and that should be sufficient.

Soulpepper (I'm going to break my own rules and list a couple of plays that are worth seeing, but I saw recently so am passing on.  I guess eventually it will become clear which I did and didn't go to.  Also, a few of these will be shown over the late spring into the summer, so check it out sooner than later if interested.)
Alan Ayckbourn Bedroom Farce
A.R. Gurney The Dining Room (this got rave reviews in Chicago, so I hope this production comes close to matching that)
Sarah Ruhl Eurydice
Michel Tremblay Yours Forever, Marie-Lou

Canadian Stage
Robert LePage Needles and Opium
Shakespeare in High Park - Julius Caesar
Shakespeare in High Park - The Comedy of Errors

So a lot to see and to squeeze into my calendar.  There's quite a bit to be excited about, including the changing of the seasons, but I will say that, like Chicagoans, Torontonians do go out and support the arts, even in the dead of winter.

But I must be off now.  Go ahead and leave a comment if you end up going to one of these shows.  Or if there is some upcoming summer theatre (particularly in the GTA) that excites you.

* Edit: I just recalled that East Side Players have also announced their 2015/16 season here.  It turns out that one of them (Wonder of the World by David Lindsay-Abaire) is one of the plays I listed on my want-to-see list, so I should go, even though I borrowed the script and browsed it a bit.  I wouldn't say I am in love with the script, but it has its moments, and the company puts on plays fairly close to my home, so I should probably go support them.

In other way-ahead listings, I see that Alumnae Theatre Company plan on doing Lett's August: Osage County in April 2016!  There was a very short run of the Broadway touring production that came through Toronto back in Nov. 2009, but this will be the first locally organized production, as far as I know.  I will probably encourage others to go.  However, I won't go myself.  I saw the Steppenwolf production with the original cast, and I just don't think anything else will live up to that.  I don't want the different versions getting muddled in my mind.

Now in terms of other want-to-see plays I listed, I thought I would make the trip to the UT-Erindale campus, but it turns out they are only performing Inge's Picnic for a single weekend, and it happens to be this weekend(!), when I am booked solid.  The other Picnic is in Scarborough in early March, which may not work out either.  It's about a half hour drive, though I'd have to rent a car, and it looks like I could make it in about an hour via transit, assuming most of my connections are ok.  That's not so terrible, but I'll just have to see how booked I am in early March.  It's quite droll that I am more likely to go to Montreal to see Travesties than to see Picnic just slightly outside of town...

** And one of those times was at Stratford, though back in 1999!  (Incidentally we also saw School for Scandal on that visit, which is one I would like to see again.)  It is really tempting to go again, and perhaps even see if my son would enjoy it, but I think it will be another couple of years before he could really follow it (he was able to follow most of Wilde's  The Importance of Being Ernest).  So I really need to hang tough and wait for a local performance.  However, if somebody gave me tickets I would go for sure. But if Mirvish tries to bring it to town in the fall or in 2016, like they did for Arcadia, I would definitely go.

TSO Season 2015/16

So the upcoming TSO season has just been announced.  You can start here and eventually click through the season.  I'm going to be honest and say it looks ok, but kind of scaled back and not particularly adventurous.  In fact, it is basically a very boring season.

I am glad they will be doing Beethoven's 5, and as a Sunday matinee, so I will most likely take the kids to that.  They are doing two Shostakovich Symphonies and the Montreal Symphony is coming in with a third.  I'll plan on making all those.  I did miss out on Second City's Guide to the Symphony, which was apparently terrific, so I'll try to go this year.  I did not manage to make it to Dvorak's 9th Symphony (it was when we were on a quick trip to Chicago).  They are doing a one-night stand of Dvorak's 8th, but I will probably pass, having seen that done in the previous two years with various symphonies.

I'm a bit torn on the Beethoven Symphony #3 paired with Piano Concerto #3 with Yefim Bronfman.  The issue is I've already seen him do the whole Piano Concerto cycle, so it just feels unnecessary, even though I am sure it will be a fine concert.  They are also bringing in James Ehnes to do the Elgar Violin Concerto (paired with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring), but I saw Ehnes doing this piece with VSO in 2014 (in a concert line-up that I liked better).  I'm sure this will be a great concert, but I feel I've already done it.

I'll be able to put together a subscription package, but there is very little that excites me, aside perhaps for the Shostakovich and Angea Hewitt coming in to play Bach.  I guess there is Prokofiev's 5th Symphony, which I do like, but I've seen several times already.  I'll go again anyway, since it is paired with Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, which is not played very frequently.

I guess I don't really know what I want.  I do like seeing familiar works every couple of years, but there is so little on offer here that is a bit off the beaten path.  But when they do have something just a bit unusual, like Strauss's An Alpine Symphony, I find it isn't quite to my taste and I don't go.  I'm just a bit fickle and fairly demanding.  That's what happens when you live in a place like Chicago and get totally spoiled for choice.  I don't even dare look at Chicago's 2015/16 season, as I probably would just get depressed.

