Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
Toronto:
There were two prominent theatre news items this year. One was the extraordinary decision of the Board of the Factory Theatre to fire the theatre’s founder Ken Gass. After petitions demanding his reinstatement and artists pulling their work from the theatre schedule, Gass decided to found another theatre company, Canadian Rep Theatre, dedicated to producing new Canadian works – such as those pulled from the factory line-up. The second big story was the announcement by David Mirvish that he plans to demolish the 20-year-old Princess of Wales Theatre and to replace it with a museum showcasing his art collection, a new campus for the OCAD University and three 80-storey-tall condo towers designed by Toronto-born superstar architect Frank Gehry, that Mirvish called “Sculptures for people to live in”.
This year I found I couldn’t narrow my list the best productions in Toronto down to only ten. Thus, in alphabetical order here is my list of the twelve best productions in Toronto in 2012. As usual, I have excluded works that have appeared recently on this list such as Opera Atelier’s remount of Armide.
L’Amour de loin by Kaija Saariaho, Canadian Opera Company. This opera marked the first time the COC had staged an opera by a female composer and the first time it had staged one by a Finnish composer, Finland being a country renowned for producing fine modern operas despite its relatively small population. L’Amour de loin, about the transcendent but unrequited love between troubadour Jaufré Rudel (Russell Braun) and a noblewoman (Erin Wall) in Tripoli, Lebanon, proved to be exquisitely beautiful and was given an absolutely dazzling production by Daniele Finzi Pasca, known for his work with Cirque du Soleil.
Between the Sheets by Jordi Mand, Nightwood Theatre. This hour-long play took one of the clichés of soap opera – wife confronts mistress – and raised it to the level of tragedy. Expertly directed by Kelly Thornton, Susan Coyne as the wife and Christine Horne as the mistress and teacher of the erring husband’s child, gave sizzling performances that kept us on the edge of our seats until the final shock that ends the play.
Bliss by Olivier Choinière, translated by Caryl Churchill, Candles Are For Burning. Why would one of the greatest British playwrights of the 20th century translate a Québécois play about Wal-Mart employees’ raving about seeing Céline Dion live? One answer is Choinière’s innovative dramatic structure where we have to divine the relationship of a hidden individual and a three-person chorus. A second is Choinière’s trenchant sociopolitical insight into the nature of celebrity worship as a means of suppressing the individual. Both created a totally riveting dramatic experience.
Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass, Luminato. Luminato gave us the chance to see this seminal 20th-century work for the first time in this country and in a new production devised by the three original creators – composer Philip Glass, director and designer Robert Wilson and choreographer Lucinda Childs – in what will likely be the last time they will have the chance to collaborate again. The huge multimedia choral ballet/movement piece may not be an “opera”, but it helped to change both the nature of the subject matter of theatre and the way in which it is presented. This was by far the theatrical event of the year.
England by Tim Crouch, SoCo Theatre, Toronto Fringe Festival. Tim Crouch’s “play” takes the form first of a guided tour of an art gallery by two guides in hospital gowns and ends as a press conference where a Middle eastern woman thanks the wife of the donor of the heart transplant that saved her life. The dual structure of the play raised myriad disquieting questions about life, death and art and the commodification of all three.
The Golden Dragon by Roland Schimmelpfennig, Tarragon Theatre. In terms of innovative dramaturgy and exploration of theme, The Golden Dragon is one of the most exciting plays the Tarragon has presented in years. The play worked as a magic realist fable about the exploitation of undocumented labourers using intertwined stories, including one about insects, to ask the fundamental question of what causes one group of people to view another group as expendable.
Home by David Storey, Soulpepper. Immaculately directed by Albert Schultz, this British play from 1970 about the chance encounters among residence of a nursing home has only gained in resonance throughout the years. Gradually Storey reveals that the “home” where the characters live is not so much an anomalous place for social misfits as we first think but a microcosm of the outside world that created it.
