Kelsey Grammer can fill a musical theatre venue.<\/strong> And can do it with the shittiest singing voice I’ve ever paid $75 to listen to. And thoroughly enjoyed. I doubt that if Jesus was a Canadian, and he came back to life, and he starred in “Godspell” at the Royal Alexander on King, and the tickets were free, the show would shut in two weeks. One thing I should mention: while Kelsey was the big name, the real star of La Cage Aux Folles was Douglas Hodge, whose edification of Albin won hands limply down over Nathan Lane’s in “The Bird Cage”<\/p>\n

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TO’s Dundas Square over NYC Times Square?<\/strong> I’ll take TO’s. It’s less crowded and less kinetic. While Times Square is breathtakingly bright and energetic, it gets tiring after 10 minutes trying to rest your eyes on something that doesn’t want your money. At least in TO you can look at Kevin Frankish.<\/p>\n

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Food? Hands down NYC. Travel to Food? NYC.<\/strong> TO is still young and is still compartmentalizing it’s ethnic diversity so if you want good Italian one night, it’s a streetcar ride over to College and Bathurst, another streetcar in the opposite direction for an hour to get great Indian. NYC is blurring these kind of lines as space becomes more and more expensive. In one block you can get Mexican Fusion, hi-fashion fried chicken on a waffle (I did!) or the latest in hip trendy sushi styles. You can get fried endangered Galapagos turtle on the streets of NYC. TO can’t even manage a good (edible, safe) hot dog.<\/p>\n

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Apple Store.<\/strong> TO’s Eaton Centre is far less frustrating than 5th Ave’s outlet. While ours smells like wet sock on a good day, at the NYC store, you could get knifed over a Mac Book Air and a Specialist would not even notice you until you bled out and fell hard onto the floor. Maybe.<\/p>\n

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Museums, Art and General Culture<\/strong>. NYC wins this by default – duh. How do you compete with the culture capital of North America? Besides, TO will soon be abandoning any semblance of intelligent art\/culture endowments, replaced with corporate funded pap, thanks to Rob Ford’s proposed money cuts.<\/p>\n

I know it’s not fair to compare TO to NYC. TO is an embryo compared to NYC’s maturity. But we’d be wise to look up to our older sibs if we want to be world class.<\/p>\n

Couple more pics for you. Be sure to follow my photo updates on my NYC Set on Flickr<\/a><\/p>\n

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Toronto (TO) is surpassing New York City (NYC) in dirt. While TO is still quite clean (I’d eat a pickle slice off the ground in the TTC over the NYC Subway) the actual “feel” of TO is becoming less than stellar. This morning I saw a lot more random garbage during my walk to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[3,23],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9WjY-1Nl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6903"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}