DAYTIME
K2: Danger and Desire on the Savage Mountain
We won’t say that Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner can’t get any better than she already is as a mountaineer, but she definitely reached her peak in 2012. That was the year the high-climbing Austrian co-led a team with her husband to the top of K2, a fiendishly difficult ascent that was achieved without benefit of supplementary oxygen. As part of the National Geographic Live speaking series, the female alpinist talks about the climb and also shows images – stunning photographs that will take everyone’s breath away but hers.
Feb. 28, 2 p.m. (and Feb. 29 and March 1, 8 p.m.). $19.50 to $79.50. Roy Thomson Hall, 60 Simcoe St., 416-872-4255 or masseyhall.com.
NIGHTTIME
Rae Spoon
The latest album from the gifted Canadian singer-songwriter Rae Spoon is Armour, an album recognizable by its armadillo artwork and lean electro-dance arrangements. It’s a reaction to the 2013 LP My Prairie Home, a deeply personal opening up to her audience that left the musician questioning the need for boundaries and protection. Intensely human but still hummable, the songs of Armour are thoughtful reflections on the fortresses we all need, sung by an artist who knows that “we are not made to be broken, even by our own hands.”
Feb. 28 and 29, 8 p.m. $16 (sold out). Holy Oak Cafe, 1241 Bloor St W., 647-345-2803 or eventbrite.ca.
FOR THE KIDS
Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age
They were both huge, shaggy and outrageously tusked mammals that roamed the Ice Age plains, but mastodons never got the attention and adjectival status that mammoths received. That all changes with an in-depth, interactive display in which the prehistoric elephants get equal billing. The exhibition is multifaceted, offering among other things the chance for visitors to utilize robotic trunks, those curved, elongated incisors which the beasts wore with distinction until their unfortunate extinction.
$13 to $22. Ontario Science Centre, 70 Don Mills Rd., 416-696-1000 or ontariosciencecentre.ca.
FUNDRAISER
Gala of Song
The opera star Jane Archibald has been all over the world, her dramatic voice taking the Nova Scotian to Toronto to San Francisco to the Vienna State Opera and elsewhere. The soprano apparently hasn’t forgotten where she came from, because on Sunday she and other soloists will return to their training ground for an evening of operatic and classical chestnuts in benefit of the Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church Choir, their former singing group.
Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m. $50. Trinity-St. Paul's United Church, 427 Bloor St. W. 416-922-8435 (ext. 21) or eventbrite.ca.
LAST CHANCE
Gaslight
The term “gas lighting” does not only refer to antique lamp situations but also to the type of insidious mind games in which lies are fed to victims in order to make them question their own sanity. It’s the type of psychological abuse that is central to a Victoria melodrama that was adapted into a 1944 film that starred Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. In his review of the current production here, Globe theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck characterized Gaslight as something not quite a thriller and not quite a mystery. Or so he would have us believe.
To Feb. 28. $49 to $119. Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St., 416-872-1212 or mirvish.com.