Cette fois, en français: Returning Home to Solstice d’hiver
Solstice d’hiver, my first live theatre-going experience of 2022, truly does feel like a homecoming; a gasp of air; a pause from pandemic and asinine convoy.
Solstice d’hiver, my first live theatre-going experience of 2022, truly does feel like a homecoming; a gasp of air; a pause from pandemic and asinine convoy.
My expectations are high. It almost feels unfair. Just as my fellow patrons expect me to be some sort of fancy theatre critic, I sit in a fancy theatre and I expect a fancy show.
The building shakes. The whole audience has joined in, one joyful scream in a darkened theatre. This. This is familiar.
To return to a Canada still starved of this normalcy feels wrong; acrid; frustrating. When I get back to Toronto (or, let’s be real, North York), I’ll simply have to tell my friends and colleagues about the magic of a packed theatre, rows and rows of masks, applause, closeness. They won’t get to feel it themselves for a few months yet, it seems
We aren’t laughing about the events of the past two years. We aren’t even laughing at Jason Kenney himself. We’re simply laughing together.
In my heart there is anger; sadness; grief for my more naïve self. Because after Dear Evan Hansen, I do not feel as if I’ve been found, as the film’s tagline so bravely promised I would be. I feel instead as if I’ve been left behind to atrophy in the Music Box Theatre some five hundred miles away, a nineteen-year-old ghost in an echoing auditorium.
As in-person Toronto theatre slowly re-opens, Intermission’s Editors will be sharing personal reflections on the realities of being back in the theatre. These are not criticisms or reviews. They are not blog posts. They are memories of being caught in the middle of a theatre renaissance. They are an archive. They are history.