Breaking into the club

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 5 Comments

Like every heartwarming narrative, this one required a certain suspension of disbelief. After years in the desert, the team that Canada lost 13 years ago would return to native soil, sending joy through the streets of a downtrodden city, Hamilton, Ont. The lords of the National Hockey League would bow to financial logic, and the team’s deliverer—a fiery-eyed patriot—would quickly reach terms with the Toronto Maple Leafs. The prodigal franchise would then set up shop a few miles down the road, and together the new rivals would share the spoils of hockey’s richest market.

The script was far-fetched enough that even the intended audience acknowledged doubt. Fully 41 per cent of those surveyed by Harris-Decima last week admitted they didn’t think Jim Balsillie could pull off his bid to buy the Phoenix Coyotes (née the Winnipeg Jets), however devoutly they wished he would. Balsillie maintained his customary self-confidence. But desperation was creeping into the message. By late last week, the BlackBerry tycoon was asking for the biggest leap of imagination yet from the 100,000 faithful who registered their support on a website he created to boost his cause. “I take on entrenched interests,” he said in one interview. “It’s my character quirk. I don’t quit. I don’t get scared.”

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Calgary's sinkholes multiply

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 5 Comments

Last week, a Calgary landlord strolling through her building’s parking lot discovered that the front tire of a pickup truck had inexplicably slipped beneath the asphalt and was dangling above a depression two metres deep. “The dirt just disappeared,” she told local radio. “They’re not even sure where all the earth went.” It was Calgary’s latest sinkhole.

Two weeks earlier, the city had evacuated a condo that officials feared was structurally compromised by another chasm that opened up under the earth; 13 residents found themselves homeless for days as a result. Earlier in the month a third sinkhole, associated with a financially troubled downtown condo project, had extended out onto city property to threaten a busy thoroughfare, forcing its closure for over a week.

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Critics stoke hijab debate in Quebec

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 10 Comments

Usually, an organization with no governmental power issuing a policy statement on a sleepy spring weekend gets about as much attention as one might expect. As the province’s largest women’s rights organization recently found out, however, this equation doesn’t apply in Quebec when Muslims and the always-prickly debate over reasonable accommodation are involved.

La Fédération des femmes du Québec (FFQ) recently announced its opposition to the banning of “religious articles” from government offices, schools and hospitals, which would effectively allow the wearing of crucifixes or yarmulkes by public employees. Though no such ban yet exists, critics pounced on the FFQ declaration, saying it would also allow for hijabs and chadors–symbols of Muslim repression of women to many.

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Archie, Betty and Veronica: A Timeline

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 3:32 PM - 5 Comments

© Archie Comic Publications, Inc

Don’t get too excited about the news that Archie is proposing to Veronica. As Li’l Abner once said, making it look like the hero might get married is “the usual comical strip trick to keep stupid readers excited.” But whatever happens — my money’s on “it was all a dream” — it will be just the latest chapter in the longest teenage romance in history, a story involving love triangles, broken hearts, love beads, motels, and many, many covers that promise more than they can deliver. Here are some of the key events over the last 67 years in the Archie/Betty/Veronica story. Continue…

America: Utterly Wounded

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 2:51 PM - 12 Comments

Gawker.com, the reliably snarky New York media watchdog website is on the defensive after Maclean’s gentle (read: Canadian) swipe at its post made on Wednesday “Meet Michaëlle Jean, the Sarah Palin of Canada,” a response to news that our GG’s taste for wildlife might be even rawer than that of the failed vice-presidential candidate. Gawker blogger “Cajun Boy” rails away about Maclean’s writer Anne Kingston’s retort, “Michaëlle Jean the Sarah Palin of Canada. Really?,” as well as the tenor of the Maclean’s comments thread in a nation-blasting posting: “Canada: Utterly Humorless.” Like a stand-up comic berating an audience who didn’t laugh, Cajun Boy assumes we didn’t grasp his “playful attempt at absurdist humor,” writing: “we reckon that it never dawned on Anne Kingston or any of the other offended Canadians that the post in question wasn’t meant to be a serious analysis of the similarities between Palin and Jean, something we actually thought was rather thinly veiled.” The Palin/Jean comparison was “intended to be logically inappropriate in every possible way,” he over explains, “thereby serving to not only bring attention to a truly ridiculous piece of political news from our neighbors to the north, but also to lampoon this country’s blissful ignorance of all life outside of its borders at the same time. We suppose our expectations were set a wee bit too high.” All ends happily, however, with Cajun Boy boasting of his own Canuck bona fides (“Hell, some of our ancestors have been traced back to Nova Scotia!”) and offering some helpful advice to his unfunny neighbours to the north: “get your big, salmon-eating heads out of your asses, and lighten the hell up.”

