Go See Sizwe Banzi!

I'll keep this brief.  Soulpepper's current production of Sizwe Banzi is Dead is terrific!  Catch it if you can!

I saw the play many years ago in Chicago (2010!) in a more traditional staging (though possibly on a modified thrust stage), but this is done on a traverse stage with half the audience on each side.  It's a bit higher energy than the Chicago production, which is probably down to the youth of Amaka Umeh, the same actor who played Hamlet in the recent Stratford production (and Howland's The Wolves before that).  I wouldn't read up on the play too much (even the Soulpepper website has some unnecessary spoilers), but just accept that this is probably Athol Fugard's greatest play.  The play is mostly about the injustices of the passbook system under apartheid in South Africa.  This time around they are really highlighting the contributions of his two co-authors, as the whole play was built around their improvisations.  It is funny and frustrating at the same time, as the characters need to make impossible choices under a brutal, dehumanizing system.  Tomorrow's opening night is sold out, but there are plenty of other dates available here.  The play closes on June 18, though if it is a huge hit, they may add more dates. 

Daniel Brooks RIP

Always sad news when a member of the Canadian theatre family passes, particularly at such a relatively young age (64).

I wouldn't say this makes me rethink my decision to skip his staging of The Seagull over at Soulpepper, as I just had seen quite a bit of Chekhov this past season (Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya) and don't care for The Seagull all that much.*  I suppose it is bittersweet that he went out on a high note (with raves all around for this production), and of course I wish, more for his sake than mine, that he could have put on yet another production a bit more to my taste.

I don't think I saw any of the things he did with Daniel MacIvor.  (I haven't even seen that many things by MacIvor, though I did see Cake and Dirt at Tarragon and enjoyed that, but this was directed by someone else.  And then during COVID (I'm speaking as if it was actually over!) I saw a digital production of House.)  The only production of Brooks I know I saw was Soulpepper's Waiting for Godot back in 2017.  (I have to chuckle a bit, since my notes are that this was a decent production but only the third best I've seen...)  

If I can track down evidence I've seen more of his work, I'll go ahead and update this post.

* Also back in 2017, I saw a production of Aaron Posner's Stupid F*cking Bird here in Toronto, which is partly a reboot of The Seagull and partly a full-on parody.  Anyway, I thought it was great, and I would much rather watch this again than another straight-up production of The Seagull.  It seems like a lot of theatre companies are on the same wavelength!  Stupid F*cking Bird is being staged in Milwaukee in Sept., here in Ontario at Brock in late Oct., in Chicago** and San Francisco in Nov., in Victoria, BC in Dec., and in Ithaca, NY in March, 2024.  I'm almost certainly going to go see it at Brock (though hopefully not in a way that will conflict with Spirited Away), but I think one more time is probably enough!

** Another FOMO moment.  The Chicago company doing Posner also did Bulgakov's Zoyka's Apartment at the Athenaeum in 2016, and I would very much have wanted to go see this had I known about it.  Probably just as well that I don't scour the Chicago theatre listings on a regular basis!

Spring-Summer Theatre 2023

I'm finding my calendar is getting pretty booked up again, though more due to music concerts and movies than going to theatre.  Also, Toronto Doors Open is tomorrow and Sunday!  I'm trying to map out a few things, probably starting with St. Matthew's Church in Riverdale and ending with the Fisher Rare Book Library on Sat. after the Bach concert.  I'd like to get to Toronto-Dominion Centre, the Textile Museum and St. Lawrence Hall on Front St., but this would probably all have to be on Sunday morning.  And I just remembered that I also promised I would hit Word on the Street this weekend to stop by the Porcupine's Quill booth!  I wanted to see the Exploring Ecothriller panel on Sat. at 11, but it turns out the main draw for me (Andrew Sullivan) is a moderator not a panelist and probably won't be reading, so I think I'll skip that.  I am more likely to try to make the Trillium Book Award for Poetry session on Sunday from 11:30-12:30.  (I should have enough time to see that, get over to the booths to do some browsing and then still get back to Riverdale by 2, but it will still be tight.  I'll have to see if I can somehow squeeze in those remaining Doors Open venues in the various gaps either Sat. or Sun. ...)  Anyway, let me put down a few theatre things I am thinking of squeezing in soon.

