Openings We're Tracking This Week, May 13-19, 2013

(screencap via Ecce Homo/Vimeo)

There is no pop icon who has been so adored, so reviled, so popular or so imitated since the early days of Madonna. And, like Madonna, Lady Gaga knows about image and - and this is important - how to ride the ebbs and flows of popularity while, paradoxically, maintaining a strict control over this seeming lack of control. Ecce Homo, in Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, intends to explore - in a cabaret setting - this phenomenon who has not only inserted herself in the collective consciousness but has become an icon for artists far more "serious". Moreover, the show looks like a blast! (Toronto)

The bedroom farce to end all bedroom farces has to, almost by definition, be written by Georges Feydeau and you can't go too wrong if the one of his you choose to see is A Flea In Her Ear. Lordie, it's all there: slamming doors, mistaken identity, philandering husbands, drunken porters, wise (and sly) wives and - the jewel of this one, especially - a dental prothesis that keeps flying out at the worst moments. This is a play that works so well no film version has ever been successful. It's a case of: you simply have to be there. (Kanata, Ontario)

"When I was in Grade Ten, I met my first boyfriend. His name was Pete, but everyone called him Pissy. Pissy Szkaluba. That's where I got my last name from. He was young, he was dumb-looking like me, he was from a God-fearing family, and I figured he might be worth a go. So at one of the school dances in late April, when we're all smoking with lust, I hung around him, begging him to notice me, till we both ended up outside behind the gym. And when Pissy thrust his hand up my blouse with the smell of beer on his hot breath and planted his lips on mine...well I fluttered, and I felt that joy, that ecstasy that's available to anyone no matter how ugly or poor or stupid you are. I released myself to the ecstacy of Pissy Szkaluba and let him have me right then and there."  Thus begins the grief and surprising redemption of Marg Szklaluba (Pissy's Wife). Beyond the crackling dark humour of the central character of the Ron Chambers play is a voice...a singing voice. The wondrous actor/chanteuse Carolyn Fe performs, playwright/actor/teacher/translator Lib Spry directs. (Montreal)