Gawker

Maclean’s — Michaëlle Jean is Canada’s Sarah Palin. Really?

Charge in Stafford case upgraded

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 2:50 PM - 0 Comments

An 18-year-old woman arrested in connection with the disappearance of eight-year-old Tori Stafford is now facing a charge of first-degree murder. Police originally accused Terri-Lynne McClintic of abduction and accessory to murder after the fact, while her boyfriend, 28-year-old Michael Rafferty, was charged with abduction and first-degree murder. But during a brief court appearance this morning, the allegations against McClintic were upgraded to match those of her fellow suspect. Authorities did not explain the change, but the timing is certainly compelling. Since her arrest, McClintic has tried to help police locate Tori’s remains, but after nine days of searching, her body is still missing. In a separate development today, authorities revealed that McClintic and Rafferty will be tried separately, and by two different Crown attorneys. Hal Mattson, Rafferty’s lawyer, says he wouldn’t be surprised if the Crown is already working out a plea bargain deal with McClintic, but her lawyer declined to speculate. “Assumptions are very dangerous,” said Jeanine LeRoy. “Those decisions have not yet been made and won’t be made until we have the entirety of the disclosure.”

The London Free Press

Flower power in Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

“By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong . . . ”

Joni Mitchell, who wrote those lyrics, wasn’t there. But you didn’t have to be there to be there. The Woodstock festival, which marks its 40th anniversary this summer, came to symbolize a sixties utopia of peace, love and LSD that came and went like a mirage. Arriving a month after the Apollo moon landing, it was the last blossom of an age of innocence when anything seemed possible, briefly. But even before the horde of half a million had turned the New York State Thruway into a parking lot, and a farmer’s field into a sea of mud, the bloom was already off the rose of flower power. The week before the three-day festival, which began on Aug. 15, 1969, the Charles Manson murders revealed psychedelia’s dark side. And in the spring of the same year, Easy Rider lit up the Cannes Film Festival with a drug-fuelled joyride that veered into the ultimate bad trip.

Last weekend, 40 years after Easy Rider, the mother of all rock festivals and the mother of all film festivals merged in an acid flashback on the French Riviera with the premiere of Taking Woodstock, an ode to hippie bliss by Ang Lee, the Oscar-winning director of Brokeback Mountain. Seeing hippydom feted amid the ritual opulence of Cannes seemed incongruous, to say the least.

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Vancouver and the famous chefs

By Chris Johns - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

When the announcement came that Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, two of the world’s most respected chefs, were opening restaurants in Vancouver, the city’s fooderati nearly choked on their sablefish in delight. Vancouver’s food bloggers and food journalists saw to it that every stage of the three new restaurants (Boulud is involved in two), from decor and staffing to menu development, was analyzed. The great chefs’ arrivals were seen as confirmation that Vancouver was now the dining destination in Canada and would put the city in the ranks of legendary culinary capitals like Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo and New York. (Though one observer who felt it best to remain anonymous did express some dismay: “When Boulud came and did the press launch it was absolutely grotesque how much ass-kissing was going on.”) On a recent visit to Vancouver I wanted to see what had happened after the splashy openings, when the day-to-day people were in charge.

