We need to educate our boys to know real beauty, to go beneath the paint and powder and look at features, the shape of the face, the poise of the head. We ought to teach them to know real beauty like a horse man knows a thoroughbred.
When a woman has a beautiful face and figure, she is sure to be healthy and intelligent. Beautiful figures are becoming obsolete to-day and a real beauty is as rare as genius. There is only one beautiful woman in every four thousand.
The very slim, boyish figure, so much desired by the girls of to-day who are willing to suffer endless dieting, is not beautiful. The trouble is that fathers and mothers have tried to make their offspring look for other qualities first and to leave beauty alone, till, simply from ignorance, the saying ‘Beautiful but Dumb’ has sprung up and persisted.”
Another failing is that the beautiful young women of this generation do not desire to become mothers and it is largely the biologically unfit who are having children.”
Eve Wylden stars in Miss Toronto gets a Life_in Parkdale, an exciting site-specific multi-media performance on hijacking the history of beauty pageants in Toronto.
Presented by The DitchWitch Brigade, Miss Toronto gets a Life in Parkdale previews July 20 and runs July 21-25 @ 8 p.m. at The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen Street West.
Previous Praxis parties have been full of interesting people and occasionally Artistic Directors impersonating each other with unconvincing disguises. Doors at 6:30, first set by the band around 8, we’re there till midnight.
Over the past four years, The Best of Fringe has provided extended runs to some of the biggest hits from the Toronto Fringe Festival and returned nearly $50,000 in box office revenue to Fringe Festival Artists. All shows are at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre.
A Freudian Slip of the Jung
By Sean Fisher
Wednesday, July 14th at 9pm and Thursday, July 15th at 7pm
Fairy Tale Ending
Music and Lyrics by Kieren MacMillan & Jeremy Hutton, Book by Jeremy Hutton
Saturday, July 17th at 5pm and Saturday July 24th at 5pm
Oy! Just Beat It!
by Anita Majumdar
Wednesday, July 21th at 9pm and Thursday, July 22th at 7pm and Friday, July 23rd at 7pm
Short Story Long
By Joel Fishbane
Wednesday, July 14th at 7pm, Friday July 16th at 9pm and Saturday July 17th at 7pm
Sia
By Matthew MacKenzie
Wednesday, July 21st at 7pm, Thursday July 22nd at 9pm and Saturday July 24th at 7pm
[sic]
By Melissa James Gibson
Thursday, July 15th at 9pm, Friday July 16th at 7pm and Saturday July 17th at 9pm
Silent City
By Stagehands
Friday, July 23rd at 9pm and Saturday July 24th at 9pm
We’d love to see you there so open up your iCal, or get out your Daytimer, or whatever it is that you do when you decide to go to a place at a certain time – and write us in. We’ll be there from right after work, till late in the night.
All proceeds go to the ongoing development of Section 98. Exciting new details to be released on this show soon!
A reading of Birgit Schreyer Duarte and Jacob Zimmer’s new translation of Life of Galileo at the Festival of Ideas and Creation presented last week by Canadian Stage.
by Leora Morris
I don’t think the text is the only thing that will make the public reading of Life of Galileo on Sunday night clear, funny, and moving. It’s also the spirit of the project, the impetus for the coming together. In the past week I have witnessed the preparation of a remarkable cast, meeting with the dual focus of reading this new translation of Life of Galileo and thanking a fellow artist.
Part of the impetus for the event was to hear Tracy Wright, a pioneer in the Canadian independent theatre scene, read the character of Galileo among an all-star cast of friends and colleagues. This has shifted slightly in the last few days: Tracy is currently recovering from surgery and so the reading is now in thanks to her. We are aiming to Skype the live performance to her.
A thank you in the form of a Brecht play.
I enjoy this concept because – although we celebrate and thank people all the time with awards ceremonies, money, booze, love poetry, pictures, and song dedications – we don’t often gift people with theatre. A staged reading feels somehow more fitting as a “thank you” than a full production: it is both an incredibly high-calibre professional performance AND a reminder of why it is happening in the first place.
My favourite moment of our read through recently at Canadian Stage was in the middle of Scene 6, when Daniel MacIvor (as Cardinal Barberini) poked Fiona Highet (as Galileo Galilei) in the side and they broke out into laughter. What a treat to see both the characters at work and the old friends at play underneath them. In fact, that is where the thank you is located, in watching all these actors (many of whom Tracy has inspired) take pleasure in each other and the script.
I suspect this layering works because readings permit a certain amount of personal style that isn’t necessarily valued in a fully staged production (when I prefer to watch a person be subsumed by their character, no trace of them in sight). Brecht would have liked it too, I think.
Join Small Wooden Shoe, and a huge cast of performers in giving thanks to Tracy Wright at Convocation Hall at University of Toronto on Sunday May 30th at 7pm. All proceeds from this evening of community theatre by professionals goes to The Actors’ Fund of Canada. Details here.
Leora Morris is Associate Producer on the project.
Laura Nordin (pictured with co-star Carlos Gonzalez-Vio) stars in the Theatre Cipher production of Agamemnon at the Church Hall of Christ the Saviour Cathedral (823 Manning — three blocks north of Bloor between Bathurst and Christie) Wednesday through Sunday at 8 PM, between MAY 22 and JUNE 5. Tickets are $10 – $20 and can be purchased here.
Totally tacky…Kelly Straughan and Melissa Jane Shaw cornered Factory Theatre Artistic Director KG (Ken Gass) at the opening night party of Featuring Lorettaand began an impromptu audition.
KG was totally unimpressed. Good thing the Seventh Stage production of 9 Parts of Desire looks like it will be a hit…
“If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighbourhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do. Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. but the unformalized feeders of the arts – studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and arts supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions – these go into old buildings. Perhaps more significant, hundreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the safety and public life of streets and neighbourhoods and appreciated for their convenience and personal quality, can make out successfully in old buildings, but are inexorably slain by the high overhead of new construction.
As for really new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”
The Tale of a Town runs May 1st -16th and BEGINS AT: Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Avenue and ENDS AT: the SCAR MFC Theatre, 609 Queen Street West, Toronto.
“After the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations, we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.”
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