Miss Caledonia by Melody A. Johnson, Lunkamud/Tarragon Theatre. Johnson has created a funny, absolutely heart-warming solo show based on the true story of her mother’s yearning for something more than the drudgery of farm life in the 1950s. Playing over 20 characters, male and female, Johnson’s transformations reflect a story about transcending the roles others force on us. Johnson draws us into her story immediately and keeps us in her gentle grip until the close.
Penny Plain by Ronnie Burkett, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. This, Burkett’s most succinct and disturbing show yet, deals with the world facing its end, with the archetypal puppeteer Geppetto, who made Pinocchio, and with a blind woman who treats her dog as a gentleman. From these components Burkett creates a story that shows both that the world becomes what we treat it and that we have to accept that we as humans are not fully in control – a plunge into the deep insights of one of Canada’s greatest performers.
Terminus by Mark O’Rowe. Outside the March/Mirvish Productions. The events of one extraordinary night in modern Dublin told in a series of monologues in rhyming couplets by two women and one man. The narratives of the three are coarse in language and gruesome in detail as befitting the present age but the supernatural nature of their stories links them back to Irish ballads of old. How the three tales are related creates dramatic suspense and when we find the answer prospects of horror and hope open up we had not imagined. A brilliantly directed and acted evening of storytelling as theatre.
Les 3 Exils de Christian E. by Philippe Soldevila and Christian Essiambre. Théâtre français de Toronto. In any given year Toronto sees dozens of autobiographical solo shows. What Christian Essiambre achieves with the help of director Philippe Soldevila is the ability to find universal resonance in the personal. A francophone actor from new Brunswick, Christian can’t find work in Montreal because of his Acadian accent. When a childhood friend goes missing, Christian takes a journey back to his home and into the past to find neither is what he thought they were. Trained as an actor and acrobat, Essiambre gives an amazingly intense physical and vocal performance.
War Horse by Nick Stafford, Mirvish Productions. An all-Canadian cast brings Michael Morpurgo’s story of a boy’s search for his horse in the battlefields of World War I vividly to life through acting, song and the fantastic puppetry of the life-sized horses. All are integrated into a tale of epic sweep with a deep emotional pull about a bond between man and beast that survives the horror of war.
There are many choices for worse theatre production in Toronto in 2012, but probably the most disappointing was:
Cruel and Tender by Martin Crimp. This play, an updating of Sophocles’ tragedy about the death of Hercules, The Women of Trachis, marked Atom Egoyan’s debut as a theatre director. Unfortunately, he showed none of he invention or insight he has displayed as director of such operas as Salome or Die Walküre. The play, itself problematic, came off as disjointed and uninteresting, and Egoyan’s wife Arsinée Khanjian gave a dreadful, often unintelligible performance as Crimp’s equivalent for Hercules’ jealous wife Deianira.
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Stratford:
The 2012 Stratford Shakespeare Festival programmed four musicals and only three Shakespeares. Artistic Director Des McAnuff ended his tenure a year early, ceding his position to new Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino, who promptly dropped the word “Shakespeare” from the Festival’s official title again. The three best shows were:
Cymbeline by William Shakespeare. It has been a long time since the best show at the Festival has been a Shakespeare, but director Antoni Cimolino working with an all-star cast revealed this fairy-tale-like play as one Shakespeare’s most profound and moving romances with superb performances from Graham Abbey as Posthumus, Cara Ricketts as Innogen and Brian Tree as Innogen’s faithful servant. To reveal the greatness in unjustly neglected classical works is exactly what the Festival should be doing.
42nd Street by Harry Warren and Al Dubin. Stratford’s expertise in musicals reached a peak with this tap-dance extravaganza based on the hits of film songwriters Warren and Dubin, who wrote the music for so many Busby Berkeley dance sequences in the 1930s. Director Gary Griffin’s placing of the orchestra in full view is an idea all future musicals at the Festival Theatre should adopt. The old chorus-girl-suddenly-becomes-a-star plot is treated with wry earnestness and the dance numbers choreographed by Alex Sanchez show limitless imagination.