The least formal of the three restaurants is DB Bistro Moderne. The room feels vaguely retro and cinematic in its design. A zinc-top bar and oxblood leather chairs suggest classic bistro, while a partition of smoked glass dividing the main dining room from a wine-lined private area, and a soundtrack that mixes angular jazz with remixed reggae, indicates a more adventurous bent. This blending of classic and contemporary is carried through in the cuisine—overseen by long-time Boulud chef Stephane Istel. All of the bistro dishes purists expect—an exemplary steak frites, coq au vin—are in evidence, but it’s not all cuisine grandmère. Grilled tuna comes with an Eastern bent in the form of cucumber mint raita and spicy harissa. One of Boulud’s most notorious creations, the DB Burger, is also on the menu, but in a relatively more reasonable $28 version, without the option of the US$150 burger they serve in New York. The version offered here is unfortunate: the foie gras filling is a cold slippery mess, the braised short ribs stringy, the truffle non-evident. Overall the food is expertly executed, but at times can feel a bit soulless. Once the novelty of having a Boulud restaurant in town wears off, perhaps we’ll see chef Istel assert more of his own personality into the food.

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What can you buy with $50 billion?

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 2:28 PM - 41 Comments

With the federal budget deficit expected to punch through the $50 billion mark this year, we wondered what one could buy with that kind of cash. Here’s what we came up with:

6.5 billion Big Mac combos
10 nuclear reactors
467 Nortel Networks
641 of the most expensive Ming Vase ever sold
520 Neverland Ranches
33 Yankee Stadiums
25 per cent of the Microsoft Corp.
235 Phoenix Coyote NHL franchises
71 Mona Lisas
1.2 billion copies of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons (at the MSRP of $39.99)
A little more than one Bill Gates
5,000 large private islands in the Caribbean
50 million Julie Couillard dresses (or at least the low-cut number sold at auction in April)

Feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments below.

That's not funny!

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 47 Comments

In December 2007, Chris Forcand was arrested in his Toronto apartment and charged with luring an underage girl, possessing a dangerous weapon and other related offences. Forcand, then 53, had posted nude photos of himself in Internet chat rooms and tried to proposition young girls. After some of those lurid conversations were sent to members of his church, Toronto police’s Child Exploitation Section was called in. Forcand was later sentenced to 12 months. The cyber-vigilantes who uncovered his activities and brought about the arrest did not reveal their identities. But subsequent reports linked them to the Internet group Anonymous, which grew out of a message board site, 4chan.org, that is arguably one of the odder places you’ll find online.

If you’ve never heard of 4chan, you’re probably still aware of some of its actions. Its users have created some of today’s most popular Internet memes, such as Rickrolling, which blasts people’s computer screens with a link to the Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up, and lolcats, those photos of cutesy felines accompanied by broken English captions like “I can has Cheezburger?” (itself an irritating slang called lolspeak). Remember the buzz about the Chocolate Rain song, by Tay Zonday? Its popularity partly stemmed from a joke—channers decided to boost its ratings because of its absurd lyrics and melody; it was eventually covered by John Mayer and others. With more than 300 million page views per month, 4chan can create news simply on the basis of size. When something becomes a trend on the site, it will likely hit your computer screen soon, explains Tim Hwang, a research associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

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The unsung heroes of Broadway

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

In a Broadway musical, the composer writes the tunes, but someone else writes the score. The new book The Sound of Broadway Music, by theatre critic Steven Suskin, is about the hidden musical geniuses of Broadway’s golden age: orchestrators, who create memorable sounds like the slide whistle in the overture to Gypsy or the sentimental violin solo in Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific. Almost no Broadway composers have time to orchestrate their own music, so it’s up to lesser-known, fast-working musicians to make a melody and a few chords sound better than anyone ever dreamed. “An orchestrator, handed a song that’s not so good, can dress it up and make it sound great,” says Suskin.

Though they do a big job, orchestrators are mostly unknown, and so underrated that they weren’t eligible for Tony Awards until 1997. (Suskin explains that many composers “didn’t want to admit that they needed help.”) His book gives Broadway fans a sense of how important these men were to your favourite songs. It includes anecdote-filled biographies of classic orchestrators like Robert Russell Bennett (Show Boat, The Sound of Music) and Don Walker (Cabaret, Carousel), as well as some currently active greats like Jonathan Tunick (Stephen Sondheim’s orchestrator), along with explanations of what orchestrators do to enhance a song. With the aid of manuscripts and invoices, Suskin also identifies who scored which songs in shows like The Music Man and Annie Get Your Gun (orchestrators have to work so fast that most of them call on “ghosts” to help them out), giving a sense of how different orchestrators create different sounds.

