# Is Toronto a fun place to visit?



## KnowitallSkyScraper (Feb 3, 2006)

Alright, so here in Buffalo we're about two or three hours from Toronto.
Now, the last time me and my parents had a full vacation in Toronto I was very very little.

But how much has changed in the last 9 or 10 years? Does Toronto have any really fun attractions? If we do go there, what places would you reccomend we visit?


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## Skybean (Jun 16, 2004)

I may be biased, but if I was within such a short driving distance from Toronto I would come very often -- several times a year at least. 

10 years is a long time, what do you have to lose?

One new attraction that has opened is the Distillery District, the largest and best preserved collection of Victorian Industrial Architecture in North America.
http://www.thedistillerydistrict.com/index.html









Another exciting area is Yonge Dundas Square beside Eaton Centre. 









If you like the arts (broadway musicals), Toronto is the place to go if you are far from New York and London. The new show, The Lord of the Rings, had its world premiere in Toronto and is currently showing now.

Architecture lovers can also witness the great change of Toronto through the renovation of our numerous cultural institutions, which are amongst the top in the country. Currently under construction are the Royal Ontario Museum (Libeskind) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Gehry) and there are many others. 

Sports is also quite big. Lacrosse, NHL, NBA, MLB, etc.

Food and shopping are also quite good with the variety that comes from a population that is amongst the most diverse in the world.

You can go anywhere inner city with subway, streetcar and even bus.

And of course, safety is not a concern.

*Tourism Sites -- some good package deals within*
http://www.torontotourism.com/Visitor
http://www.toronto.ca/visitors/


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## thryve (Mar 5, 2005)

OMG Yes toronto is a blast!!! Everything from taking the subway and enjoying the strange characters you see, strutting around classy Yorkville, shopping on Eglinton and downtown, there's nice old neighbourhoods like Rosedale, Forest Hill, Cabbagetown, there's Harbourfront Centre entertainment, there's everything that's been mentioned above such as sports and theatre, and great architecture, multicultural activities, etc.......it's a blast! 

gotta run,
-thryve


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## Xusein (Sep 27, 2005)

Fine city, had some great times there...


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## schmidt (Dec 5, 2002)

TORONTO!!!

Toronto is an AMAZING city. I had one of the best times in my life over there. (and it was winter!)


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## ♣628.finst (Jul 29, 2005)

Toronto! If you like sports, that;s a lot out there. 

But I didn't think Toronto is a fine city, or an Amazing city. Yes, it's skyline is amazing, but nothing else surprised me, just everything is LARGE in Toronto.


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## Towers (Jan 3, 2006)

its way better in the summer then winter. always visit in summer. summer are exciting times here


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## algonquin (Sep 24, 2004)

I'll second that... come to Toronto during the summer. Almost every weekend somethings going on. Come during the Molson Indy, Carribanna, the Toronto Street Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, the CNE, PRIDE.... you won't be bored.

Not to mention the attractions that are there year-round. The best thing about Toronto is street life.... spend time to walk around. You'll need a lot of time. Toronto's best strength are it's walkable, unique pedestrian neighbourhoods... of course they are best experienced in the summer.


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## algonquin (Sep 24, 2004)

Do you like Lord of the Rings? It premieres tonight in T.O.

*
It's curtain up for Frodo, Gollum and Gandalf. Tonight is opening night, and that means the make-or-break period is under way for the $28-million Lord of the Rings stage show*

MICHAEL POSNER

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

And so the hour of the Shire has come at last.

After four years of development, many false starts, racking doubt followed by tantalizing possibility followed by sure conviction, endless script rewrites, songs written and songs scrapped, a protracted wrangle over whether to stage it in London or Toronto, a summer-long casting process, six gruelling months in rehearsal and seven weeks of sorely needed previews, one journey has ended and another -- the journey of Frodo, Gollum, Gandalf and all the magical creatures of Middle-Earth -- finally begins.

At 6:30 p.m. this evening, at Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre, the curtain rises on the world premiere of the stage version of J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Produced by Kevin Wallace, directed by Matthew Warchus, with music by the Finnish folk ensemble Varttina and India's A. R. Rahman, it's an adaptation that is unique by almost any measure.

Unique not only in cost -- at $28-million, it's hands-down the most expensive stage production in history -- it's unusual in being a show that is nearly impossible to define, because it simultaneously is and is not a musical, is and is not a play, is and is not a circus act, is and is not a vast spectacle. It's a theatrical experience unlike any other.

But how it is ultimately defined, by critics and audiences, will go a long way toward determining whether the show runs for one year -- or many years.

