Welcome to the free edition of Long Play! What you’ve missed recently if you’re not a subscriber: Is Rawi Hage the last macho voice in CanLit? Come for immigrant alienation, stay for everybody’s favourite cuddly philosopher Martin Heidegger, who may or may not have spent his last days in the wilds of Quebec.
December in Arts:
Theatre
December 7-18: Entrances and Exits: Home for the Holiday at the Tarragon Theatre/The Howland Company. A holiday-themed improv on a loosely structured script. Colin Mochrie guest stars Dec 7-11.
December 9-18: Miriam’s World by Naomi Jaye is based on Martha Baillie’s The Incident Report, a novel that tells the story of a library worker in 140 succinct incident reports. I had no idea librarians file these daily and have to deal with er let’s say problematic patrons as much as the TTC workers. I liked the book when it came out and this looks promising too.
December 13-16: This Moby Dick in the manner of Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina – but actually by the Franco-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire – looks intriguing.
To December 18: Ronnie Burkett’s naughty puppets are back. What are their stories going to be like in the age of cancel culture? I am hoping not too safe. His previous production, Forget Me Not, which required audience participation, was about the “New Now” where written language is forbidden and an underground guerrilla of letter writers was on the rise. If you stretch it a bit, that could have been about free speech? At least in some way? The Little Dickens at Canadian Stage sounds much less risky, but you never know with Burkett’s puppets.
Film
From December 9: Joanna Hogg’s shtick is to produce one masterpiece after another, isn’t it? ALL of her films are exceptional, things have gotten a little weird. What kind of pact with the devil did she sign? Her latest will be screening at Tiff from Dec 9 and it has the character played by Tilda Swinton trying to spend some quality time with her elderly mother in an isolated, haunted hotel. I’ll be there on first night.
From December 23: “If we liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are”. This must be the most heart-stirring utterance from the trailer for Women Talking, directed by Sarah Polley, based on the Miriam Toews novel. The film is set in a rural Mennonite community in the US, but anybody who’s lived in an intensely patriarchal place will recognize these faces. This seems to me to be about the women of rural Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, or Eastern Europe, or anywhere highly religious or single-ethnic in North America. The storyline is literally a group of women talking—a consciousness-raising group, if you will—about the series of sexual assaults they experienced by their men. If they fight it, it will blow the community, the life as they know it, apart. This coming-into-consciousness, this sapere aude! is the most exciting moment in the political history of human consciousness, though.
Music
Well of course it’s the month of The Messiahs. I may be an (Orthodox-origin) atheist but I’m also a huge fan of this overperformed Handel gem and I won’t hear a word against it. I wish we would stop getting up during Halleluja! though. It was the chorus during which King George jumped to his feet and the audience followed, or so the lore goes, but listen guys, it’s been a couple of centuries since 1740s, and can we just sit down and relax.
Unless it’s the Sing-along Messiah in which case, there’ll be a lot of getting up for the choruses. OH WAIT. There’ll be no Sing-along Messiah this year from Tafelmusik. Has Ivars Taurins retired the wig and the breeches? It appears to be the case. There’ll be sing-alongs elsewhere in Canada, my internet search reveals, but not in Toronto. The period instruments The Messiah by Tafelmusik is December 16-17 and its chief attraction is Karina Gauvin.
The TSO and the Mendelssohn Choir will perform theirs over five nights this year, Dec 17-21. This will be a bigger, louder, fireworks-y The Messiah, with a mezzo rather than a counter-tenor (yay).
If you prefer your Messiah in a church, Elmer Iseler Singers with Viva Singers have just the thing for you at Yorkminster Baptist in North Toronto this Friday, December 9.
And now introducing a new thing:
Short reviews for busy people
The Birds
The Birds by Emily Dix continues till December 10 at the Hart House Theatre. Whereas the blurb may get your hopes up — post-Covid paranoia! Du Maurier! Hitchcock! —Dix’s retro play has practically nothing to do with Daphne Du Maurier’s terrifying short story, nor is it in any way a riff on the Hitchcock/Tippi Hedren film. It starts by appearing to be about an American family (that cruelly under-represented demographic in global cultures) and its inter-sibling drama, and it drags over a series of incidents into a whodunit where you need to figure out who the Michael Myers is in this particular household. It’s set in mid last century so the protagonist could wear the Mad Men era clothes? Pointless.
This is How You Lose Her
Coming late to Junot Diaz, but I am absolutely loving every bit of this. Whether he is “mimetically exacerbating” machismo in order to expose its inner workings or just writing some incredibly fun male-centered prose – it doesn’t matter. This is muscular, fast, high on testosterone, irreverent, working class, immigrant, filled with Hispanic slang and slurs of endearment, while also having a big big heart. His female narrators are equally a blast. In the cancelled words of Alex Perez, If you’re out there, Junot, come back!