After Dark, July 31, 2012

Evolution
CharPo is not what I planned
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

This week is the first anniversary of our podcast, This Is The CPC. In a month it will be the first anniversary of The Charlebois Post - Canada. In four months The Charlebois Post - Montreal hits two years old. The Charlebois Post - Toronto is a month old and already a huge success. CharPo-Alberta and CharPo-Atlantic Canada are being beta tested and we are examining the feasibility of a CharPo-BC. We have launched a new award aimed at publicists called the CharPR Prize (pronounced "sharper") and are looking into creating an electronic publishing house: CharPoFolio. All this while jumping through hoops towards incorporation.

What the hell am I doing?! How did this happen?!

As I have said before, CharPo Montreal was begun as a response to the lessening coverage of English-language theatre in Montreal (two English-language arts weeklies have died since). It was a simple little blog I went ahead with together with Editor-in-Chief Estelle Rosen.

Openings We're Tracking This Week, July 30 - August 5, 2012

Kristin Galer from Little Shop

The Sunday Read: Ian Farthing on The St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival

THE ST. LAWRENCE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL – the little Festival that could!

Ten years on

by Ian Farthing

If you’d said to me 10 years ago that I was going to be the artistic director of a successful outdoor Shakespeare Festival in small town Eastern Ontario, I would have just laughed in your face. At that time I had never even set foot in Ontario, was a total city boy and had not even had the opportunity to work on a Shakespeare production professionally. Shakespeare? In Prescott? Ha!

But one day a friend called me up from the UK to say that a mutual friend of ours was directing a show in Canada and I should audition. Being a Brit, she had no idea that travelling from my home in Vancouver to Toronto was almost as far (and certainly almost as expensive) as going back to the UK. Long story short, I ended up going for the audition, landing the gig and spending my first summer working at the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival in Prescott, ON. 

The Abominable Showman, July 29, 2012

Montreal’s historic Le 456 Sauna (formerly The Neptune Sauna) closed in November 2011 after 33 years of non-stop service around-the-clock

Hello Montreal!

Bugs explores why a Montreal remount of the campy play Bathhouse: The Musical is a good fit in a notorious city that even global drag icon RuPaul says is absolutely drenched in sex…

By Richard Burnett

There is a famous saying about Montreal: “Good boys and girls go to heaven, bad boys and girls go to Montreal.”

If you think Montreal’s a good-time city today, you should’ve seen her back during her Sin City golden era, when she was home to some of the hottest jazz nightclubs on the planet and a wide-open scene fueled by Prohibition stateside. 

So the thirsty came to Montreal from all over the continent: gamblers, racketeers and the world’s most famous entertainers, everybody from Louis Armstrong to Frank Sinatra, who held court at the Chez Paree nightclub. The city ranked behind only New York City and ahead of Chicago on the vaudeville circuit, and even Al Capone opened a club here (it still stands today as the Lion d’Or). There were also the over 100 brothels along Ste-Catherine Street between Bleury and Berri streets, in the historic red-light district.

Tour Whore, July 29, 2012

Hard Times - Strap in and get out the tarp
by Cameryn Moore


First of all, I should say that Winnipeg Fringe is not a bad Fringe, objectively. I would not have kept applying to get in over the past two years if it was a bad Fringe. In 2010 and 2011 I made decent money here, sold out at least one show each Fringe, and oh my god, for a loudmouthed flirt like myself, the line-ups here are HEAVEN.

But this year in Winnipeg has been hard for me. And while I don’t think I’ve been all sweetness and light up until now, I haven’t had a Fringe like this in a long time, if ever, in terms of grinding me down. So in the interest of giving y’all a full-spectrum sense of the touring life, I’m gonna share. Strap in and get out the tarp.

Review: Unenlightened (Winnipeg Fringe)

by Edgar Governo


Sometimes, a performance suffers most from the timing of when a person sees it. I saw this show the day after seeing TJ Dawe's Medicine, and the two face opposite problems despite dealing with what seems to be extremely similar subject matter.

Both shows ostensibly tackle the same premise: an autobiographical tale in which the author/performer, unsatisfied with some aspect(s) of their own life, seeks help from a shamanic retreat at a remote location to learn more about their true selves. Right away, those specific parallels predisposed me to compare Elizabeth Blue's work to Dawe's, even though the two were no doubt created independently and that type of comparison can be inherently unfair. Unfortunately for Blue, such a comparison also reveals how much more polished a performer Dawe can be, despite my reservations about his work (discussed in more detail in my review of his show).

Review: Dirty Fairy Tales (Winnipeg Fringe)

by Edgar Governo


Notions like "the fourth wall" and "suspension of disbelief" seem entirely out of place when talking about any Sound & Fury performance. (It's tough to maintain that "once upon a time" feeling when a tablet at the front of the stage is counting down how many seconds the troupe has left in the show.) This trio just wants to have fun at the theatre—tell some cheesy jokes, dress up in silly costumes, and banter with the audience.