Summary Of Kiss And Cry At The Bluma Appeal Theatre By Toby Regbo

Some loves are like onions. They start dry, then you cry, then you get used to it – but there are things you can’t digest.

That is the short, unusual simile expressed by narrator, Toby Regbo as he accounts for one of the heroine’s love affairs. Charleroi Danses’ Kiss and Cry at the Bluma Appeal Theatre in Toronto is all that unusual, amusing, magical, and much more. It is a story of Gisele - an old, lonely woman reminiscing over her past lovers and memories surrounding them. Her first love, she recalls, was a 14-year-old boy she met when she was 12 and whose hand she momentarily touched in a crowded train. Since then, she searches for love, and we are introduced to her four other partners, for whom her feelings never match the intensity of the first.
Throughout the story, the pair of hands dance, get furious, dispute and reconcile. Astonishingly, the hands manage to say a lot without saying anything at all. Standing on two fingers, they transform into lovers taking tentative steps towards one another, touching and erotically dancing in a club, hugging and kissing, craving and rejecting intimacy. At times, these scenes are rather amusing and the audience gets a good laugh. And although one may think so, it is not these hands that hold the show together. Rather it is in the live screening of an almost dreamlike journey through Gisele’s life and reminiscence that lays the core beauty and essence of this show – the fact that the entire thing is being screened as it is