Controversy all over the place

Well, here’s an interesting tactic to lure out-of-province tourists: “Drive to Toronto — Park Anywhere You Please!” Of course, even if you are from the city, it’s not like you ever have to pay parking tickets. Just formally challenge them. They get caught up in the municipal courts and never see the light of day. This reporter is still waiting for a court date relating to a ticket he received in December 2006.

Cool stage news this week, gay Toronto actor Michael Sutherland-Young is set to make his full-monty stage debut in the totally gay new play With Bated Breath at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre. The play’s about a small town boy from Cape Breton who moves to Montreal to become a stripper, so the nudity’s not completely gratuitous like in that other Centaur Production the article mentions.

Also in stage news, and apologies that I’m a bit behind on catching this one, but Theatre Passe Muraille has announced its 2009-10 season, and it will include the gay hip-hopera Bash’d, which has already toured the country on the Fringe circuit and had a successful run Off-Broadway last summer. You’ll want to catch this one.

Meanwhile, another gay Toronto arts gadfly, John Greyson, is stirring up controversy in the Middle East (and isn’t that an accomplishment!), but boycotting the Tel Aviv International LGBT Film Festival citing the “growing boycott movement against Israeli apartheid.”

And we end the week with Mitchel Raphel’s retrospective on Michael Ignatieff’s rise to almost-power, including a lovely photo of Iggy at the 2006 Toronto Pride Parade.

Rob Salerno is a playwright and journalist whose writing has appeared in such publications as Vice, Advocate, NOW and OutTraveler.

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