CTV News Kitchener says goodbye to Will Aiello
Kitchener Watch
CTV News Kitchener said a fond farewell to Will Aiello as he heads off to CTV Ottawa.
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Globe and Mail
30 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
At Shaw, a confounding writing choice nearly ruins an otherwise passable trip to Narnia
Title: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Written by: Selma Dimitrijevic and Tim Carroll, adapted from the novel by C.S. Lewis Performed by: David Adams, Kristi Frank, Élodie Gillett, Alexandra Gratton, Jeff Irving, Dieter Lische-Parkes, Jade Repeta, Kiera Sangster, Michael Therriault, Kelly Wong, Shawn Wright Directed by: Selma Dimitrijevic Company: Shaw Festival Venue: Festival Theatre City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. Year: Until Oct. 4, 2025 The Shaw Festival's production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn't horrible. Some of it's quite fun. The production is well-paced, well-costumed and occasionally well-acted. But Selma Dimitrijevic and Tim Carroll's adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic tale – which sees the iconic Aslan imagined for the stage not as a lion, but as a man – seems to miss the point of Lewis's source material, without adding much meaning to the story through its myriad creative liberties. When we meet Aslan (Kelly Wong), a severed feline head hangs from his decidedly human shoulder. The Pevensie children – Lucy (Alexandra Gratton), Susan (Kristi Frank), Peter (Jeff Irving) and Edmund (Dieter Lische-Parks) – are almost as surprised as we are that Aslan, guardian of Narnia, is just as mortal as the humans they left on the other side of their magic wardrobe. When they ask about the discrepancy between the lore and the truth, the answer is, well, disappointing: Aslan appears as people want to see him. That's a nice idea. But… surely the Pevensies want to see the creature as the lion they've been promised, no? So, too, must the patrons who purchased tickets to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – heck, it's in the title. The Witch, the Wardrobe and … a guy named Aslan? Inside the Shaw Festival's final voyage to Narnia It's a deeply strange choice not helped by the fact that the other creatures of Narnia are perfectly delightful animals – especially Mr. and Mrs. Beaver (Shawn Wright and Jade Repeta, respectively), dressed in whimsical furs by designer Judith Bowden. The beavers' dam is warm, cheery and folksy; the beasts' hokey demeanours, too. When the Pevensies join the rodents for supper, it's the closest this jumbled production gets to capturing the wonders of Lewis's wholly original world. (If there couldn't be a lion, I'm at least glad there could be beavers.) The rest of the show is a more mixed affair. When we meet the Pevensies, sent away to the countryside at the onset of the Second World War, they're leaning on each other for support in their dreary new home, and hiding from the likes of Professor Kirk (David Adams) and Mrs. Macready (Kiera Sangster). Of course, the real story starts when Lucy, the youngest Pevensie, stumbles across Narnia at the back of a coat closet, and tumbles into a world of kings, queens and permanent winter. Lions aside, Dimitrijevic and Carroll mostly preserve the beats of Lewis's story, including the White Witch's lethal weapon of Turkish delight and a gnarly battle sequence that tops off the Pevensies' ascendancies to the Narnian monarchy. But Dimitrijevic helms a superficial production that doesn't take advantage of the script's capacity for interesting directorial interpretation. Adams and Sangster are badly underused – I found myself wondering if imaginative doubling might have drawn sweet parallels between the Pevensies' disparate worlds – and the final battle, set to a backdrop of piercing strobe lights, is messy and under-choreographed. Performances, too, vary throughout the cast – Gratton is the strongest of the children, followed by Lische-Parks (who's also a standout in the festival's Anything Goes). Michael Therriault's Mr. Tumnus is just right, frenetic and friendly, but Dimitrijevic and Carroll's new scenes for the faun in Act Two don't add much to his overall arc. Wong does what he can as the titular not-lion, but the cards are stacked against him – there's only so much an actor can do to compensate for muddy writing. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe might be an OK choice for young children (though the high schoolers at the performance I saw, judging by their frequent guffaws and post-show zingers, might disagree). For the little ones, Élodie Gillett's White Witch isn't especially scary, and seriously – those beavers are nearly worth the price of admission themselves. Tiny kiddos new to the world of theatre will probably enjoy them. But on the whole, while this chronicle of Narnia isn't terrible – just blandly, forgettably fine – it's not one I'd recommend for ardent fans of C.S. Lewis. Or, you know, lions.
