My first day at Canadian Music Week didn’t go exactly as planned, so my decision to forgo such acts as The Breeders, White Cowbell Oklahoma, and KRS-One in favour of The Indies was a risky one. See, despite the fact that I’ll watch the Oscars or the VMAs when they come on, generally I am of the opinion that awards shows manage to suck harder than Paris Hilton at… well… the afterparty of an awards show (too easy, I’m sorry). But, I took the gamble in hopes that the night would be less phoney chatter and acceptance speeches and more kick-ass performances. For the most part, the cards were stacked in my favour.

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And so begins my first ever CMW experience. Let me tell you, so far it hasn’t exactly gone as planned. A confusion of dates cancelled my plans to see Gogol Bordello last Sunday and last-minute essay writing derailed my plans for Dub Trio on Wednesday. But all was well with the world because I had my Thursday night planned out and this time nothing was going to go wrong.

But I seemed to have forgotten the cardinal rule of festivals like this one and North by Northeast. No matter how much planning you do, something will always go wrong. Those are just the ropes when you have 500 performances scheduled at 40 venues, not all of which are walking distance. And when you go out for Ethiopian food when you plan on seeing Immaculate Machine at 8:30. In case you’ve never heard of Immaculate Machine, they’re definitely worth checking out.

You may know frontwoman/keyboardist Kathryn Calder from her famous lineage. She’s the niece of A.C. Newman, the lead singer of the New Pornographers (who, if all goes well, I’ll be reviewing in a couple of days) and has now joined on as a full-time member of that band. Immaculate Machine play a catchy brand of pop-rock not unlike the New Pornographers but with more keyboards and fewer members.

All in all I was pretty excited to catch their performance at the Horseshoe. When I got there, around 9:15, they were already well into their set. And I mean that – I caught one song. One freaking song! In case you’re wondering, it was “No Such Thing as the Future.” At least it was a good one song. I did, though, get to meet the band afterwards, so I guess that somewhat made up for it.

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By this point Cabaret has become so engrained into the public consciousness that it is easy to forget how deceiving the play is. Chances are, whether you’ve seen it or not, what stands out in your mind is Liza Minnelli (in the 1972 movie version) or the catchy melody of one of the musical numbers: “Life is a Cabaret” from the title song, or perhaps “Money makes the world go round” from “Money Money”. Maybe you even picked up the hedonistic philosophy at the forefront of the production. It’s easy to forget, then, just how deceiving a play Cabaret really is.

The play centres on the story of Sally Bowles, a young British upstart cabaret performer with delusions of grandeur, and Clifford Bradshaw, a young American would-be writer with… well… delusions of grandeur. Bradshaw enters the world of 1929-1930 Berlin in search of a topic for his breakthrough novel, but rather than writing, gets swept up in the fast-paced sex-soaked atmosphere and falls in love with Sally.

And of course Germany in the 30s was all fun and games, right? Nothing could possibly go wrong, right? Right? Well, no. This was also the time of the rise of the Nazis. The play is not only set at this crucial moment in world history, but echoes the transitional political situation in both its themes and its plot. Nazism is continually the sublimated factor lingering under the surface of the play until the end of the first act and the beginning of the second when it is released in a big way. Man, Freud would have had a field day!

This production of Cabaret by the UC Follies handles the shifting moods masterfully under the direction of Stephen Low. I mean it. At the start of the play I was actually worried because I couldn’t think of a way to write a positive review without sounding like a pervert. Picture this: an entire chorus full of girls (and a few boys) singing and dancing provocatively in lingerie so skimpy that you’re simultaneously wondering how they are avoiding a wardrobe malfunction and hoping that they are all 18. And that’s just the opening number! I wasn’t able to avoid sounding like a pervert. So sue me! (Note: do not sue me.)

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The initial impulse when faced with a Canadian work of art is to assimilate it into the question of Canadian identity. This should’ve made my job as reviewer of Criminals in Love a relatively painless task. I’d just take a few lines of dialogue, relate it to the question of Canadian identity, and then I’d take my paycheck and be on my way (that is, if we bloggers got paid).

But although George F. Walker’s play is set in a fictionalized East Side Toronto neighbourhood, its concerns are much more universal than they are local. Criminals in Love could just as easily be set in any American suburb and lose little if any of its meaning. Interestingly enough, this does reflect the Canadian identity in one important way – it doesn’t have an easily characterizable identity.

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English students have it tough. Hold on… stay with me for a moment. A regular day consists of drama followed by novels served up on top of a heaping pile of poetry. But that’s not what brings us down. Here’s the problem – everything they assign us is good! Shakespeare, Pope, Shelley, Keats; all they give us is the cream of the crop. We love the classics of English lit, but we’re all critics at heart. Every once in a while we want to read something bad, not because bad literature gives us pleasure, but because blasting it does.

Leave it to the English Students Union to alleviate the pain. It’s called The Poetry Massacre and it’s the cure for what ails you. Each participant brings in and recites a piece of poetry considered to be “bad”. Then the floor is opened to what ESU calls “a five hour onslaught resulting in a collapse of text.” Performances by New York Avenue and The Vestaloynes follow. Admission is $3 or free with a poem. I just wouldn’t suggest bringing something that you wrote – an ego can’t survive the wrath of 50 repressed English students.

Location: O’Grady’s Tap and Grill

Date: Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Time: 9:00 PM