Looking out onto Yonge Street
On the opening night at The Burger’s Priest’s eagerly anticipated second location at Yonge and Lawrence, owner Shant Mardirosian had butterflies in his stomach. “I was sweating buckets,” says the man behind what many consider to be Toronto’s best burger. But when the doors finally swung open, the eager crowd outside burst into a spontaneous cheer, leaving Mardirosian at a loss for words. “It was insanity. It brought a tear to my eye, to be honest. I’m blown away by what’s going on.”
Read the rest of this entry »
It took an old chestnut—a raisin, actually—for Toronto theatregoers to appreciate Cara Ricketts’ ability to breathe new life into familiar roles. In Soulpepper’s A Raisin in the Sun (2008), she embodied both the all-American youthful ambition and sexuality of Beneatha, a young medical school–bound woman in 1950s Chicago, and the aching realities of the mid-century black middle class. It was a breakthrough performance for the North York native, who had already made an impression on the fringe. In 2005, after graduating from the theatre performance program at Humber College, she brought poetry to the role of Peggy Sue, an embattled woman caught between two men in Joseph Jomo Pierre’s Born Ready, a lyrical look at Toronto ghetto life. This summer, after two years in essential-to-the-plot but non-leading roles at Stratford, the 28-year-old takes centre stage alongside such heavyweights as Stephen Ouimette and Brian Dennehy in Jennifer Tarver’s production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. She plays Ruth, the American wife of a British academic, whose visit to her husband’s male-dominated homestead awakens the horny beast among siblings and father alike. Though Ruth switches emotional and sexual alliances throughout the play, the balance of power remains firmly in her hands—she is both an object of desire and, in a characteristically Pinteresque gesture, a mythical female figure in a world of men. It’s ideal material for the wide-ranging Ricketts, whose emotional intelligence as a performer conjures up so much more than the physical world of her characters.
Rob Ford won the 2010 election with 47 per cent of the vote, and has since entered a nice stretch of political honeymoon, where he’s eliminated the Vehicle Registration Tax, blown up Transit City and frozen the city’s property taxes. So how do people like him? According to a 
Follow Toronto Life on Twitter, Facebook and via RSS