Reviews

Toby Francis has one of those voices. He can sing clean and crisp notes in the stratosphere one moment and warm, chesty tones down two octaves the next. Effortlessly.

Jim Steinman’s music is a good fit, then, to show off Francis’ incredible range and superb voice.

Love and Death and an American Guitar tells two stories simultaneously – that of Steinman’s constant struggle for royalties, respect and recognition, and the attempt to finish writing his incomplete musical, Neverland.

It’s Me… Mandela, ostensibly about Nelson Mandela’s life, actually has little to do with Mandela; it concerns mostly Mandela’s relationship with his brother.  Without giving too much away: the depicted relationship is entirely fictional.  The opening narrative mentions, from the perspective of an eight-year-old in a seventeen-year-old’s body, Mandela’s relevance to the end of apartheid; everything else in the play, though, might have related to an entirely fictional character.  In fact

If there is one thing that the Peel Region does particularly well, it is putting their children on the stage. Koorliny Arts Centre, Murray Music and Drama, Nine Lives and Stray Cats have all used children in their shows recently and for this company, Primadonna Productions, it is their modus operandi. It augers well for a very secure future for theatre in this area.

The annual spelling bee, and all the hoop-la that goes with it, has become a cornerstone of American Culture and Underground Productions’ version even had a “Bake Stall” to help the audience through this competitive institution.

Staged in a suburban Town Hall, the atmosphere was cutthroat as the contestants battled they way through words most of which I’d never heard before!