Plays written for audiences steeped in the aesthetics of film are unfathomably rare. The Baroness and the Pig is such a play. An episodic narrative structure unfolds through a series of tableaux during which one actor strikes painterly poses while the other rolls in invisible mud so convincingly you can almost smell it.

Leni Parker is the Baroness, a corseted 19th-century matron who undertakes to train a wild child for domestic service, hoping success will amaze her friends and restore the social status she lost to gossip over a philandering husband. Ms. Parker’s obliging noble begins as a cartoon character, and elicits much laughter from early scenes. Natalie Claude as the reluctant pupil also plays it broad, soothing anxiety by curling up in the foetal position, rubbing her crotch as if tormented by a fierce itch. Scenes of instruction are driven by clever word-play, Pygmalion stripped of Shaw’s verbiage.

The meandering rhythm of Michael Mackenzie’s script leaves plenty of time for an audience member to wonder about everything he doesn’t tell us: exactly how was this child raised by pigs? Since the setting is France, presumably they were those stubby, dark sangliers who run in family herds, get drunk on fermented fruit and taste so good soaked in wine. But how was she discovered? And what about the poor Baroness? Has she thought of taking a lover?

Just when it seems the play is only ever going to be about actorly antics and elliptical, one-sided conversations about aesthetics, comes a brilliant pivot. In perfect unison, the two actors reach for gravitas and it all makes sense.

Rifts on social themes like class, body image and domestic bondage could easily be wrung from The Baroness and the Pig, but the Imago production reveals this play is mainly about the forging of a relationship based on identification and filled with tenderness. How an over-civilised matron gets in touch with her animal urges, and a wild child learns to wear shoes while remaining true to the laws of the wilderness, including loyalty to the leader of the pack.

The actors are excellent, and very ably directed by Catherine Bourgeois, associate director of Imago Theatre. It would be so easy to go so wrong with this ethereal text, and she doesn’t ever. The set by Jasmine Catudal, costumes by Louis Hudon and soundscape by Peter Cerone offer just the right post-modern mix to serve a filmic script, hints of history without a whiff of dust.

Montreal playwright and film writer Michael Mackenzie has waited 15 years to see his play produced in English, although it has been widely staged in translation, including Hungarian, Portuguese, German, Hebrew, Czech and French. A worthwhile wait, to say the least.

Continues through May 18 at Theatre La Chapelle, 3700 St. Dominique. Tickets $16 and $20. Box office: 514-843-7738.

Pile a sauna with beer and mushrooms, then drink a case of wine; borrow some underwear and wait for a half-naked dancing bear to crawl out of a vent overhead. He will be Eugene Hutz, his moustache will be rich and full, and you will know him by his terrible joy. A Gogol Bordello CD is an audio recording of a circus, a shiny echo that can’t capture the gypsy punk band’s lunatic energy, but Super Taranta is still fine to dance to pantless while you burn cars.

The group’s popularity has rightly soared since the release of this cerebrally softened, fluorescent hole to the Wonderland of their full catalogue, and it’s easy to see why: the writing is more lucid, the production cleaner, and the sound more pop than before. If coated Gogol goes down easier, fine, swallow with me, brothers and sisters; but afterwards, go back and eat the bitter herbs. You will be rewarded.

- Lev Bratishenko

At the turn of the century Groove Armada was on top of their game with their music licensed to TV adverts, soundtracks etc. faster than the beats they were producing. Yet now as the game has changed, electronic music now a respected art form and not just merely a reason to “shake that ass”, the duo much like their former contemporaries (Chemical Brothers, Fat Boy Slim, Moby) have seen their most recent compilations fall on deft ears with their inability to evolve their big beat sound for the more sophisticated electronic audience. However with Soundboy rock, the duo has re-established themselves as influential players in the art form they once fostered.

Now this album is not a complete departure of the Armada sound. With echoes of “Superstylin” in the new track “Light Sonic”, and the ass shakability of the ipod advert ready “Things We could Share” old school Armada fans will not be left out. It is in the down tempo tracks that the London lads show their mastery at crafting atmospheric beats and lyrical arrangements using their self taught sophistication sure to be gained by many a club night come down and not the latest edition of mixing software. With current electronic darlings like Beruit and Buriel, whom themselves sample the house, big beat and drum and base techniques of the masters made mere moments ago, one would hope that one of the genres forefathers can still hold a place at the table they once built.

Stand out tracks:

Light sonic -This sound could easily open up to a cheap and accessible dance anthem but by saving that release for the remixes the continuous tension creates a blissful and flirtatious tease.

From the Roof Tops -Lucid beats and more then mellow sample of the Boy George 1989 Single “After the Love”; a hymn of thanks for their own foundations.