Small steps (to get back in shape?)

I am far better about exercising my mind than my body, but I have gone and gotten a 3 month membership to the exercise rooms at the Park District building.  It is literally across the street, so I hardly have an excuse, other than their exercise facilities are not great.

I really signed up for the pool, however.  The lane swimming times are not great either, but they do work for me a lot better than they did the previous season.  They are currently 8-9 PM Monday and Wednesday.  And that's pretty much it for the entire week, which I find incredibly lame, but I should be able to make it to one and often both evenings.  I did like the fact that they have a medium speed swimming lane, though it didn't appear that it was appreciably slower than the fast lane.  Nonetheless, that's probably where I will end up most days.

It's been several months since I was biking regularly, and until the deep freeze lifts, that is how it will remain.  I don't think I've swum laps since last May or perhaps the first week or so of June.  I think I did reasonably well, given that I am out of practice.  I'm still a little sore from Monday, and I'll probably be even more sore on Thurs.  But I'm the only one to blame for getting so out of shape.  Next week I'll look into using the exercise room a bit more and see if they have weight machines or only free weights.

I even went today (Wed.) and it is often going back the second or third time that is the hardest.  I'm sore in some places that I haven't been working on in a long time.  I guess that is a good thing.  Now I just have to try out the stationary bicycle and the weights on one of the non-swimming days, and we'll see if I can start making some serious progress.

Toronto arts updates

I guess it is a pretty clear indication of how rarely I see live jazz (compared to live classical music) that it isn't until just this weekend that I realized that the two main jazz clubs in Toronto closed down years ago (Top of the Senator and Montreal Bistro).  Sadly I didn't go to either while I lived here in the early 90s.  There really isn't a single venue in the city that offers multi-night residences to visiting musicians from New York or Chicago (pretty sad considering how close it is and that Montreal still has its jazz clubs).  The Rex is basically the only game left in town, and from what I can tell, it only offers one-night stands and generally odd times at that.  Atomic is coming in in February and the start time is 9:45 (compared to an hour earlier in Montreal the day before and in Hamilton the day after -- and at 3:30 in Hamilton during their Winterfest Kick-off if I decide to make a road trip).  Same thing with Dave Liebman later in the month.  It's not that I can't stay up until midnight, but it just seems wrong not to have an 8 o'clock set and a 10 o'clock set for major jazz musicians.  Anyway, Toronto is really no better than Vancouver any longer in terms of jazz and perhaps even worse when you look at the fairly lame line-up they have at the Toronto Jazz Fest in the summer.

It is better in terms of movies, particularly art movies, with TIFF being pretty amazing (except during the film festival itself, when it becomes overbearing and lame).  It might even slightly edge out the Siskel Film Center in Chicago, which is saying something. 

Anyway, I'm just back from seeing my first play at Canadian Stage -- The Other Place by Sharr White.  While there is one scene I think probably should have been cut (a bit too much spoon-feeding of the audience) it was good.  There are two things I'll probably see later in the season (though not enough to justify a subscription), but I don't really like the look of the 2015/16 season.  Also I have to say that after I learned more about their new artistic director, I was less impressed.  He basically is bored with conventional theatre and wants everything to be multi-media.  I don't mind so much if it is just a slightly enhanced backdrop, as in The Other Place or in Chinglish, but many of his offerings are theatre/dance or theatre/film, and I just don't find this particularly appealing.  He may be the right person to try to hook the Millennials on Canadian Stage, but I probably will only be a very occasional visitor.  I much, much prefer Soulpepper and Tarragon.

I managed to just miss some art installation in the main VIA area of Union Station (though the reviews weren't particularly encouraging).  I was sure it said through the weekend, but everything was coming down on Sat. morning.  My daughter and I continued on our way to Harbourfront where we did some ice skating (very badly) and then saw the video installations at The Power Plant, which I didn't particularly care for, and then some mixed media work at the Billy Bishop Artport which went over a lot better.  I may be able to post one or two pictures later.

I had known about the Kubrick exhibit over at TIFF, but I just either would forget or was working crazy hours, particularly over the past two weeks.  So I thought I would sneak in today, but it was the last day of the exhibit and basically everyone else had the same idea as me.  So I just couldn't get in.  It's probably for the best.  I very rarely have really thought these movie-themed exhibits are that thrilling.  About the only one that I really liked was the Croenenburg one at ROM years and years ago.

I've gone into some detail about various local art shows.  I'm curious about the Basquiat, which opens at the AGO in about two weeks.  My kids don't seem to be too interested, but my wife might go if we can bundle it with some other activity where we have hired a sitter.  And I'll soon see whether MOCCA gets the cool rooms from the Coupland exhibit.

