Geeky Cat Miusings

Thanks to Anne for suggesting an excellent play at the Toronto Fringe Festival yesterday. I had the opportunity to see the Gladstone Variations at my favourite hotel in Toronto. Which hotel, you might ask. The Gladstone, of course. Not that I have ever stayed there (shame, shame) but they regularly exhibit art and photography shows there that I have meandered through, finding my enjoyment enhanced by the charming setting. The hotel has some artist designed rooms that you can take a look at online. It would be very difficult to pick a favourite room from all these choices but if you can afford it, I would recommend you give it a tumble (or maybe just look at the rooms for your own inspiration). But I digress - back to the show. The Gladstone Variations is considered the most ambitious project in the Fringe’s history. There are four plays going on at the same time and a character from one play will jump into a scene from another play, giving you a little taste of what is happening somewhere else, keeping you in suspense and leaving you wanting to see the other play to find out what is the story there. The stories give you a real sense of the history of the fine old hotel that was built in 1889 and is still looking splendid, filled with old-world charm. The actors were great and the concierge (the actor, not the hotel staff) left me breathless with his strong peformance. It is not often you get to be shoulder-to-shoulder with the actors in a play, but it is a very immersive experience, very 3D. You begin outside the hotel and move around, going into the lobby, up the stairs, and through the hallways following the actors in their dramas as though you are a fly on the wall - and don’t we all, at some time or another, wish we could be a fly on the wall see what others are doing? Here is what the playwright Brendan Gall has to say: “You get a real sense of layers of history here. There’s this notion of not removing wallpaper, necessarily, but maybe painting over it, so all of these eras share the same space, they bleed through. Things seem like one thing but suggest another.”

We replenished ourselves at the Get Real! Cafe on Ossington Avenue - a surprisingly lovely vegetarian eatery in a run-down part of town. They converted a small row house to a cafe with a lovely backyard patio - where you can watch the clouds roll by in a very relaxed setting. The food was delicious even if I were just a fly sneaking a nibble of your portobello rosemary arugula pesto whateverucallit!