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It can't possibly be worse than the Commons, right? Liveblogging QP –Senate QP, that is.

By kadyomalley - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 27 Comments

Oh c’mon, it’ll be fun! They can get awfully feisty over there in the Red Chamber, after all.

1:55:54 PM
Well, I’m in — in the Senate chamber that is; I decided to head over a few minutes early, just in case there was any confusion on the part of the security guards on the admissibility of a dual-berry-wielding member of the press. Much to ITQ’s surprise, there wasn’t — the gatekeeper on duty just wanted to make sure that both were on vibrate, and was assured that was the case – and I’m now ensconced in the gallery, which is considerably closer to the action than its counterpart in the Commons.

Anyway, as I type this, Senator Serge Joyal has just wrapped up an impassioned diatribe against the sale of silverware from Rideau Hall. Which is all well and good, but we’ve come to that moment that we’ve all been waiting for — Question Period!

2:03:54 PM
The plight of the lobster fishery? Really? That’s going to be the lead question for the very first Senate QP to be liveblogged ever?
Okay, Senator Callbeck — dazzle me.

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Mitchel Raphael on the picture that took 20 years to get

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

Gilles Duceppe’s short-lived acting career

At the third annual Maclean’s Parliamentarians of the Year awards gala, Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe was runner-up for most knowledgeable MP and best orator. He found the latter recognition “funny, because in Quebec they are saying I am not that good an orator. But here, I am very good.” Duceppe comes from a family passionate about theatre and film. When asked if this had influenced his oratorical skills, he noted: “I was not a good actor at all. I can’t play a role. I did only once for a Christmas play [in Grade 6 at his Catholic school]. The nuns had me play Saint Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary, which is the most awful role for a man to play—the husband of a virgin!” The awards gala was hosted by Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells and Le Devoir columnist and L’actualité magazine contributor Manon Cornellier. Speaker Peter Milliken did the toast. Bob Rae won for best orator but could not attend—in his place he sent Toronto Grit MP Kirsty Duncan to fetch his award. (In 2007, when Michael Ignatieff won for best orator, he sent Ruby Dhalla on his behalf.) Toronto Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, who voted for Rae as best orator, said the reason Rae beat Ignatieff this year was that as leader “Michael doesn’t have as much time in the House. Bob gets more floor time.” Ontario NDP MP Joe Comartin won, for the second year in a row, the award for most knowledgeable MP. He said he can now place the extremely heavy awards in his Windsor, Ont., office because he just replaced his flimsy desk with a more solid one. For the third year in a row Nova Scotia NDP Peter Stoffer won most collegial. In second place was Liberal whip Rodger Cuzner, who noted: “I guess I’ve got to drink a little more [to beat Stoffer].” Cuzner said he wasn’t surprised that fellow Grit Paul Szabo once again won for hardest-working MP. Szabo sends new MPs a three-page letter filled with things they need to watch out for. “He wants to see everyone succeed,” says Cuzner. Halifax NDP MP Megan One of the highlights for her was seeing Garneau at the Canada Aviation Museum. “I really wanted to get my picture taken with him but I was too shy,” recalls Leslie. “So I took a picture of him by himself and it’s in my photo album still.” Twenty years later at the awards gala, Capital Diary snapped the first picture of Leslie and Garneau together. The NDP continued to dominate the awards for the third year, which had leader Jack Layton beaming all night. He noted the most knowledgeable MP, Joe Comartin, is his party’s justice critic and that the best rookie MP is their deputy justice critic. Layton also had kind words for the winner of best overall MP, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney: “He’s always a guy you can approach. I’ve always had a good relationship with Jason. He’s straight up. What you see is what you get.”

Another chip off the old Bloc

The Bloc’s Paul Crête also did well in Maclean’s Parliamentarians of the Year poll. He placed third for most collegial MP and fourth for hardest-working. Crête has been an MP for nearly 16 years and was part of the wave of separatists elected when the party ran in its first federal election in 1993. It was a well-timed tribute to the MP, who will be leaving federal politics to run for the Parti Québécois, in a yet-to-be-announced Quebec by-election in the riding now vacant thanks to the resignation of ADQ leader Mario Dumont.