Slightly further afield, I had seriously considered going up the National Gallery for the Jack Bush exhibit, but after checking out the slides, I decided his art was kind of bush league (ok, poor joke) and definitely not worth a winter trip.  There is a Chagall exhibit of considerable more interest in the summer, so perhaps that will be the time to go.  If we do make it to Montreal in April (a combined museum/theatre trip), then Montreal will edge out Ottawa by a couple of months.

I've mentioned elsewhere some of the interesting upcoming theatre shows, but perhaps I will circle back and actually list the ones where I've gotten the tickets as a kind of show of support.  There are a few more I should probably add to the list, especially now that the summer Shaw and Stratford seasons have been announced and are on sale, but I guess I should wait until all my tickets are booked, just in case I inadvertently spark a rush on some show.  You never can tell, as they say.

Curiously, you never can tell is the catchphrase of a waiter in Shaw's early comedy of the same name.  While I probably won't actually go down for this (as the times just don't pair up with the two plays I will be seeing), there is a small chance that I would take off on the Friday beforehand and see the evening performance.  I'll wait on the reviews before making a determination one way or the other.  However, it is time to try to start buying up the rest of my tickets, so that I can manage to fit everything in.  My calendar is getting pretty complicated...

Finally Rezzori

This is an unbelievably silly post.  I cannot find a usable book cover on-line to indicate that I am finally starting Rezzori's An Ermine in Czernopol, so I am pinning one up here.  Sorry about that.  If I have anything interesting to say about the book after this many month delay (while I was off reading Russians), I will update this post in a week or so.

Sharp-eyed viewers will note that the cover is an adaptation of the central painting in the Max Beckmann triptych, The Beginning.  This is perhaps the 2nd most famous of the triptychs, simply because it is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and millions of people have seen it.  However, it does go into storage periodically or rather other paintings are rotated back on view.  It wasn't there on my last two trips.  I just checked and it is back on view now, so it should be there in mid March when I have a short trip to NYC planned.  That's a significant plus (not that I wouldn't have stopped by the Met anyway).

Ok, I am back, having finally read the novel, and I thought it was a fine novel indeed.

As I have hinted in a few posts, von Rezzori seems to be mourning the loss of a cosmopolitan city that was generally open to citizens of various nationalities (Germans, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians among others) and religions (within limits).  Muslims did not seem to feature in this city, clearly based upon Czernowitz, an actual city that was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  Jews were largely accepted, though somewhat despised (including by the narrator's parents to his shame and regret).  And the anti-Jewish sentiments, so horrifyingly channeled by the Nazis, come to a head in a somewhat smaller-scale Kristallnacht in Czernopol.  After which point, the city loses its cosmopolitan character, and starts to become a backwater.

There are quite a number of much more thorough reviews of the book: here and here and here and here and here.  (Somewhat bizarrely the Guardian does not seem to have reviewed it when the new translation came out, when it would have seemed to have been very much up their alley.)

Mourning the loss of a once-great city puts von Rezzori in the same tradition as Joseph Roth (particularly his shorter non-fiction writings, but one could argue The Radetzky March sets up the Austro-Hungarian Empire as something to be mourned) and certainly Stefan Zweig (almost everything but in particular The World of Yesterday).  One connection not made by these other reviews (because it had not come out yet) is to the film The Grand Budapest Hotel.  (However, Wes Anderson freely admits to being heavily inspired by Zweig, so the linkage is quite legitimate.)  The same sense of urbaneness, even to the point of ridiculousness, is well represented in An Ermine in Czernopol.  Curiously, the main character Gustave H., is most of the time witty and urban like Herr Tarangolian, the prefect of Czernopol, but at the end of the movie, makes a noble gesture of self-sacrifice that is a bit more in line with Major Tildy (who is the "ermine" of the title).

Where this novel is a bit of a departure is that the narrator, and particularly his parents, are a fairly central part of society, and the parents' open antisemitism (mixed with only occasional noble efforts to save particular Jewish children from danger) helped fuel the climate where the general population turns on the Jews of Czernopol.  Curiously, von Rezzori was somewhat closer to the centre in that he was not Jewish and he was actually from an aristocratic lineage (which he later played up), but he was not particularly well-off (his father was a civil servant in Czernowitz) and he had Romanian citizenship, which kept him from being drafted by the Nazis in WWII.  So he is not as complicit as the Germans, particularly a German writer like Günter Grass (who ended up far more tied to the Nazis than he admitted after the war).  An Ermine in Czernopol actually has a number of similarities and a few outright parallels with Grass's The Tin Drum, though I liked An Ermine far more.

