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Category: Culture

The Fantasticks is often fantastic, and quite delightful

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There are monster musicals, with giant orchestras and expensively-costumed casts, and then there is The Fantasticks. This is a sweet, unassuming, almost Our Town-type of musical, with a piano and harp as its “orchestra,” a cast of eight, an invisible wall, a ladder and a sun-and-moon on two sides of a piece of balsa wood.

The ladies love Lando: Billy Dee Williams at Comic Con

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There is more to Billy Dee Williams than his role as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back: in addition to numerous other acting roles – including his long-time stint as the spokesperson for Colt 45 beer – he’s an avid painter and often shows his work in town at the Liss Gallery. But for those heading down to Toronto Comic Con (a pop-culture convention at the Direct Energy Centre, March 18-20) dressed as imperial guards, Wookies and Jedi Knights, it is all about Lando.

Break-in All the Rules: Confessions of a Rosedale Burglar

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Reading a home is something of an art form. Keith Matthews (not his real name) gestures at a large brick home on a snowy neighbourhood street with the blinds pulled partially back. “You can tell no one’s in there,” he says. “You see the living room on the right-hand side, the kitchen area on this … Continued

Green day

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Our trusty scribe-about-town goes in search of the last Irishman in Cabbagetown

How to wallop Watson, the Jeopardy! machine

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Clobbering the two best Jeopardy! contestants out there is no small feat. But last week, during one final Jeopardy! round, Watson — the artificial intelligence IBM computer that won a three-day tournament against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — answered incorrectly. The machine answered "Toronto" for a clue under the heading "U.S. Cities." So was this some sort of snide remark? Was Watson intentionally trying to knock our nationally sensitive identity? Or is the machine’s gaffe a sign that with the right practice — and a good dose of Canadian trivia — this superhuman, high-tech machine can be beat? 

Oleanna: a near-perfect production of a powerful play

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Oleanna is a strange name for a challenging, savage, and, thanks to Soulpepper’s present production of it, brilliant two-character play by America’s David Mamet, one of the finest dramatists and screenwriters of the past quarter century. The name, based on an 1850s folk song about some kind of future utopia (as lovers of Pete Seeger’s 1960s hit may recall), is comically ironic: in the war between the sexes, there are no utopias.