Openings We're Tracking The Week, May 28 - June 3, 2012

Seana McKenna in The Matchmaker (photo credit: On The Run)

Stratford is going to tackle The Matchmaker. You know Thornton Wilder's play even if you don't think you do. Yonkers, a woman who sets people up, a day and night on the town for some working stiffs and their girls, and a stuffy gent looking for a match himself. Of course, it's Hello Dolly! without the music but it is also a wondrous, lovely, funny play with a role tailor-made for the magnificent Seana McKenna. Also opening at Straford: The Pirates of Penzance - Gilbert and Sullivan and steampunk. Whoa!

FTA continues with the cursed jewel of the fest, Romeo Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God. Cursed? Well, the production - coming from Europe - was the centre of a firestorm in Paris with the Catholic Church going ballistic and pickets, disruptions of performances, death-threats and bomb-scares about one image in the piece: rocks being thrown at a projected portrait of Christ. (The subsequent stop of the production in London was considerably less hysterical...) (Montreal)

And now for something completely different: Not Now, Darling, Ray Cooney and John Chapman's iconic sex farce has a run by the Curtain Club Theatre. Slamming doors, scantily clad ladies, wives on the warpath...you know the drill. (Richmond Hill)