Openings We're Tracking This Week, November 14-20, 2011

Adam Charles and Shane Snow in the Arts Club Theatre Company’s production 

of Blood Brothers. Photo by David Cooper.

Soheil (l) and Farbridge

It appears to be guy week at CharPo with pairs of gents marking the stages across the land. First off: It's been everywhere and while Blood Brothers is not the mega-success of a Rent, say, or a Cats, it definitely hits the people who see it hard and it has, as a result, become a cult musical with an awfully big cult. By Willy (Shirley Valentine) Russell, it tells of brothers separated at birth.

Two more guys seem to be taking over at Buddies in Bad Times with Hallaj - the guys are writer/director/writer team Soheil Parsa and Peter Farbridge of the acclaimed Modern Times Stage Company. The works of a 10th Century sufi mystic, Mansur e-Hallaj, are used to throw light on the current situation in the Middle East.

Two guys - small parts of a great work - pop up on another stage and croak. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead will either be a revelation to you or, to those who know the work, seem a piece that has not aged all that well. What makes this production interesting is the energy that a young cast - Mt. Royal U. in Calgary - might bring to the piece. This was the play that screamed to the world that Tom Stoppard had arrived and is full of the turns of phrase, deconstruction of plot and whimsey that Stoppard made his hallmarks. It's Hamlet, but not.