CBC
42 minutes ago
- CBC
Gen Z TikTok star Jack Innanen tackles generational tension head on in Adults
After achieving astronomical online fame for his TikTok sketches, Toronto's Jack Innanen did what so many rising entertainers do. He moved to New York to pursue new acting opportunities. And success quickly followed, with Innanen scoring a starring role in FX's Adults, the latest evolution in the hangout sitcom about a bunch of 20-something New Yorkers stuck in arrested development. Ironically, the show landed Innanen right back in Toronto, where the city's busy streets and brunch spots approximate New York's vibe. "It was really funny," says Innanen during an interview with CBC Arts, "to work so hard to get that visa, move out immediately and then get shipped right back home." Innanen is once again on home turf, making the most of a local press day talking about going from social media to sitcom star in Adults, which is essentially the Gen Z and extremely online answer to Friends. It's the day before Adults premieres. Innanen started his morning flaunting the per diem he received in colourful Canadian cash on Instagram (making things extra local by playing Drake tracks over each story). Not long after, he's throwing those dollars around on a breakfast TV show. In the TikTok sketches that earned him more than three million followers, Innanen is usually performing two types of characters — school teachers, desperately single men and unsuspectingly horrible people among them — who engage in conversations that go from casual to extremely twisted. The actor started making those videos when he was attending the University of Toronto and credits the environment around him as inspiration for those sketches that got him global recognition. "I would just walk to class and look at the characters of Toronto," he says. "I see someone and would be like, 'I wonder what this person would be like stuck in an elevator' or something. Just living in Toronto, you kind of get punched in the face with cool stuff or funny, interesting people." In Adults, Innanen plays Paul Baker, a spacey hearthrob who was originally written as being from Colorado but rewritten as a Canadian. Innanen suspects the rewrite was made to accommodate his "sorrys" and "abouts." Paul Baker, who is always addressed and referred to by first and last name, is the newcomer to an extremely tight, verging on co-dependent friend group who all crowd around the same Queens, NY home. The show, which was at one point titled Snowflakes, also stars Amita Rao, Owen Thiele, Lucy Freyer and Canadian stand-up Malik Elassal as the various members of Friends 2.0. But unlike Ross, Rachel and Chandler, these titular adults are raunchy, diverse, extremely versed in global and social issues, and are often too disillusioned by the state of the world to have ambitions. In the pilot episode, the gang speaks enviously of an old classmate who achieved viral victim status, just to give you an idea of the bar they aspire to. A lot of the show's comedy is premised on how unprepared Gen Z is in today's world, to the point that Adulting 101 programs are being offered to help a generation raised with Uber and Venmo learn basic functions like changing a tire or filing their taxes. In the first episode, Elassal, playing Samir, steps into a bank in need of a cheque to pay for a furnace repair. The scene's a riot because of how utterly lost Samir is when it comes to finding the words to request such a thing. "I just got my cheque book the other day," says Innanen, at 26, relating so hard to that bit in particular. "Can I not just e-transfer my landlord? Now I have to get cheques! I have to mail a check to pay my taxes. A lot of paper bureaucracy is a big thing for me. What are we doing? Why can't I just text my vote in." Innanen also speaks to the generational tension that makes for so much of the show's most hilarious gags, especially when it feels like these characters are on completely different wavelengths, making basic comprehension impossible. Older characters tend to speak in practical or cancellable vernacular, to which Gen Z, and Innanen's Paul Baker in particular, might respond with a compilation of words so random and chaotic that it verges on poetry. When Innanen's Baker asks a gun shop owner, "what is the spectrum of your language?" it feels like he's capturing the essence of the show. "There's not only a language crisis but just an understanding crisis," says Innanen, elaborating on how Adults speaks to the zeitgeist. "There's a difference in just our understanding of the world. You talk about the job crisis or