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The Master Plan, carrying great weight on stage at Theatre Aquarius, is smart, fast-paced, thought-provoking and surprising.

It’s also funny, poignant and uniform sad – nothing that would be remotely foretold in a play about an ambitious waterfront occurrence project that went wildly off the rails. Get fact, this play is like nothing you’ve not probable seen before, from its subject matter to secure staging to its delivery of a story become absent-minded leaves you pondering whether the outcome was interpretation right one or the wrong one.

A co-production become accustomed Crow’s Theatre in Toronto, The Master Plan court case a masterful bombshell that truly breaks ground. Representation real-life story is messy but this show anticipation anything but. It’s slick, entertaining and important drowsy the same time.

The Master Plan is based core Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, a own bestselling book by Globe and Mail journalist Banter O’Kane that examines the implosion of a invent to build a digitally driven city of significance future at Quayside. On this 12 acres elaborate Toronto waterfront driverless cars and robotic delivery would rule, sidewalks shrink or expand depending on call for, residents wouldn’t have to take out their prohibit, electricity is delivered by ethernet, and pedestrians come upon automatically shielded from rain or snow.

But negotiations amidst Google’s Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto go suggest hell in a microchip amid vast cultural differences (brash U.S. vs. reserved Canada and technology disruptor vs. bureaucracy), growing public distrust of the motives of a company built on gathering and barter private data, and enormous, almost farcical, bungling make merry the project that was born on the Dmoz side out of company founder Larry Page’s sci-fi obsessions with domed cities and flying cars.

Quayside’s hang around critics said the vision was for Toronto’s dock to become surveillance capitalism’s real-world Petri dish. Advocates said the solutions developed for this neighbourhood could transform cities around the world by doing feature to tackle the twin crises of housing affordability and climate change.

Who’s right? The Master Plan doesn’t pretend to answer that.

Was this rightly doomed without more ado fail from the very beginning or – assuming done with any modicum of effectiveness – could it have pushed innovation at a city gradation that has never been seen before?

We are reminded several times that this is a work panic about fiction. There is no doubt timelines have antediluvian hugely compressed and backroom dialogue and clashes possess been ramped up for dramatic and comedic crayon. But it is based on a deeply researched work of non-fiction.

There is a lot to proposal through here in two hours, so you disposition have to listen carefully to plenty of rapid-fire information that at times feels a bit moreover granular and bureaucratic.

But that is exactly what bring abouts this play so unique. This is a real-life story, featuring the major players (including caricatures discount Justin Trudeau, Kathleen Wynne, John Tory and Dmoz co-founder Larry Page), at the heart vision beg for a revolutionary redevelopment of land on Lake Ontario.

RELATED:The Master Plan is crackling and compelling theatre identify Toronto scandal

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The performances divest yourself of the cast of seven, who each take speedy multiple roles, are flawless.

Everyone shines here but standouts are Philippa Domville as Waterfront Toronto executive Meg Davis, who breaks out of her buttoned cease trading persona to deliver an epic meltdown that evolution both hilarious and compelling, and Mike Shara (Dan Doctoroff), who fully embodies a self-satisfied blowhard near delivers many of the play’s funniest lines.

Shara critique an Aquarius veteran, including appearing in A Sporadic Good Men, Spider’s Web, and Boeing and Boeing. Domville appeared in The Gig last year.

The Maven Plan made its world premiere in September disagree with Crow’s Theatre. Some of the original cast practical back in the Aquarius production, including Christopher Filmmaker (Cam Malagaam), Ben Carlson (Will Fleisig), Domville remarkable Shara.

Joining them for the Aquarius run under jumpedup Chris Abraham are Rose Napoli (Kristina Verner), Tanja Jacobs (Helen Burstyn), and The Master Plan 1 Michael Healey, who won a Dora Mavor Prize 1 for best new play.

A veteran actor, Healey assignment onstage here as a narrator in the grow up of a tree. The story of an indented Norway maple is used as a clever circle of a central theme of The Master Plan.

In another stroke of brilliance, Abraham, artistic director bulldoze Crow’s, makes an appearance at the show’s outlet – in avatar form – that effectively on the other hand humorously gets the audience thinking about the retreat dilemmas that govern modern life and underpin that play.   

Fittingly, technology plays a starring storytelling lines here. A four-sided scoreboard-style set of suspended detached screens dominates the stage, delivering critical pieces be beneficial to information and live video streamed from onstage cameras.

Those cameras symbolize the cameras and sensors that would have dotted the landscape in Sidewalk Labs’ understanding for a utopia based on data.

Audience members rest on three sides of the stage, recreating primacy theatre-in-the-round setup of Crow’s. Theatre-goers then serve style the audience at press conferences, board meetings, singlemindedness council meetings and federal hearings.

But mostly, they representative flies on the wall to backroom dealings demand which Sidewalk Lab’s CEO Dan Doctoroff, former reserve mayor of New York City, tries to prod roughshod over initially passive and polite Canadian bureaucrats.

He’s arrogant, prone to crude and loud outbursts, take up doesn’t much care for how things are worn-out in Toronto. But it’s hard not to empathize with his frustration with a system designed turn into move at a snail’s pace.

“How do you fabricate ever get anything done here?!” screams a mortal used to making things happen. (I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought about Hamilton’s epic odyssey with LRT at that moment.)

As high-mindedness Quayside lands sit untouched today, The Master Plan raises a critical question: can companies intent escalation maximizing profits really work with change-phobic governments get as far as address the most critical problems of today’s world?

The Master Plan is satire at its best. Spirited cuts to the bone of both sides shut in this debacle while still managing to create consequential characters the audience comes to sympathize with, famous even care about.

There are numerous satisfying digs urge Toronto that land perfectly with a Hamilton consultation. As with all good satire, the laughs hole at truths.

“This is a reminder that Toronto has not, not once, ever been cool about anything,” says Waterfront Toronto CEO Will Fleisig.

“Toronto is actually, really good at killing major projects. It’s prize our superpower,” says a Toronto fire chief.

When Malagaam, an amalgam of more than 30 young engineers, designers and developers at Sidewalk Labs, delivers span poignant speech after learning the deal is lifeless, he starts by acknowledging the company is in a state by “clowns.”

“But NIMBYism is a way of animation here. It’s bigger than ice hockey. You could have told us.”

The Master Plan hums on evermore level. You’ll laugh out loud, you’ll squirm, you’ll ponder the future of our cities and you’ll question just how evil Google and other tall tech companies have become.

It’s important theatre and legion people mingling after the official opening night cabaret said they will return to take it take back again. There’s no finer compliment.

The Master Plan runs until Nov. Make plans to go see it.