For Toronto cinephiles, it’s hard not to envy Quebeckers. La Belle Province is home to a robust and thriving film industry, and perennially turns out movies that are not only well received by critics, but well attended too. Indeed, it can be downright disheartening that a single province can consistently produce graceful, powerful movies like C.R.A.Z.Y. and Incendies, both of which hit that critic-audience sweet spot, while English Canada languishes with the likes of Score: A Hockey Musical. Monsieur Lazhar, which won Best Canadian Feature at TIFF last year and is nominated in the foreign language category at this year’s Oscars, is the latest Quebec flick to make us jealous.
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The Pick: Monsieur Lazhar, Quebec’s latest Oscar contender
The Pick: Love From Afar, a haunting tale of longing that occasionally masquerades as a circus act
Krisztina Szabó as the Pilgrim and Russell Braun floating above as Jaufré (Image: Michael Cooper)
To say the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Love From Afar has a lot going on would be a bit of an understatement. This particular take on Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s 2000 opera—about a medieval poet who falls in love with a faraway woman he’s never seen—was directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca, a Cirque du Soleil alum, and the result is like a less flashy, opera-fied version of the troupe’s Michael Jackson Immortal show. Before the singing even begins, a shimmering sheet of blue silk flies over the audience. Then there are the cartwheeling tumblers, the dazzling video projections, and Russell Braun hanging in a suspended throne that looks like Glinda’s bubble from Wicked. It’s almost enough to distract you from the music.
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The Pick: Revelations, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s gospel-tinged masterpiece
Kirven James Boyd and Rachael McLaren (Image: Andrew Eccles/Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater)
In photos, the dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater seem to never touch the ground. Their barely clad bodies, arched and flexed in graceful silhouette, float in suspension like nymphs, untethered from reality. In the flesh, however, their dancing is anything but ethereal—it’s percussive, muscular and totally tied up in the real world.
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The Pick: Tosca, the Canadian Opera Company’s sublimely soapy melodrama
Carlo Ventre as Cavaradossi clutches Adrianne Pieczonka as Tosca (Image: Michael Cooper)
Puccini’s Tosca has never been a critical favourite. The melodies are just too schmaltzy, argue its detractors, and the plot is too outlandish. Musicologist Joseph Kerman once called it a “shabby little shocker,” and Gustav Mahler walked out of the performance before it was over. But the famously soapy tale of a singer trapped in a torrid love triangle has always been a popular favourite, prompting gasps, titters and OMGs for over a century.
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The Pick: Mercer Union’s Diane Arbus retrospective, a glimpse at the birth of the modern magazine
Pierre Leguillon’s Diane Arbus retrospective as displayed at Malmö’s Moderna Museet (Image: Courtesy Mercer Union)
Diane Arbus was as much a voyeur as an artist, famously focusing her lens on the fringes of ’60s society—freaks, transvestites, mystics, bohemians. “You know how every mother worries that their baby will be a monster? Well, I think I got that on film,” she once said about one of her photographs, titled, with perfect deadpan, “Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx.” It’s that precise ambiguity—between intimacy and prying—that makes them as striking and unsettling today as they were half a century ago.
The Pick: Gary Hustwit’s Design Trilogy, three docs full of hot typefaces, beautiful objects and glorious city porn
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Gary Hustwit has a knack for taking seemingly mundane subject matter—an ubiquitous sans-serif typeface, for example, or a potato peeler—and using it as a lens for riveting sociological insight. We first fell for Hustwit’s delightfully nerdy brand of filmmaking in 2007 with Helvetica, his fascinating look at the passionate, pedantic world of typography. He followed that up with Objectified, a documentary on the equally specialized sphere of packaging and industrial design. This year, he completes the trilogy with Urbanized, which zooms out on city planning and infrastructure, and which will be screening along with its companion films this week at the Lightbox.
The Pick: Love Is a Poverty You Can Sell, a little bit of Weimar-era Kurt Weill at the Factory
(Images: courtesy Soup Can Theatre)
Contrary to what his legacy might suggest, Kurt Weill only dabbled in cabaret. Sure, he wrote a few tunes for the darkened German haunts, but mostly he focused on longer forms like opera and musical theatre. But Weill’s compositions, laced with despair, a wry wit and disenchantment, came to epitomize the sound of 1920s Weimar German cabaret for many in the West.
