Michael Jackson The Immortal World Tour kicked off its Toronto shows Friday night at the Air Canada Centre. Being a old fan of Michael Jackson and Cirque du Soleil, I was anticipating some magical synergy.

The show's premise had promise, but in execution it lacked the soul that I've come to expect from Cirque productions, such as OVO or Allegria.

The production suffers by trying too hard to capture too much of Jackson's musical output instead of focusing on achieving a wow-factor in bringing the most important elements of his music and life to the big stage.

The Ugly One left me squirming in my seat. It's not so much the subject matter -- the importance we give to vanity -- but how quickly things can turn when taken to the extreme.

In our society, plastic surgery has become so commonplace that, for some, it's no longer sufficient to get a facelift or a boob job. We're enticed with ads for botox, liposuction, even penis enlargements and designer vaginas. Where will it end?

The Ugly One is an uncomfortably absurdist, biting comedy by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, in the Theatre Smash production that just opened at the Tarragon Theatre. It revolves around Lette, a happily-married man (adeptly played by David Jansen) whose wife (Naomi Wright) has never told him how unspeakably ugly his face is. Nobody has.

Primus fans are a funny bunch. They chant "Primus sucks" but mean it as a compliment.

If Wednesday night's show at Massey Hall was any indication, the band continues to keep its fans happy, promoting Green Naugahyde, its first studio album in 11 years. With just three musicians on stage, Primus played a three-hour set (with intermission) that kept the fans on their feet almost the entire show.

Paul Kelly treated Toronto to two sold-out nights of his brilliant songwriting at The Dakota this past weekend, playing an alphabetical selection from his vast repertoire.

Kelly is touring his popular-back-home-in-Australia A-Z shows, where he plays a song or two that starts with the letter A and works his way through to Z, engaging his audience with little stories along the way.

It would be disingenuous for me to call His Greatness a fiasco. Or turgid. Those words are reserved for the output of some other playwright.

His Greatness, written and performed by Dan MacIvor and directed by Ed Roy, is "a potentially true story about a the playwright Tennessee Williams." And it's nothing like the fictional play-within-a-play's scathing reviews.

It's a play, which opened last night at the Factory Studio Theatre and is full of zingers delivered by Richard Donat, who plays Williams as he loses his grip on reality through excessive drinking and debauchery. Or is it madness?

Marat/Sade is Soup Can Theatre's adaptation of Peter Weiss' drama-musical (full title: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade). It's delightfully wicked.

If that's not a strange enough concept for a play, envision director Sarah Thorpe's take on it. She has changed the setting to McGill University's psychiatry department circa 1957, where Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron -- the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association -- conducted psychologically torturous experiments on un-consenting patients.