Reviewed by Marianne Ackerman

In the works of Mordecai Richler, Trevanian and Michel Tremblay, Montreal’s Blvd. St. Laurent appears as an immigrant’s Via Dolorosa, where ambitious upstarts vie with petty criminals for trade. How times have changed. These days, The Main offers sweat yoga, restaurants with valet parking and designer fashion sold at High Street prices. First-time novelist Louis Rastelli has captured the transition with a beautiful, sometimes heart-rending fictionalized memoir, A Fine Ending, set during the 1990s when youth replaced immigrants as the neighbourhood’s dominant flavour.

Nobody really knows how bohemia starts, but cheap rent seems to be an ingredient. During the two decades between the election of the Parti Québécois and the 1995 referendum, the Plateau, as the flat grid of streets east of Mount Royal has come to be known, offered the best deals since the Depression. Migrants poured in from across Canada, others from the very Montreal suburbs built by immigrants who’d struggled to escape; practically everybody was some kind of artist. Non-descript bars became performance venues where newly-minted bands gathered fans and momentum. A handful went on to international fame, but Rastelli has been careful to leave out their names. Nor does politics much intrude. The 1995 referendum goes by unmentioned.

This tale runs on enchantment. One man’s attachment to his cats Bindy and Pappy and the terrible things that befall them provide the emotional thread, creating a parallel existence amid the humdrum pathos of paying rent, hoping for love and keeping a creative flame alive.

The narrator – also named Louis – is a suburban refugee who floats back into town after a stint living in Kitchener studying architecture. No great events befall him, yet as in all great fin de siècle novels, apocalypse hangs in the air. His trials include coping with a stream of obnoxious flat-mates and friends who get by on “couch surfing” (crashing), battling furious landlords, holding and going to parties with his best friend Liora, an unexplored relationship that may well explain why no one else hangs around long.

A girl he chats up in a bar admires his t-shirt, whips off hers and offers an exchange. For a moment he believes he might be having “a rare Plateau experience” - meeting and getting to know a total stranger from scratch. But no, it turns out Kirsten has read one of his chap-books and knows most of his friends.

The quintessential beta male, Louis is the guy you think you can count on to look after your cats when you go on tour. Lying in bed with Stephanie, as stoned as they can be, he reflects on a year just ended, musing that maybe something has solidified. “Our sleepover conversations drifted off on tangents so quickly they seemed logical. ‘Do you know how to make good coleslaw?’ she asked me. ‘No, but I’d love to learn.’ Another long silence.”

The novel includes several hilarious set pieces, one set in a private church where beer is served while a self-appointed pastor rants from the Bible, digging up the dirt and haranguing the assembled into accepting his dark theology. When the ice storm plunges much of Montreal into darkness in 1998, forcing people to huddle together in public shelters or hole up with candles in each other’s living rooms listening to transistor radios, Louis and his friends go to a bar. An older man (possibly in his fifties) joins the conversation, explaining how the system of mortgages effectively ties people to their homes, payments, jobs and thereby to the wheels of economy, which ends up dictating every important aspect of their lives until death. His lecture leads to an uneasy silence and more beer, as if the assembled have just glimpsed their collective future.

A Fine Ending reads like a middle of the night yarn from a slightly stoned scribe who has set himself the task of telling everybody’s story - for a laugh or at least a smile. Yet hovering overhead is a powerful metaphysical gravitas heightened by the narrator’s innocence. Evil and death surround him, lives are ruined by drugs and drink, clouds of violence and doom gathering. Fittingly, the story ends on the last night of the Twentieth Century in a melancholy scene heavy with foreshadowed nostalgia: something sweet and good is going, gone.

With hindsight, we know it wasn’t politics or terrorism or even the fake demon Y2K that killed their world. It was Montreal’s return to prosperity. Once politics had ceased being a local obsession, gentrification invaded the Plateau, but so did a slew of not uninteresting jobs for a generation now facing forty. Some might count themselves lucky, others not. In the context of the roaring present, when time to kill is rare commodity indeed, A Fine Ending will strike many readers as thoroughly exotic, a splendid account of a time out of mind when a man could stretch out on the carpet at 3 a.m. and play with his cats.

Marianne Ackerman’s first novel, Jump, is set on the Plateau during the 1990s.

The seductively innocent Alice bounds naively down a busy London street when she is spotted from a far by the achingly hapless Daniel. Gazes are locked and thanks to cupid’s arrow, or rather a rogue London taxi cab, a tale of love unfolds. Julia Roberts’s mug graces the movie poster for Closer, but this film is a caustically modern analysis of love and no one gets out unscathed. No warm fuzzy cuddle moments here.

Dan falls for Alice but meets Anna, Anna is with Larry, Dan and Anna sleep together, Alice finds out, Alice sleeps with Larry out of revenge and so the “romance” begins.

Alice is played by the perennial luminous Natalie Portman who brings to the role the charms of a young girl but the innate knowingness of a woman loved many times over. Dan, the hapless writer played with reserve and against type by the normally cinematically charming Jude Law, rescues Alice literally off the street and only when his valor subsides and their relationship has become stale his week constitution allows him to be so easily charmed by Anna, a photographer hired to shoot his book jacket photo. Anna is played with perfection by the normally gregarious Julia Roberts whom uses her wounded bird eye flutter coy smile charms to attract the alpha-male Larry, a star making performance by Clive Owen. Larry is possessive and animalistically male whom like Dan, saves the wounded birds, but very much likes them caged.

