THE WEEK MARCH 8 TO 14

GALLERIES

It’s not every gallerist in town that would have the chutzpah to allow an artist to transform their space into a heartfelt tribute to rummage-sale art, but that’s exactly what’s been going on at MKG127 this month.

Walk past the windows on Ossington Ave. and you’ll see Laura Kikauka’s dizzying show, “Strength Through Embarrassment,” covering almost every inch of the gallery’s walls.

Tiled side-by-each, Kikauka festoons the gallery with thrift-shop art finds — lovingly amateurish landscapes, wildlife, still-life paintings — and adds her own embellishments, in the form of hand-painted song lyrics.

(My favourite: A painfully orange- hued winter scene of an angular river, wending its way through a wonky landscape, bears the phrase, “Every junkie is like the setting sun,” from Neil Young’s majestically understated “The Needle and the Damage Done.”) All is not so grim — a cute thatchedroof cottage is encircled by Randy Bachman’s eternal “We love to work at nothing all day;” an awkwardly rendered stork perches on one leg with a phrase from the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” — but there’s a potent unity here in the agglomeration of unpractised hands given singular voices not their own. One might even call it a canny confluence of popular cultures. You think? Only until Saturday, so move quickly. (MKG127, 127 Ossington Ave., www.mkg127.com.) Murray Whyte

THEATRE

Soulpepper’s production of Eugene O’neill’s shattering Long Day’s Journey Into Night has drawn especially good reviews for its two younger cast members: Evan Buliung as the dissolute Jamie and Gregory Prest as the consumptive Edmund. Both are the kind of dynamite actors who seem to be getting better with each new appearance. (Remember Buliung in Stratford’s The Grapes of Wrath or Prest in Soulpepper’s Ghosts?) The next time someone tries to tell you there are no great performers in the next generation, send them to see these two in action. (Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill St.; tickets: $51-$68, students $32, rush $22 at 416-866-8666 or soulpepper.ca) Richard Ouzounian

MOVIES

They’ve been trying to make a movie out of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sci-fi western character John Carter since the 1930s, long stymied by the tricky ping-ponging between the Wild West of the Arizona of the 1880s and the even wilder environs of the planet Mars. Enter Disney with John Carter, directed by Pixar champ Andrew Stanton ( WALL-E, Finding Nemo), which leaps to a theatre near you on Friday. Peter Howell