First off, I'm actually kind of avoiding the Theatre Centre and the Assembly Theatre (unless they actually relaunch SFYS as promised) because the east-west streetcars have been messed up so much.  I'll rethink this decision when the next phase of the streetcar rerouting hits in 6-9 months.

Tarragon:
She's Not Special - this weekend only (and tonight is a Black Out Night event).  I'm probably going on Saturday evening.

Theatre Passe Muraille:
Into the Woods by Sondheim and Lapine - June 1 - June 11

Factory Theatre:
Armadillos - June 3 - 24

Soulpepper:
Sizwe Banzi is Dead  - May 26 - June 18

(I highly recommend this show.  I saw it in Chicago years ago.  I'm taking my son to see it on May 31.)

Canadian Stage:
Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night's Dream is going to be playing this summer in High Park.  I'm fairly ambivalent about going out to High Park to see plays there, as it is so incredibly uncomfortable on the stone stairs.  Also, I've seen Dream many, many times, and I would normally pass on this, but I am subscribing to Canadian Stage for the first time in years and supposedly am going to get a free ticket for Aug. 1.  If that's the case, I would probably go.

In one of my next posts, I am going to scope out some of the theatre events I want to see in the medium to long-term, but I may have to recover from this weekend first!

Sketching Out the Boston-NYC Trip

Had I booked everything a few weeks back, I probably would have made a few different choices.  Anyway, I am supposed to land in Boston around 10:30 on Thurs.  I'm assuming an hour or more to get off the plane and through customs.  I think I'll head over to the Gardner Museum first (it's supposed to be free for me) and then to the Museum of Fine Arts, which is open quite late on Thurs.  I haven't entirely decided whether to book tickets to Hokusai in advance or when I get there.   I'm leaning towards just getting the timed ticket when I get there, as my schedule is a bit unpredictable.  I've gone ahead and booked a night in a youth hostel(!), but everything else was crazy expensive.  I might have stayed somewhere nicer with free breakfast but I have to leave for the airport at close to 4 am, so there just isn't any point.  If it were allowed, I would probably just go to the airport and crash there.  I'm actually a bit annoyed that there are essentially no hotels near Logan, and at this time of day, I'll have to cab it.

Assuming I make my flight, I'll be in Newark early and will then head into Manhattan.  Friday will be the big day for museums.  I know that I want to see MOMA, the Met and the Sarah Sze exhibit at the Guggenheim.  Sometime in the late afternoon, I'll stop by the hotel and drop off my bag.  If there's time I might squeeze in something else. Then I head over to Brooklyn to see Love & Rockets.  I hope it is worth it.  I had hoped to stay in Brooklyn but there just is nothing in that general area.  Once I have to get back onto the subway, I might as well just stay in one place in Manhattan.

Sat. I am planning on watching Stoppard's Leopoldstadt and Some Like It Hot.  I probably can squeeze in a trip to the Whitney before one show and possibly the Frick or something like that between the shows. We'll see.  I had thought seriously about seeing the revival of Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, but the timing just isn't great.  Also I see that it is a 3 hour play(!), and I have so little patience for these overstuffed plays these days.  I did see that Chris Jones loved it when it played the Goodman, and I generally agree with his views, but others have been much harsher.  Anyway, it isn't worth changing my plans to stay another day.  If this production transfers to Toronto via Mirvish or some other company in Toronto tackles it, then I'll go see it.

Sunday, I head in to the Brooklyn Museum (in part to see It's Pablo-Matic), and then will spend some time with my cousin and his wife.  I haven't seen them in several years.  And then I'll probably just head back to the hotel to rest and make sure I head out in time to catch my flight on Monday.  This time it's at noon, so it will be a much less stressful experience.  I'm sure I'll enjoy myself (assuming I don't miss that early flight out of Logan!), but I wouldn't exactly call this a relaxing trip.  Anyway, I should finish booking a few more things tonight.

