Tickets now on sale for SPENT at the Young Centre
Ravi Jain and Adam Paolozza, the Vladimir and Estragon of Bay Street
Our internationally acclaimed, sell-out, Dora award-winning hit SPENT opens February 18th at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts.
THERE ARE ONLY 6 SHOWS!!!
Tickets are now on sale and you can buy them online HERE
You can also follow SPENT on twitter: @spenttheshow #spenttheshow
Here’s a trailer video from SPENT‘s NYC run:
Selected praise for SPENT
“Funny, fast-paced and utterly mad, it shows just how well theatre can shed light on our bonkers world 4 STARS”
-Edinburgh FEST magazine
“sharp-as-a-tack satire…boundless energy and inventiveness…thoroughly enjoyable 4 STARS”
-Edinburgh, The LIST
“Spent in fact creates a magnificent Urban Canadian myth…I kid you not. What this company has achieved is very important”
-Capitol Critics Circle, Alvina Ruprecht
Happy Holidays from TheatreRUN
2012 – Year in Review:
This past year started with our successful run of the dora award winning The Double. We went on to tour our international hit SPENT to NYC, to present our French creation Artaud: un portrait en décomposition at Summerworks and to create new work with Why Not Theatre, Fixt Point Theatre and Ahuri Theatre.
Artistic Director Adam Paolozza is now halfway through his Urjo Kareda Residency at the Tarragon Theatre. He assisted Richard Rose on the hit revival of No Great Mischief, featuring R.H. Thomson and David Fox. Adam’s currently writing a new play as part of the Tarragon’s playwriting unit and assisting Morris Panych on The Amorous Adventures of Anatol, opening January 10th at the Tarragon. Also as part of Adam’s Residence TheatreRUN will be developing The Double in March during a three week Workspace at Tarragon.
2013 What’s ahead:
Shostakovich @ RHUBARB
image by Lacey Creighton
We’re continuing our experimentation with music and gesture with a new creation, Shostakovich, 3 Days In Red. The Piece will be presented as part of the Rhubarb Festival at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre from February 27th to March 3rd at 8:30pm. This is a silent drama featuring a live string quartet. The piece is somewhere between dance and theatre, focusing on the body in stress and the anxiety of living in an oppressive political regime. We have a chorus of 4 actors who play The Husband and 1 actress who plays The Wife. The piece is directed and choreographed by Adam Paolozza with musical direction and arrangements by Sam Sholdice. Cast details to follow soon.
“I reflected that if I die someday then it’s hardly likely anyone will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one myself. You could even write on the cover: ‘Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet”
- Shostakovich on writing the 8th String Quartet
Here’s a link to listen to Shostakovich’s 8th
SPENT @ YOUNG CENTRE
Ravi Jain and Adam Paolozza
SPENT returns to the Young Centre for the Performing Arts for a limited engagement in February and March 2013!!! Dates, times and ticket prices to follow!
Here are some press highlights we garnered from the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh:
Selected as Mervyn Stutter’s Pick of the Fringe
Selected as Best of the Fest (top 5 shows of the Fringe) by List Magazine
“Ravi Jain and Adam Paolozza, the Vladimir and Estragon of Bay Street lead us through the existential lows and mystical highs of financial life…an extraordinary hour of physical theatre”
-The Independent
“The unbelievably fast transitions between accents and mannerisms is just one element among many which demonstrate that this is a well-polished piece which deserves the awards and acclaim is it receiving.”
-Westend/Broadway World
A physically swift and comically ingenious deconstruction of what it has felt like to be tossed about by the economic tsunami. Ravi Jain and Adam Poalozza from inhabit a vault-load of characters all with city-slick timing.
-Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
The Double tours to Kitchener @ MTSpace
In April we will be touring our hit show The Double to the MTSpace theatre in Kitchener. Stay tuned for more details.
…And in May 2013 we’re working on a new project with Ravi Jain and Dan Watson!
Thanks to all of the great collaborators we’ve worked with this year and thanks to Tarragon Theatre, The Young Centre for the Performing arts, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts
-Adam
Scott Walker releases Bish Bosch
Scott Walker is simply one of my favourite artists.
One of the last true craftsmen of the 20th century, though his music points us towards the 21st.
He released his latest opus this weekend.
It’s called Bish Bosch.