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The Pick: St. Vincent, an indie act that cuts through the preciousness
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Pop music has no shortage of ethereal female singer-songwriters, but none cut through the preciousness quite like St. Vincent’s Annie Clark, who performs this week at the Phoenix. Like her elfin counterparts, there’s something alien and inaccessible about her. Sometimes it feels like she’s on the other side of a wall, but her latest album plays on that faraway sound, burying images of tangible cruelty and grit within its layered orchestrations.
The Pick: Ride the Cyclone, the ghastly, wacky surprise hit of the season
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The best show in the city right now isn’t at the Princess of Wales or the Royal Alex, but in the cramped bowels of the Theatre Passe Muraille. Ride the Cyclone, an irreverent and buoyant musical from the relentlessly innovative Victoria troupe Atomic Vaudeville, has a small cast and minimalist sets. But through word of mouth and ecstatic reviews, this little show has become the hottest ticket in town—it sold out the entire second half of its run, meaning only a few people will be able to snag rush seats at this Saturday’s matinee.
The Pick: Lang Lang’s youthful fireworks with the Toronto Symphony
(Image: Philip Glaser)
The 29-year-old Chinese pianist Lang Lang has an unimpeachable image. He’s got perfectly sculpted spiky hair, lots of carefully draped scarves, a closet full of designer suits and a flair for the dramatic when he’s on the bench. With endorsement campaigns and sold-out arenas, he’s turned a classical performance career into a multi-million-dollar enterprise. Sometimes that works against him, obscuring the gifts that brought him such fame in the first place. But Lang Lang is the real deal, and Toronto audiences are being given the opportunity to hear his prodigious talent in a two-week residency with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
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The Pick: Billy Bishop Goes to War, a film adaptation of a stage classic
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For years, the closest thing Canada had to a hit musical was an idiosyncratic piece of theatre called Billy Bishop Goes to War. Since its debut in 1978, John Gray and Eric Peterson’s two-man show about the famed flying ace has been revived widely. Just in time for Remembrance Day, Barbara Willis-Sweete’s winning new film adaptation will be appearing on a pair of Toronto screens this week.
The Pick: The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s poignant AIDS drama revived
Jeff Miller and Jonathan Wilson in The Normal Heart (Image: John Karastamatis)
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart hit a lot of nerves when it premiered off Broadway in 1985. One of the first plays about the new and poorly understood HIV/AIDS epidemic, its fierce activist rhetoric polarized audiences, gay and straight—but everyone agreed on its indelible impact. Now, in a markedly different time, the play is currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity, first with a Tony Award–winning Broadway engagement earlier this year, and now in a moving new production at Buddies in Bad Times directed by Joel Greenberg.
The one thing you should see this week: a filmmaker who revels in his demons
This week’s pick: Guillermo del Toro at the TIFF Bell Lightbox
For psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim, fantasy and fairy tales are a necessary part of a child’s development, a way to symbolically vanquish death, abandonment and familial conflict. For filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who’s appearing this Thursday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, the obsession with monsters runs a little deeper. The demons that populate his world are welcome alternatives to the horrors of the known world, both an escape and a means of understanding humanity’s moral complexity.
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The one thing you should see this week: quintessential autumn music from a pair of twin sisters
This week’s pick: Tasseomancy’s album release for Ulalume at the Great Hall.
There’s an otherworldly quality to a lot Tasseomancy’s music. The baroque-folk duo, made up of twins Sari and Romy Lightman, took their name from a word for tea-leaf reading, and their latest album, Ulalume—launching this Thursday at the Great Hall—is appropriately rooted in mysticism.
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The one thing you should see this week: lush paintings that turn portraiture on its head (by cutting out the faces)
“Mulieribus Quinque” by Lauchie Reid (Image: Courtesy Narwhal Art Projects)
This week’s pick: Lauchie Reid’s The World Turned Upside Down at Narwhal Art Projects
Sure, the past century hasn’t exactly been kind to the sort of classic portraits with stately, poised subjects that populate dusty European wings in art galleries (something to do with the advent of photography). But in his new show at the Narwhal, Lauchie Reid (an OCAD grad and member of the art and illustration collective Team Macho) pays homage to the neglected form and adds his own ingenious twist.
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