something, and your parents say, 'go in and just give the CEO a hard handshake and give him your resume and you'll get the job.' It's like, no. I've applied to 600 jobs on Indeed and heard nothing back. My job doesn't exist anymore because AI took it last week. It's just gone now." In speaking on a near-molecular level to a whole new generation weaned on social media discourse, Adults is also part of a wave of new shows made by studios going online to tap talent. Innanen references English Teacher, a brilliant sitcom about the culture wars created by TikTok star Brian Jordan Alvarez, and Overcompensating, the new Prime Video comedy (also shot in Toronto) from Benito Skinner, aka BennyDrama on social media. Innanen isn't even the only online star involved with Adults. The show's creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw first earned notoriety for a speech they delivered in front of Hillary Clinton at their Yale graduation. They performed a bit as a couple breaking up as a metaphor for moving on, and made the former secretary of state laugh out loud at a double entendre involving the word "endowed." "You're given the format of a speech —we're going to kill that," says Innanen, about what his generation can achieve. "You give us the format of a TV show — we're going to kill that. Someone who makes TikToks: they're a talent there, and they can also be a talent in this field." Of course, Innanen acknowledges that there's a huge adjustment from making content for the smallest screen (our phones), where instant gratification is king, to working on collaborative projects on the more traditional small screen. "You get to live in a scene with other people," he says, "and you have call backs, an actual narrative, an actual character, build an actual world, instead of a joke I'm trying to get off in like 45 seconds. Totally different. "Also, the waiting for over a year for [the show] to come out, that's really tough," Innanen adds, reminding us that the instant gratification when it comes to TikTok content goes both ways. "I'm used to, like, filming it. I edit it for a few hours. And it's out. And then, I never think about it again."
National Post
an hour ago
- National Post
Fewer education assistants means less support for Delta students
Article content DELTA, British Columbia — A shortage of education assistants in Delta Schools will mean less support for the district's most vulnerable students next school year. This is the warning from CUPE 1091, the union representing school support workers in the Delta School District. Article content 'Education assistants are overwhelmed trying to meet the needs of students. Come September, there will be even fewer of them,' says Daun Frederickson, a Delta school support worker and president of CUPE 1091. 'It is so much harder for students with complex needs to succeed at school without one-on-one support. For our schools to be truly inclusive, they need EAs.' Article content The Delta School District is faced with a half million-dollar shortfall for its 2025-2026 budget. Despite an ongoing shortage of EAs, the district will not be able to replace retiring EAs and will need to leave other EA and support staff positions vacant, unless the province steps in with more education funding for the next school year. Article content 'B.C. public schools should be inclusive for every child. Cutting EAs, like in Delta, Surrey, and Prince George, just to name a few communities, makes it harder for schools to be inclusive for students with complex needs,' says Paul Simpson, head of the K-12 Presidents Council and a Burnaby school support worker. Article content The K-12 Presidents Council, representing over 60 K-12 support staff union locals across B.C., including CUPE 1091, says the cuts being experienced in Delta are happening across B.C. It has launched a province-wide campaign, Better BC Schools, calling on the province to increase funding for EAs and other supports for public schools to help B.C. families. Article content 'School support workers could be doing so much more – helping more students in every grade, helping expand before- and after- school child care spaces we desperately need,' says Simpson. 'These are investments that could make a real difference for practically every family in this province. All school support workers in B.C. are dedicated to making our schools better for students and are ready to work with school districts and the province towards that goal.' Article content Article content Article content Article content Article content Contacts Article content For more information: Article content