Read an interview with him in The Guardian
Directing Gold No Trade in Brooklyn
I’ve been in Brooklyn over the past three weeks directing Gold No Trade’s The Pinks, a period piece about a female confederate spy and the American civil war.
This company was founded by class mates of mine from Lecoq. They work on a “tréteau”, a small platform, which condenses all the action and creates an interesting visual style and movement vocabulary.
Here’s what they say about it:
“The Tiny Stage: The tiny stage we perform on is called a trestle (or tréteau, in French). It’s derived from the portable stages traveling Commedia dell’Arte troupes would perform on in Renaissance Italy. At l’Ecole Lecoq we used a trestle stage as a tool to learn how to compose a stage image as precisely as a photographer or painter composes their artwork. Gold No Trade decided to stage an entire play on a trestle because the constrained space required us to develop innovative storytelling techniques. The compression of space paradoxically opens the horizons of the imagination.”
They tell BIG stories in SMALL spaces. They’re super cool.
Here’s a link to their web site: www.goldnotrade.com
They’re doing a full production of this show in March if you’re in NYC.
Toneelgroep’s Roman Tragedies at BAM
I just saw Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies tonight at BAM in Brooklyn and it kind of blew my mind.
Here’s an interview with the director.
Chaplin: The Musical, or rather, Was This Really Necessary?
So, now they’ve made a Broadway musical out of Chaplin’s life. I guess it had to happen sooner or later. I haven’t seen it and I’m loathe to judge it based solely on the New York Times review I read so lets just wax philosophical about the idea in general.
Why? Why do we need a musical based on Chaplin’s life? I guess you could ask why we need any piece of art, and in a sense that’s not really a fair question. But in this case I can say with impunity: WHY? Leave Chaplin alone.
And this goes for all would be clowns out there and all the physical theatre artists that are inspired by his slap-schtick. Let him inspire you but don’t just copy him. That ain’t enough anymore. And it does a disservice to our audience. What our audience needs is a new Chaplin, someone who can speak about our times in the same way. Chaplin was sublimely funny and he had a big heart. He was also courageous and knew how to use the comedic gesture to make an unequivocal political statement. That’s what we need more of.
If all you do is reproduce Chaplin or Keaton or Tati or Bill Irwin or whoever or whatever you love, you think is cool, then you’re just perpetuating the same commodifying impulse that drives the ideology behind the Hollywood remake. Remakes are for the market. They have market value. They are impoverished artistically. Re-inventions are harder to come by because they force you to think harder, look deeper and to open your eyes to what’s happening around you.
So, please, from the bottom of my heart, leave Charlie alone. He had a great run and now let the rest of us get on with it. Or, go see a show by his grandson, James Thiéree. That guys amazing and he’s still alive!
Ok. I’ll get off my high horse now because I have to keep practicing that hat trick I stole… 
Walter Benjamin/ Bertolt Brecht pdf
I’m writing a new comedy right now about Left wing politics and I’ve been boning up on the history of Left wing theatre. Obviously I’ve been reading Brecht and Benjamin.
Then I saw this book, in an online pdf format, that seemed to be made for me.
Maybe you’ll enjoy it too.
Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht
Winter & Spring 2013 Announcement: SPENT returns to Toronto and The Double tours to Kitchener
SPENT @ The Young Centre
Ravi Jain and Adam Paolozza
After a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, an 800-seat sold-out command performance in India as part of Mumbai’s Lit! Live Festival and a two-week run in NYC at the Queens Theatre last April, SPENT returns home for a limited engagement at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in February and March 2013. Information on Dates and Ticket sales coming soon.
Click here to read about the other exciting shows in Soulpepper’s 2013 Season
Spent is co-produced and co-created by Theatre Smith-Gilmour, Why Not Theatre and TheatreRUN
The Double in Kitchener
Arif Mirabdolbaghi, Adam Paolozza and Viktor Lukawski photo by Lacey Creighton
Our Dora award-winning hit from last season, The Double, has been selected by MTSpace Theatre in Kitchener to play a limited engagement in April 2013 as part of their Impact 13 Festival. We’ll be going on the road for 4 performances and we hope that this is just the beginning of a long touring life for The Double! Details about ticket sales coming soon…
Wish We Had This In Toronto
This is an article from the Guardian about a Beckett Festival in England
Robert Wilson in Krapp’s Last Tape
