kingrat

I saw Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street tonight at the 5th Avenue Theatre. Musicals are kind of hit and miss for me. A lot of the 5th Ave musicals lately have merely taken pop or rock music, converted it to a Broadway sound, and woven into it some love story or come-from-behind tale of overcoming the odds. This year's entrant in that genre is a musical version of The Wedding Singer. (Anyone interested in those tickets? I got two I need to unload.)

Anyway, Sweeney Todd is a Steven Sondheim musical about revenge. The 5th Ave made it somewhat bawdy as well. I really liked it. It was fun and different. There just aren't enough musical pieces about cannibalism. Not even Rocky has a song about the cannibalism.

Last night I picked Deborah up and we saw The Tricky Part at the Intiman Theatre. I really enjoyed the show. If you've read the Intiman's page on the show, it says that it offers no balm and presents the issue as complex. They're right. Really, the play is about how Moran has carried an inner child that is still 12 years old for many years and in confronting his abuser a couple of years ago, he realized that he held no anger toward the man. He was angry at himself for letting himself be frozen at this point when the abuse started. Or something like that. The abuse isn't whitewashed. It's presented as something ugly, that pushed him to think of himself as that 12 year old and to return to his abuser to feel free. The play neither lifted me up, nor did it drag me down. It was more exposition than mood-altering. Although Moran does infuse humor and jokes (mostly of the shared Catholic experience variety) throughout the first 2/3 of the play. Also, I should mention that this is not an anti-Catholic play. I was somewhat afraid it would be another version of how Catholicism screwed up that I hear often from people, none of whom have been abused by the Catholic church, to my knowledge. So here's a guy who was abused, not by a priest, though it was by an erstwhile Catholic boys camp counselor, but the abuse happened unconnected to anything church related. Even then, many seem to find ways to blame Catholicism. Moran doesn't. He blames no one, except his abuser.

I went and saw Poochwater at Theatre Passe Muraille. Damn funny play. A war vet attempts to return a wallet, finds the wallet owner not home, and breaks a picture in the process of putting the wallet into the apartment. So he sits down to write a note of apology, but can't remember what his name is to sign. The rest of the play is him trying to figure out who he is, with the help of an apartment dweller who puts him under citizen arrest when he finds him in the flat.

The theater is in the Queen Street West neighborhood of Toronto. Or something like that. It's a couple miles of Broadway essentially. Quite cool actually. A little more run down than Broadway though.