Super Grouchy

I'm generally pretty cranky and grouchy most days, but it's going to be a lot worse for the next month or so.  There are three primary reasons.  First, they are reconfiguring our space at work, and my team is being shuffled over into a different area.  While I am a "tethered" employee with a guaranteed space, my colleagues are not and are going to be tossed into the maelstrom of hot-desking.  It's pretty much guaranteed that I won't be sitting near any of the people on my team, and generally I'll be a lot less happy at work (and my happiness quotient there is already pretty low...). 

Second, I decided there was no way I could write all the broken sestinas I need (45-50) to make a unified project out of them, or at least by my self-imposed deadline.  I decided that I might be able to get up to 15 by May 31 (though even that will be a stretch) and combine them with my last draft of my second chapbook and send that off to Brick Books.  (This will be my first foray into submitting my creative writing work in some time, excepting the mini-scripts that go off to SFYS.)  But maybe this is for the best.  While some of the sestinas work better than others, perhaps a whole book of them would just be too much.  Anyway, I started typing up some of the ones I wrote while at various gigs at The Rex.  But I just realized that one of them is missing!  This was written back in mid-April when I was wrapping up a book review, and I wrote out a sestina on a separate piece of paper.  I'm such a packrat that it is almost impossible that I simply tossed the paper out (after I had typed up my book review), but it might still be another day or two before I can lay my hands on it.  So this makes me pretty grouchy, and I'll either find it tonight (and have one less thing to be grouchy about) or I will give up the search and be quite livid indeed.

Finally, I have been trying to lose weight in a somewhat passive way for a while.  I've pretty much stabilized my exercise routine to 2 evenings/week at the gym and swimming on Tuesday or Thursday (and I'll be swimming tonight).  On top of biking to work or somewhere downtown 4-6 times/week.  So my minutes of vigorous exercise are way above the recommended level, and I can't quite imagine how heavy I would be without this exercise.  But the real issue is I don't sleep enough and I get hungry and snack at night.  Throughout my late 30s I was probably eating essentially 4 times a day -- and the body gets used to that and packs on the pounds.  My eating habits are a bit better now, but not quite where they should be.  The only time I have been able to lose weight was when I started skipping a meal, typically breakfast.  (This was pre-COVID days.)  I'm going to try that again and see how it goes this time around (despite my stress levels being elevated).  It will get easier around the 2 month mark, but I am going to be super cranky the first month.  Not really looking forward to this change, but hopefully I'll get down off of the weight plateau I'm at right now.

To feel slightly better, I did just make a few donations to the Star's Fresh Air Fund and some other charities, but I'm still pretty glum overall.  That's really all I have to say at the moment.

Update: It looks like I tracked down the missing sestina.  It was in a notebook and not on a loose piece of paper, which is a surprise, as that isn't quite how I remember it.  What was a bigger surprise is that I have two complete sestinas in the notebook, and that I don't remember at all but is good news (assuming I still like them on second reading...).  So I guess I can only grouse and gripe about work and dieting.

Actually one other small positive thing just came up (and I probably should try to dwell a bit more on the positive than the negative).  I never did get around to booking the other parts of my NYC trip (which I really have to do tonight!) and then I learned that Love and Rockets has apparently decided to tour again -- and they will be in Brooklyn on the Friday I am in NYC!  Since I haven't booked anything for that evening, I can see if there are still tickets (and just possibly stay overnight in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan).  I'll have to see if it all comes together (and doesn't cost an arm and a leg), but this might be a pretty cool update to my plans.  It actually reminds me a bit of one of the first Camper Van Beethoven reunion shows I managed to see in New York on a business trip through a combination of serendipity and some grifting...

Victoria Day Outing

I tried pretty hard to make this a busy Victoria Day.  I started out at the gym.  It was supposed to close at 1 pm, but then they announced they needed everyone out by 12:30 to close at 1.  I get where they are coming from, but this definitely should have been communicated better.  I would have turned up a bit sooner.  In the end, I got in a reasonable workout but I would have liked another 10 minutes (and not have felt so rushed at the end...).  I also managed to get my hair cut.

