ALT: Joel Kinnaman as Tak Kovacs in a dark, strange world, wearing a blue coat and shirt; he's looking around in wonder. Oh god, I didn't know whether I could get past the first episode: I love dystopian futures, but this seemed hackneyed... Altered Carbon has the feel of sometimes The Hunger Games , sometimes Harry Potter , often Repo! The Genetic Opera or Gotham City or Narcopolis .There's martial arts, comic booky treatments, digital effects and story content. Some of it is dumb, and the names for things in the future are lazy: The Array is the internet, a sleeve is a host, ONIs are basically smartphones, Poe is like TNG's Data, Meths are the 1%, and paying my chip-implanted fingers is technology that's already here. The "strong, independent woman cop" is the lamest character attempt/trope out there, and the actress is terrible. The producers seem to be trying to appease audiences on every front rather than trying to make a solid, consistent produ...
Photo courtesy of CanStage I saw Concord Floral at CanStage this weekend and from the moment I entered the Bluma Appel Theatre, I knew we were in for something different, even by Matthew Jocelyn's standards. Billed as "a gothic urban thriller," I don't think that does this production enough justice. This is a very thought-provoking look into young people's psyches, through the medieval looking glass of Boccaccio's The Decameron. ( For some background, here's an interesting project and here's the play's teaser trailer.) Written by Jordan Tannahill and directed by Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner, the work is the result of a 2012 Festival of Ideas and Creation. Four years later, it's still fresh and oh so relevant. But it's not for the faint of heart. In other words, you need to love teenagers and understand them if you're to get past the frank talk and subjects covered. I found some of the ensemble stronger in their actin...
photo credit: Edie Steiner
This week I interviewed Jill Battson, librettist for the new piece Dark Star Requiem , a world première from Tapestry New Opera & Luminato, the Toronto Festival of Arts & Creativity. It premières on June 11 & 12, 2010 at 8pm at The Royal Conservatory’s Koerner Hall. Tapestry describes it as ‘a dramatic oratorio on the history of HIV-AIDS in North America and Africa. In this marriage of content and form, poet Jill Battson and composer Andrew Staniland trace the twenty-five year history of AIDS from its origins to the present day. This evocative, poetic concert work interlaces such topics as ecology, myth, politics, and family. While this text includes fragments from the Latin Mass for the Dead, the overall perspective is humanistic rather than religious.’ Being a linguist, I looked forward to having a conversation with someone who loves the texture of language. We ended up discussing the production, the subject matter and opera in general.
Ji...
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