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Accountability in accounting

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 1:31 PM - 19 Comments

From the good ole days. When it was the surplus that was being misunderestimated.

Stephen Harper, Oct. 6, 2004. “We also know that the government has been wildly inaccurate in its forecasts and spending projections over the past five or six years. In recent budgets the Liberals have lowballed surplus numbers by an average of $6.5 billion per year. In the U.S. they do not have this kind of debate. There is a congressional budget office. People there, like here, may disagree on fiscal policy, but they should not have to guess if the numbers they are using are accurate.”

Monte Solberg, Oct. 13, 2004. “It just makes the point that if government … is going to be taken seriously about numbers, it must provide estimates that are going to be at least close to where we actually end up.”

Stephen Harper, Oct. 13, 2004. “These guys were lying about the surplus, and this proves why we need independent fiscal forecasts.”

Rob Nicholson, Oct. 15, 2004. “The Liberal government makes a mistake every year by trying to guess the revenues of the country. It has mis-guessed the surplus every year. Mistakes are made, but the government might want to get some new people to advise it. That might be a good move. Why do we not bring in a bill suggesting that whoever has been advising the government for the last seven years as to what its revenues are should be fired. I bet we would get a consensus on that one. Is there anybody in the House who would disagree with bringing in a bill to get new people to advise the Liberals? We would all be better off and Canada as a whole would be better off.”

'I pay the rent, what do you do?'

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Five years ago, rising prices drove Oonagh O’Hagan, an art student at the famed British art school Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, from charming Notting Hill to a mouse-infested apartment above a Perfect Fried Chicken take-out in South London, shared with four unknown “eccentrics.” Glasgow-raised, with a residual Scotch accent and a cheeky, self-deprecating sense of humour, O’Hagan got along famously with all but one who, it became clear, was a “pathological” note-writer with a two-per-day habit. Insular, frosty and prone to “brutal, rigid, Presbyterian thinking,” says O’Hagan, the note writer enjoyed patchwork and, to her roommates’ endless curiosity, had affixed seven locks to her bedroom door. “Like something from a Dickens novel, she would lock herself into her room—as if she was weaving some sort of huge rope ladder to get out the window.”

“Every time you came in from work, you’d see the fridge, and you’d be like, ‘Oh my God, another note!’ ” says O’Hagan, 30, now a lecturer at London’s University for the Creative Arts and fashion designer, who’s consulted for Burberry and Louis Vuitton. Spurred by twin anthropological and curatorial urges, O’Hagan found herself collecting the notes (some were “really hostile and vile”). At first, the massive pile next to her bed depressed her. Then, she says, it struck her as “quite funny.”

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GOP Should Support Sotomajor

By John Parisella - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 1:05 PM - 5 Comments

It has been said that the announcement of a Supreme Court nominee goes a long way in determining the outcome of the nomination. By all indications, Appeals Court Judge Sonya Sotomajor stands a good chance of being confirmed before Labour Day. Unless some indiscretion in her past is uncovered, Sotomajor appears to have the qualifications and the votes to make it to the highest court.

While we can assume she will eventually be part of the liberal voting bloc of the court, as her predecessor David Souter was, it will be interesting to see how the Republicans will vote at the end of the hearings. It may still be early in the process, but the GOP would do well to keep an open mind before the hearings and eventually vote on the basis of her qualifications rather than an ideological bent.

Currently, the court is composed of four conservatives (Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts) and three liberals (Stephen Beyer, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and John Paul Stevens, who is 89), with Arthur Kennedy often acting as the swing vote on the ideologically polarized court. It should be recalled that Kennedy’s vote is the one that made George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United States in 2000. Sotomajor’s nomination would therefore do little to shift the political balance. Continue…

Tax freedom? What a lot of rubbish.

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 22 Comments

What is it about springtime that makes anti-government types go light-headed? As millions of Canadians from coast to coast were getting ready to celebrate the Victoria Day weekend by opening the cottage, firing up the barbecue, or—er—watching hockey, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation took the opportunity to declare May 14 “Gas Tax Honesty Day.”