It's a week before opening night and Wallace is in his fifth-floor aerie at Mirvish Productions. Although he shares producer credits with Saul Zaentz, who bought creative rights to the property from the Tolkien estate four decades ago and later produced the film version, Wallace is the real engine here. An actor turned producer, he speaks about the show with something approaching religious fervour, his eyes closed.

A Catholic lad from Limerick, "incredibly superstitious and crossing myself 50 times a day," he woke this morning thinking "in one week, the history of the show will have been written." By which he means that the world's critics, hundreds of whom descended on Toronto last weekend to see one of the final previews, will have rendered their verdicts.

Wallace has seen the show more than 30 times. The last occasion was the previous Saturday night. He took very few notes, he says. "The company had reached a level of fullness, where they were really inhabiting the stage. And I thought, 'This has achieved my objective. The show is where I would want it to be going into the final week of previews.' "

He reaches for a soccer analogy -- his father managed a club in Limerick, and the game was woven into the fabric of his childhood. "The team is ready now. It's had its pre-season training. Of course, every performance is different because every game is different, and yet it's the same. So the show is in the hands of 150 people every night -- the cast, the crew, the orchestra, the technicians."

He knows how easily it can all go wrong. "Will the fiddles be absolutely sharp? Will the sound mix be exactly as you want it to be? Will the actor hit the line? Precision is required every night. There can be a key line in the script that needs to have a chest-voice delivery, on the first syllable of the first word, and if the actor goes to a head voice, you miss it. You miss the logic and you're out of the story for several minutes."

And while he maintains that everyone is now playing at the top of their game, he wants his 55 actors to be able to retain a sense of freedom, so that they play with instinct as opposed to watching themselves. "And yes, it's important that they play well in front of the critics and in front of the opening-night audience, but in terms of word of mouth, it's important that they play well eight times a week, with intensity and focus. It's boot camp and a Buddhist monastery, for a year [the time remaining on the cast's contracts]."

A lot has happened to The Lord of the Rings since its first 5½-hour preview on Feb. 2. First, the show has been cut and cut again, so that it now runs three hours and 30 minutes including intermissions. That was the main challenge, to trim without doing perceptible damage to the integrity of the saga. Dozens of other changes, large and small, have been made. Costumes and makeup have been revised -- the disfiguring Hobbit eyebrows, for example, are gone. The lighting has been tweaked. A solution to the cranky multilevel stage, with 17 built-in elevators -- it caused show stoppages at several previews -- has been found. The scene structure of Act II has been altered and new scenes written for Gollum, played by Michael Therriault. A new curtain call has been installed, which incorporates more of the show's musical numbers. Warchus and his creative team are staying another month in Toronto to do more fine-tuning, depending on reviews.

It's the three months that follow opening night, Wallace says, that determines the fate of any show, "whether it's going to run or not run. Even with great reviews, you can't sit back. You've got to communicate them to the marketplace. Those who read the reviews or hear about them are a fraction of the number you need to reach. The thing you can't control is, what is the smell of the production? Is it good or is it bad? I'd love to know how that gets formed. But somehow a message goes out. An impression is formed and it's formed very quickly. And so you can tell by how the audience enters the theatre whether they already believe it's a hit or they don't."

Wallace says he is isn't troubled by the challenge of defining exactly what The Lord of the Rings is, as a genre. "I think that's one of its greatest strengths. Because it's a testimony to the fact that what Warchus set out to do was put Lord of the Rings on stage, and he was going to call on all the traditions of the theatre to serve the story. That's what he's done. So now we have to wait for that definition to form. You're asking people to spend $125 on a Saturday night. They need to know what they're going to see."

In a month, Wallace, Warchus and the others will be gone. They'll be in London, starting the next chapter in The Lord of the Rings' stage history. Auditions for the London production begin in April, the show goes into rehearsal in November and it's scheduled to open at the Dominion Theatre in 2007. Other productions are also planned, so that if it has legs, it's entirely conceivable that Wallace will end up devoting 10 years of his life to a single project.

He smiles. "It would be wonderful to have that problem."


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## schmidt (Dec 5, 2002)

Towers said:


> its way better in the summer then winter. always visit in summer. summer are exciting times here


Heh interesting. Here in warmer parts of the world people recommend the inverse. We always tell people to come here in winter cuz cities will be more busy and all. In the summer EVERYBODY rushes into the beaches, nobody stays in non coastal, actually non beach cities eheh.

I visited Toronto in the winter and I think I would have enjoyed more in the summer.


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