Friday, March 8, 2019

Looking Ahead (Theatre Summer-Fall 2019)

I actually have only a relatively few things on my plate after April.

I will say that the amazing performances I saw in Kiss of the Spider Woman does make me more likely to check out Copenhagen at Soulpepper this April.  (Kawa Ada is also in Copenhagen as Werner Heisenberg.)

I've decided to skip Shaw completely, and I am very much on the fence regarding Henry VIII at Stratford, though perhaps in the end I'll go.

I guess this is quite short notice, all things considered, but Miller's After the Fall will be going up in Buffalo starting March 21 for about 3 weeks.  I've seen this in Chicago and would probably see it in Toronto, but am not sure I would/will travel to Buffalo for it.  The Miller play I really want to see is A View from the Bridge, as it is the last major play of his I've never seen.  Now this actually popped up in Buffalo a year or two ago, but I had really strong reservations about the staging and the director's "concept" for the piece, so I decided against it.

Death of a Salesman shows up for a one weekend run in Toronto in June.  I'll likely go see this again, and am mostly debating whether to take my son.

Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie shows up at Bloor West Village Theatre in September.  I've generally not been very impressed with Bloor West, though this is a play that's relatively hard to mess up if played straight (there was some crazy inversion of the play at Theatre Centre that I'm so glad I missed), and I might take my son, as it is a pretty good entry point into Williams's work.  I'm sure I'm just been too snobbish about it, but I generally think that it is just too "easy" to program the major Williams plays (Menagerie, Tin Roof, Streetcar) at a major theatre and this should be left to the storefront theatres.  I just think that Soulpepper should be more ambitious and should program something more obscure than Streetcar Named Desire, so I am going to pass on it next season.

I've been generally unimpressed with the 2019-20 season announcements I've seen so far, so it may be that I do see less theatre next season, but hopefully some interesting things will pop up.

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