Results tagged “michelesmith”

It was only a matter of time before someone did a clown show about the financial crisis. We always had the feeling the recession was actually the set-up for a really good joke, and SPENT, the new play created through the joint efforts of TheatreRUN, Why Not Theatre, and Theatre Smith-Gilmour, promises to deliver the punchline. It sounds like a good idea: the show is created and performed by Ravi Jain and Adam Paolozza, two of our favourite young theatre artists, with the assistance of Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour, two accomplished old hands at physical theatre. Yet somehow, even though this is a subject we would all surely love to be able to laugh about, SPENT doesn't quite give us the giggles we were looking for.

Alec Scott wrote a piece for this month's Toronto Life called "Flop Culture" that heavily criticizes the Canadian theatre scene. In the piece (which was strongly rebutted by Factory Theatre Artistic Director Ken Gass over at BlogTO), Scott notably snipes that if he has to "watch another mime-inspired adaptation of a Chekhov short story, [he] may spontaneously combust." This is almost certainly a dig at Theatre Smith-Gilmour, who have for almost a decade produced a series of... mime-inspired adaptations of Chekhov short stories (and usually to great critical acclaim). So, it's kind of amusing that the show they premiere the same month as this dig is the first non-Chekhovian work they have performed in this country since 1999's Chekhov's Shorts (last year, a work they created based on the writing of Lu Xun premiered in Shanghai, but it won't make it's debut here until 2009).