Designed to “kick off the summer travel season for Canadian motorists” by reminding us of “the high tax component hidden in the price of gasoline,” this 11th annual holiday consisted—according to CTF propaganda—of “events” across the country. The highlight event was a jamboree down at the Ashbridges Bay Pumping Station in Toronto that featured CTF director Kevin Gaudet engaging in such summer-fun activities as . . . releasing a report on gas taxes . . . and . . . demanding that gas taxes be lowered.

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Conference Board Recalls Research

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:56 PM - 8 Comments

From their website:

The Conference Board of Canada has recalled three reports: Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy; National Innovation Performance and Intellectual Property Rights: A Comparative Analysis; and Intellectual Property Rights—Creating Value and Stimulating Investment. An internal review has determined that these reports did not follow the high quality research standards of The Conference Board of Canada.

Here’s the story

France disses Canada and Britain on upcoming D-Day anniversary

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:53 PM - 18 Comments

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided that the liberation of Europe was an all-American affair. For the 65th anniversary of D-Day, he will be enthroned up front with U.S. President Barack Obama at an American cemetery overlooking Omaha beach. Among the heads of state not invited to the ceremony is Queen Elizabeth II of Britain and Canada, the last surviving leader who served in the Second World War. Apparently she’ll have to watch the commemorations on her TV. The deliberate snub has infuriated London’s pundits who pointedly remind Sarkozy of the thousands of British and Canadian troops who fought on Sword and Juno beaches on June 6, 1944.

The Daily Mail

The Telegraph

A cow, some goats and MPs, oh my

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:49 PM - 2 Comments

The second annual Embrace-an-Orphanage gala at the Canadian Museum of Civilization was packed with MPs. Conservative House leader Jay Hill as one of the ch-chairs.

Cape Breton Liberal MP Mark Eyking helped sell goats.

To see the full gallery click here.

See Rachel Harper selling tickets for the big draw!

See who had the most fabulous purse!

Montreal gets its very own Toronto-style concert hall

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:44 PM - 2 Comments

This morning in Montreal, Jean Charest unveiled the design for the new concert hall for the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Kent Nagano was on board, as was Lucien Bouchard, who’s the chair of the orchestra’s board, and who brings poignant irony with him wherever he goes. Architect for the new hall is Jack Diamond of Toronto’s Diamond and Schmitt Architects, which may help explain why the new hall looks eerily like Schmitt’s Four Seasons Centre, his downtown Toronto opera house. The shape’s different because this room isn’t for opera. But the room vocabulary — Blonde! Beige! — is pure Diamond. Here, they made a video:

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2617261&w=425&h=350&fv=file%3D%2Ffileadmin%2Fvideos%2Fvideoadresse.flv%26image%3D%2Ffileadmin%2Fvideos%2FviAdresse.jpg]

My play's longer than your play

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

After wowing audiences in London, Sydney and Madrid, Robert Lepage’s multilingual play Lipsynch finally receives its North American premiere next month at Toronto’s Luminato Festival. And what has theatre mavens chattering most about the Canadian theatrical alchemist’s latest production? Its exploration of the human voice? Its multidisciplinary virtuosity? No, the buzz is all about Lipsynch’s audacious running time of eight hours and 25 minutes. It’s being staged in three-hour chunks over three days or, for Lepage devotees, at all-day marathons punctuated by 20-minute intermissions and a 45-minute meal break. Tickets run $75 to $125, which when you do the math is a bargain. Where else can you buy genius for 25 cents a minute?

Toronto-based actor and playwright Rick Miller, one of nine actors who collaborated on the production, says Lepage’s desire to mount a nine-hour play met with resistance. “We all thought he was nuts,” he says. But he now sees the time commitment as key to the “operatic experience”: “Time takes on a different scale; you experience things without turning on the BlackBerry or cellphone.”

Continue…

Ouch

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:28 PM - 12 Comments

Peter MacKay broke his arm playing rugby on the Parliament Hill lawn last night.

Update. Breaking news. CTV is reporting the injury as a dislocated elbow.

A cow, some goats and MPs, oh my

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:22 PM - 2 Comments