You’ve this film before: a tale of over-sexed, over-paid white professionals behaving badly in chic urban settings (Your Friends and Neighbors, Happiness, Magnolia), but this version stands out. The sexually carnivorous characters are all chasing the same goal - love or whatever it is that them fundamentally human. Love is ownership, battle and possession. It’s that allusive ‘connection’ they hunger for with a sense of entitlement. Mike Nichols, a director never shy to analyze modern love, ” Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me”, creates a compelling intimate space in which the characters continue to fail at intimacy themselves. Closer is based on the award-winning play by Patrick Marber and the pairing of Nichols, one familiar with
the adaptation of theatrical works to film (Angels in America, Wit), works perfectly to shed the static nature that usually finds cerebral plays when observed through a camera lens. With Marber’s scalpel sharp words, the strong cast and direction, there is a lyrical feel to this bittersweet love song.

Closer is by no means a recipe for modern relationships. Nor is it a cautionary tale of love. Instead, after the post coital consequences, it’s a raw and rough essay on what it means to crave, chase, possess love. The film ends with an echo of
the opening scene, the tale of romance begins again. We’ve come no Closer to understanding the game yet are all still so willing to play.

The hum and tweets of the orchestra warming. A backstage announcement: “Maestro Levine to the pit, please.” The audience, spectacled, silver-haired, settles into seats. The Lincoln Centre’s proscenium still darkened. Spectators munch Becel-bronzed popcorn. Sip pop from huge glasses. Someone picks daintily at his gooey nachos. Could this be Tristan und Isolde?

Verily. This is opera with stadium seating, tragedy with handy drink holders. The Metropolitan Opera’s recent High Definition simulcast of Herr Wagner’s fiendishly difficult masterpiece is the latest in the new age being ushered into the opera house. Or rather: cinemas. And why not? Produced by Dieter Dorn and directed by Barbara Sweet, it’s been over a century since opera been so accessible.

It starts with two fat ladies singing. Isolde (Deborah Voigt) and her maidservant Brangane (Michelle DeYoung) in the hold of a ship on the Irish Sea. Cornwall having defeated Ireland, Isolde is a peace offering – being delivered to victorious King Marke by his most-loyal soldier Tristan (Robert Dean Smith). But Isolde is as disgruntled as Tristan is honourable. She gets her captor to quaff poison before herself imbibing. This, however, is opera: Brangane had secretly switched the bottle with a love potion. The rest, as they say, is mythology.

Appropriately, the cast is stunning, clothed in robes Ayn Rand would’ve worn had she been painted by Klimt. The steely-eyed Voigt – a lauded Wagnerian soprano – her hair fiery and her acting flawless, is perfect in her debut Isolde. Mezzo DeYoung makes a credibly sturdy maidservant. And baritone Matti Salminen as King Marke sings a heartbreaking rendition of Tatest Du’s wirklich?, a song about trust and love crumbled by betrayal. The role of Tristan, however, is not as straightforward. Robert Dean Young was flown in from Wagnerian ground-zero, Bayreuth, for this filming – two years in advance of his scheduled Met debut. The week, you see, had had two Tristan mishaps: Canadian John McMaster’s voice buckled repeatedly, bequeathing him boos at the end; his replacement, Gary Lehman, slipped into the prompter’s box and bonked his head. Given there are only about ten Tristans in the world, Young’s arrival literally saved the show. Though heroic of voice, his mien could not be less so. His acting, even for opera, was wooden. At times he looked like a confused handyman, at others he seemed the organiser of a Star Trek convention to which nobody showed.

But don’t let’s nitpick. Wagner, taking a break from the Ring Cycle in 1857 to write Tristan und Isolde, never would have envisioned opera like this. Nor would the first cineastes to film the performing arts. This is big drama on the biggest of screens. Live. Full HD colour. Surround sound. Split shots, close-ups, slow pans. Back stage interviews during intermission: the stars, conductor, production coordinators, each quizzed by seasoned vet Renée Fleming. There was even a time-lapse film of the complicated stage set-up. Shots of the musicians blowing into candy-red oboes. The crystal, punctuating coughs of the more phlegmatic audience members. This was the next best thing to being there, but a fourth of the price.

After all, as aficionados will tell you, the magic of opera is more than what happens on stage. Sure, sitting through four-and-a-half hours (with two half-hour breaks to wring out hankies and buy steamies and Twizzlers) is still exhausting. But it is softened and made interesting by cinematic innovation. Mind you, the sound was nearly as flat as the screen. But you can’t win ’em all. At least not yet. Note to stalwart sceptics: tickets to most screenings were sold out weeks in advance.