I had decided a while back that I would watch Fellini's Amarcord at The Revue on Roncesvalles.  I don't think I've ever watched a movie there.  There was another 2nd run movie theatre I went to on Bloor (west of what is now Hot Docs, though I don't think it was the Paradise) in the 90s.  But I surely didn't go all the way to Roncesvalles. 

I had sort of hoped to combine this with a trip to MOCA, but only one of three exhibits is actually open.  The other two open next week, but I might as well try to make it on June 4, when MOCA will be free.  Since I wasn't going to be biking over to MOCA, then it made more sense to just take the TTC (even though I have been avoiding it), since Amarcord was going to end pretty late and the drivers out that way aren't great to say the least.

Anyway, the Powerplant hasn't reopened with its next set of shows, and the Textile Museum was also closed.  I'll probably go to the AGO next weekend.  In the end, I decided to go to the first set over at The Rex (Tim Posgate on banjo!) and then mosey on over to The Revue.  The first Queen streetcar was short turned, and the next one was quite delayed.  I thought I was going to miss the opening of the movie,* though ultimately I did make it with 10 minutes to spare.  (Unlike the total mess the TTC has made of the Gerrard/Carlton streetcar causing me to miss Shakespeare Bash'd staged reading of The Revenger's Tragedy -- I'm still pretty pissed over that.  If it hadn't just been pouring out, I wouldn't have been in the position of depending on the TTC when in most cases it is just thoroughly unreliable.)

Amarcord was pretty incredible.  Maybe not as "significant" as La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2, but certainly funnier and warmer than either.  I'm glad I made the trek out to see it, but in general getting over to Roncesvalles in too much of a pain, and I'm not going to make a habit of it!

I didn't get quite as much reading or writing done as I would have liked, but overall it was a pretty good day.

* I actually was 5 minutes late to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, but this meant that I slipped in just as the last preview was starting.  Still, I cut it much, much closer than I would have liked.  I guess I am going to the movies a lot more often than I have in years.  I'm sort of looking forward to Wes Anderson's Asteroid City (mid-June) and the new Indiana Jones movie (late June).  There is actually a new Studio Ghibli film called How Do You Live? coming out in mid July, but no word yet on whether there will be a US/Canada release.

Recent Adjustments to the Reading List

As I just mentioned in the last post, I will bump up Faulkner's The Wild Palms though I still don't imagine I'll get to it before the fall.  In honor of his passing, I will probably add Martin Amis's Time's Arrow and move it up to hit over the summer.  It's a relatively short novel, so that helps.  I was also considering adding The Information, though some consider it part of the "London Trilogy" with Money and London Fields.  I was definitely considering tackling those again, but that would be more of a 2024 or even 2025 venture, so that's when I will read The Information.  (It's not a full review, but I do talk a bit about Other People in this ancient post.)

I don't often read works in the proper months.  So I read George Lamming and Sam Selvon too early, i.e. not in Feb.  I'm not sure how much Asian fiction I'll get to in May, though I have been reading a fair bit of Evelyn Lau's poetry recently.*  There is a small chance I'll wrap up Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March in time, and I'll at least start in on All About H. Hatterr in May, but it is hard to say.  I did request Murakami's latest collection of short stories, First Person Singular, from the library, and I should be able to start in on that as well. 

I actually need to finish booking some things tomorrow for my upcoming trip to NYC, but I have spent some time thinking over what books to bring on the trip.  My ideal books are ones that I think I'll enjoy but could part with at the airport...  I'm leaning toward taking Shields's Larry's Party and Hamsun's Mysteries and maybe Shamsie's Home Fire.

Edit (6/12): I actually managed to get through all 3 books on the trip, on top of wandering through museums for hours and catching a play and a musical!  I didn't much care for Hamsun's Mysteries for reasons I may get into at some point.

* There is quite an interesting tangent here, but I think I'll hold off until I review her recent collection, Cactus Gardens.