Elektra by Sophocles, translated by Anne Carson. Greek director Thomas Moschopoulos gave Stratford the most imaginative production of Greek tragedy the Festival has ever presented. Set in what seemed to be a modern museum, the Chorus gave an incredibly precise performance as they spoke, chanted and sang their part. Yanna McIntosh maintained an extraordinarily high level of passion and rage for the entire length of the drama.
The bomb of the season among several choices, was:
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown by Clark Gesner. Here an unpretentious small-scale plotless musical that fares best in an intimate setting was blown up to fill the Avon Theatre. Director Donna Feore tried to nurture adults’ nostalgia in characters modern children do not know while pandering to children’s present interests in video. She paradoxically tried to create an air of childlike simplicity with high tech means and as a consequence achieved none of her goals and created a “children’s show” that was the opposite of what children’s show should be – unrelievedly boring.
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Niagara-on-the-Lake:
The 2012 Shaw Festival did not reach the dizzying heights in overall quality that it achieved for its 50th season last year, but it produced several shows that likely could not be bettered anywhere in the world. The three best were:
A Man and Some Women by Githa Sowerby. This was the third Sowerby the Festival has produced and it showed, yet again, that Sowerby was a playwright far ahead of her time. The play makes a pro-feminist argument that seems absolutely new. She demonstrates that men’s refusal to allow women to work is not just detrimental to women but to men themselves. Sowerby’s modern technique of creating a subtext of menace below the spoken commonplaces generated a massive amount of tension in apparently ordinary domestic scenes. Insightful direction and superb acting from the entire cast again found literary gold in the neglected past.
Come Back, Little Sheba by William Inge. This was also the third Inge the Festival has produced. Director Jackie Maxwell showed with this work that Inge deserved to be ranked alongside Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as one of the United States’ greatest playwrights. Corinne Koslo and Ric Reid as a middle-aged couple trying to put a good face on the failure of their dreams gave beautiful, emotionally rich performances filled with almost tangible pain.
Ragtime by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens. The Festival’s production was the first Canadian production of the musical since its world premiere in Toronto in 1996. Jackie Maxwell revealed the work as one of the great musicals of the 20th century. She and her flawless cast had full command of the epic sweep of the story that intertwines the fate of families of three different backgrounds. Thom Allsion, one of Canada’s greatest talents in music theatre, gave an electrifying performance as Coalhouse Walker, a good man driven to extreme measures in order to gain the justice denied him.
The Shaw can take a wrong turn now and then. The worst show was:
French Without Tears by Terence Rattigan. Rattigan’s first play is a fluffy, insubstantial comedy that requires a light touch to succeed. This it did not receive from director Kate Lynch, who still did not manage to find all there was in the already shallow subject matter. The result was agreeable though slightly dull entertainment that did not build in pace or tension.
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Elsewhere in Ontario:
Two productions seen outside Toronto, Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake deserve special mention:
See How They Run by Philip King, Theatre Aquarius Hamilton. The Theatre Aquarius production of this venerable 1944 British farce was one of the funniest shows I saw all year. I had feared Canadian directors had forgotten how to direct British farce, but not Marcia Kash. Her sense of comic pacing and that of the able cast was so spot-on, that the phrase “you’ll laugh till you cry” was simply a statement of fact. Ivan Sherry shone as the hapless vicar of Merton-cum-Middlewick but Andrea Risk stole the show as the village’s self-appointed morality officer and busybody who descends hilariously into a drunken stupor.
The Secret Mask by Rick Chafe, Great Canadian Theatre Company, Ottawa. Based on the excellent GCTC production I expect that Winnipegger Chafe’s play will soon be seen everywhere. Paul Rainville gave an exquisitely drawn portrait of a stroke patient with aphasia who struggles with the frustrations of re-acquiring language. The regaining of language parallels the reacquaintance of the stricken father with his long-estranged son, sensitively played by Michael Mancini. Chafe’s play is not just about the effects of an illness but about the characters ridding themselves of the prejudices they have towards each other and our ridding ourselves of the prejudices we have towards them.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Einstein on the Beach, Act 4, Scene 3, Spaceship. ©2012 Lucie Jansch.
2013-01-01
Best Productions of 2012