That really enough to say on the matter.  If one likes books from Mitteleuropa, then one must definitely explore von Rezzori's work.  It might be easier to ease into it, perhaps starting with The Snows Of Yesteryear.  After that, either Memoirs of an Anti-Semite or An Ermine in Czernopol.  I think one should leave what is often considered his magnum opus, The Death of My Brother Abel, for last.  And that's all I have to say on the subject (for now at any rate).

Writing for the desk drawer

This is a topic I raised quite a while ago when I was discussing authors and their last works.  No question there are a few books that are written and sort of forgotten or, perhaps more frequently, end up in someone else's hands. This can actually be a good thing as it might save a novel or novella from being destroyed (Malcolm Lowry's In Ballast to the White Sea, for example). Sometimes the publisher just holds onto it too long and it is forgotten. There are quite a few of these, but the most recent case I am aware of is José Saramago's Skylight, which I expect to get to one of these days.

In the West, writing for the desk drawer is basically a personal choice. Most of the time it is employed when the author simply doesn't feel the work is up to snuff, although there are probably a few cases where the author doesn't want to confuse the buying public if he or she already has a strong brand writing in a different style or genre. Still, this is what pseudonyms are designed for, although the secret virtually always gets out.

In the Soviet Union and other places with limited freedom of expression, the expression takes on a much more problematic dimension where authors, even those who had published extensively before, knew that certain stories and novels would run afoul of the censors, and, particularly under Stalin, might lead to exile to Siberia.  So they were only left in the desk drawers, though in fact, for some of the bolder authors, their works were circulated clandestinely as samizdat or were even smuggled abroad.  I'm not terribly well versed in the details of the times and generally don't know how which authors treated which works.  I believe Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita did circulate to some extent, as well as did Anatoly Rybakov's Children of the Arbat (which I have not read -- but some day should).  I wonder whether I would have had the courage/conviction to be an underground writer in Soviet Russia.  Perhaps but most likely not.

As it happens, three of the authors from my Russian list wrote for the desk drawer, though in at least two cases they even did submit some of their work periodically to the censors. Tsypkin seems to have been the only one who didn't try to publish his major fiction (Summer In Baden Baden) but he wrote scientific articles.  It was the anti-Semitism of the U.S.S.R. that really did him in.

Andrey Platonov was by far the most published of the three, and quite a few of his stories straddle the line of Soviet realism and more naturalistic modes uneasily.  He did eventually fall out of favor (with Stalin!) and it became all but impossible for him to place his stories, particularly when the avant garde journal that published him as well as Mayakovsky went under and/or was suppressed.*  He actually did submit Happy Moscow to the censors, but it is hard to imagine they would accept it, given that it depicts among other things a disaster while the Moscow Underground is being built.  In that sense, he may have been his "own worst enemy" to some extent, sending in material that would just put him further in the dog house.  I'll have more to say on this subject in an upcoming post.

Finally, Krzhizhanovsky seems to have submitted quite a few of his pieces to different journals without success, and he basically made his living as a lecturer on literature but wasn't published.  More than a few of his stories have quite negative portrayals of editors.  It wasn't clear to me when he gave up, but I wonder if he even tried to publish the novella "Memories of the Future," or if that was truly written for the desk drawer.  One sort of hopes for his own sake that it was the latter.  This is a story about a young man who is driven to understand time and builds a time machine.  He is immediately swamped with requests to take people back before 1917, so that they can cash out their now confiscated estates and send the money abroad to relatives (or perhaps they themselves would leave Russia, though that would set up a terrible time paradox).  Even as a pure fantasy, I can imagine the authorities would look upon this work extremely suspiciously.

I'd have to do additional research to go on at any greater length, so I think I'll stop there.  I have myself been taking a few steps to get my work back out of the desk drawer (as I definitely do not have such an excuse!), so I'll just have to keep chipping away at it.  

* The afterword to The Foundation Pit goes into the most detail about this, indicating that Platonov -- and Vassily Grossman -- seemed to fall out of favor when they were among the only writers/intellectuals that realized and would say anything about Stalin crushing the peasants in the later half of the 1920s.  This is covered directly in Grossman's Everything Flows (also on the NYRB imprint) and somewhat obliquely in Platonov's Soul and The Foundation Pit.

Newsflash - Jane Munro in Hamilton

So this is just a quick note to anyone who follows Canadian poetry and lives in or near Hamilton.  Jane Munro (whose recent collections I'll be reviewing over the next week or so) is reading in Hamilton tonight.

Details:

Thursday JANUARY 22 2015
Hamilton Poetry Centre
Jane Munro reads from Blue Sonoma
When: 7:30 pm until 9:00 pm
Venue: Bryan Prince Bookseller
Location: 1060 King Street West • Hamilton • Map

It appears she was on a poetry tour through Toronto last spring, but isn't reading in Toronto this time around.  Had I still been in Vancouver, there were a few opportunities to see her read in the fall, not that I am sure I would have taken advantage of them.