Hi All
Toronto in November! It's only the start of winter and it's crisp and clear (-2 already)...and I'm soooo delighted we were here for the last days of a spectacular fall season: the trees were exploding with color (I haven't seen a real fall for years) and we spent halloween with our two year old niece watching her hand out candy to witches and goblins of various sizes and ages... My Brother in Law (a film FX guy) had glued a third hand to the middle of his chest and painted a bullet hole on the middle of his wife's forehead: much to the delight of the trick or treaters... We finished the evening with the gory family watching a cozy screening of 'The Bride of Dracula'
Lisa and I are just settling down in TO after a fun filled week in Sarnia, Ontario..... OK.. it wasn't our first choice to spend a week in this particular small town, but this was the '06 site of the Ontario Theatre Conference - so we went where they were.. Lisa joined me straight from a mini tour of western Canada. She had done readings at Calgary Wordfest Literary Festival, then hung out for a few days being 'creative' at the Banff Centre and then met up with her agent in Vancouver. We threw ourselves on the 401 highway and headed west to spend our time schmoozing...
The theatre conference is a gathering of all the independent theatre bookers in Ontario looking for acts for the 07 - 08 season. I've been curious what these events are like and if I could make the move out of festivals and into regular theatre seasons with Whiskey Bars: the Kurt Weill show I've been doing for years. We were picked by the conference jury to present Whiskey Bars in performance and it went well... we ended up opening the showcases at the conference, and I was delighted to be told later by one of the jury members that Whiskey had been high up in the picks of the jury. Since the Jury has some amazing theatre creators and professionals on it, it was a fine compliment. Whether all of this will add up to bookings is another thing - every theatre has it's own mandate and size and season and we'll find out in the next months whether we'll fit into their needs - however the feedback on the show was pretty amazing and we were delighted to get that kind of response for a first time out... And finally Sarnia was surprisingly fine - incredibly friendly and great food (!?!) - Lulu's Lounge served us the best tiramisu I've ever had....
And now we're hunkering down in an apt on Church and Queen...and beginning work on the production of A Bad Year for Journalist that will be going up in Toronto at the end of December. I spent yesterday in a ginormous wreckers lot outside of Toronto wading around in immense mud puddles, avoiding wrecking machines and pulling auto parts out of cars for pieces for the set... so for the meantime we're sharing the apt with some rusting metal. We found a couple of wonderful actors in auditions last week and now have to choose between them... hard to do... weighing different physical types and timings against the character we're casting for... For those of you in Toronto or with friends here we're doing a first reading on the 7th of November and two shows at the Alchemy theatre on the 20/21st of December.
Toronto is already treating us well. There is theatre and performance and music everywhere we look and several new friends from the Theatre Conference are around town. As I write this our dog is careening from one end of the apt to the other playfighting with the dog we're looking... so the house certainly feels like an action packed exciting place to be... We'll be on this side of Yonge St. for the next month and then in December we'll be back to our friends house in Kensington Market and house sitting as they enjoy the month in their new home in Costa Rica (Costa Rica!!! Jealous... me?... not at all...no...not jealous at all). And after that... probably heading North for several months to an artist residence just below the arctic circle...
if you're in town or passing through in the next month or two then drop a line and say hi...
cheers
Brem
