Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
Toronto:
In alphabetical order here is my list of the ten best productions in Toronto in 2013. As usual, I have excluded works that have appeared recently on this list such as Opera Atelier’s remounts of The Magic Flute and The Abduction from the Seraglio.
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After Miss Julie by Patrick Marber, Red One Theatre Collective. Marber’s relocation of Strindberg’s classic play to Britain in the 1940s received a thrilling production directed by David Ferry. Claire Armstrong was luminous in the title role and for once made Julie not merely a neurotic aristocrat but a truly tragic figure. Christopher Morris’s John and Amy Keating in Marber’s expanded role of Christine lent further intensity to a triangle less about love than power.
Albertine en cinq temps by Michel Tremblay, Théâtre français de Toronto. Jean Stéphane Roy presented a brilliant new interpretation of this Tremblay classic. He has the young Albertine at 30, beautifully played by Mélanie Beauchamp, survey her other selves at age 40, 50 60 and 70 as if the work were a medieval morality play about the five ages of woman. The precision of the close-knit ensemble was the best in any play seen in Toronto this year.
L’Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato by Mark Morris, Luminato. Luminato gave us the chance to see choreographer Mark Morris’s signature work from 1988 for the first time in this country. The piece is an interpretation in dance of Handel’s 1740 choral ode exploring the three basic personalities of humankind. As the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Choir performed this lively piece, Morris envisions a modern form of pastoral where men and women are completely equal. No one of the 24 dancers is the premier danseur or prima ballerina and no one is tied to traditional gender roles. If dancers pair off, men will as likely pair off with men, and women with women, as men with women. This breaking of social and balletic strictures results in a a celebration of community and an overwhelming sense of joy.
Angels in America, Parts 1 & 2, by Tony Kushner, Soulpepper. Soulpepper took on the challenge of presenting Kushner’s epic two-part play and succeeded beautifully. Anchored by a magnificent performance by Damien Atkins as a young gay man diagnosed with AIDS, Albert Schultz masterfully guided the action through the devastation felt by all the characters to the rebirth of new hope. Diego Matamoros as the vitriolic lawyer Roy Cohn and Nancy Palk in an array of both male and female roles, contributed to an insightful production that was filled with an abundance of humour, imagination and insight into the human condition.
As I Lay Dying by Dean Gilmour and Michele Smith, Theatre Smith-Gilmour. Gilmour and Smith took William Faulkner’s 1930 stream-of-consciouness novel and turned it into a gripping theatrical experience filled with the multiple ironies and existential questions that Faulkner poses. To retain the flavour of Faulkner’s prose, the production used far more spoken word that is usual in a TSG show, but yet did not give up its emphasis on clown, movement and physical theatre. This brilliant adaptation of a seemingly unstageable novel has all the hallmarks of another masterpiece from Theatre Smith-Gilmour.
Body 13 by JM Kivanda & G. Kirkham, MT Space & Theatre Passe Muraille. Toronto is not the only city in Ontario to be home to masters of ensemble theatre. Theatre Passe Muraille again hosted Kitchener-based MT Space to present their latest work – a humorous, deceptively simple story about a day at the beach that explores desire, both sexual and non-sexual, as it comes into conflict with differences of gender, culture and age. What results from the ensemble performance is an image of Canada as a mixture of possibilities that only comes from mingling with people from all around the world.
Dialogues des Carmélites by Francis Poulenc, Canadian Opera Company. Robert Carsen’s production of Poulenc’s 20th-century masterpiece was both dazzling and devastating at once. To show the threat that faces the French aristocrats at the centre of the story, he recruited a hundred supernumeraries to watch their actions and delimit their space. The starry cast included radiant performances from Isabel Bayrakdarian as the unworldly Blanche de la Force, who seeks shelter from the coming French Revolution in a convent. Adrianne Pieczonka as the strong Madame Lidoine and Judith Forst as the raving Mother Superior provided opposing images of how to approach death. Carsen staged the devastating final scene where one by one the members of the convent are guillotined with such luminous and sensitive abstraction that he showed us how faith can transform horror into beauty.
Needles and Opium by Robert Lepage, Ex Machina & Canadian Stage. In Lepage’s new production of his 1991 classic, he used the latest stage technology to bring his endlessly inventive theatre piece to vivid new life. The story of a Québecois actor in Paris intertwines in plot and imagery with the stories of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in Paris and French author Jean Cocteau returning to Paris from New York. What results is a concatenation of extraordinary, dreamlike images where place transforms into place and story into story. The underlying irony of the show is that, like all art, all the appearance of freedom and fluidity is created by the most demanding precision and discipline.
Once by Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová, Mirvish Productions. After an onslaught of musicals where elaborate sets, costumes and projections seemed to take priority over music, Once came as a welcome relief. Here the characters communicate primarily through music and song, not raucously but with simple, thoughtful sincerity. As a result Once was the most emotionally intense musical of the season. Glitz may impress for the moment but Once stays with you long after the final curtain.
Polly Polly by Jessica Moss, Theatre Mischief, Toronto Fringe Festival. Moss’s solo show, one of the must-sees of the 2013 Fringe Festival, showed how a young woman with a negative self-image fights off an unpleasant voice that casts everything she does in the worst possible light. Moss’s amazing virtuosity in staging arguments within herself, and the show's interplay of verbal, visual and metatheatrical wit was simply dazzling.
Two companies that presented the best theatre productions in Toronto in 2013 also presented two of the worst.
La Clemenza di Tito by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Canadian Opera Company. COC General Director Alexander Neef made a terrible decision in choosing identical twin opera directors Christopher and David Alden to direct three of the COC’s seven productions in 2012/13. The absolute worst of these was Mozart’s final opera where Christopher Alden decided to portray the Roman Emperor Titus as a tyrant rather than the model of magnanimity whom Mozart celebrated. Needless to say, this approach made complete nonsense of the opera. With poor design and conducting this was the don’t-see opera of the year and led many to hope that Neef never hires Christopher Alden again.
The Barber of Seville by Michael O’Brien & John Millard, Soulpepper. This adaptation of Pierre de Beaumarchais’s classic 18th-century comedy was one of the worst shows Soulpepper has ever presented. Director Leah Cherniak’s technique was to throw every possible comedic cliché at the piece in hopes that something would stick. As a result all we got was a pile of clichés, none of Beaumarchais’s play and the stink of incredible hubris that believes that the adaptors’ sense of humour is superior to that of original playwright.
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Stratford:
The 2013 Stratford Festival under new Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino proved to be no better than the seasons under the past two Artistic Directors. The acting company like the shows presented remain unacceptably uneven. Only two of the offerings could be ranked as “best” this year:
Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller. Under Cimolino’s direction Schiller’s play from 1800 about the conflict between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I proved that Schiller’s insight into political machinations has not dated one iota in more than 200 years. The action was thrilling and Lucy Peacock was as radiant as Mary as Seana McKenna was imperious as Elizabeth.
Fiddler on the Roof by Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick. Though Scott Wentworth did not bring the kind of insight to the role of Tevye that Brent Carver did in Stratford’s production in 2000, his performance was still absolutely solid and the design and supporting cast, especially Kate Hennig as Golde, were far superior to the 2000 production. Donna Feore gave the show a straightforward, no-nonsense staging that let the classic musical’s virtues shine forth unimpeded.
The worst show at Stratford in 2013 was:
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. British director Tim Carroll demonstrated that the faddish notion of “original practices” can turn one of Shakespeare’s most durable tragedies into a nightmare of boredom. Of the entire cast, only Sara Topham as Juliet struggled on to make sense of her role, while newcomers like Daniel Brière as Romeo flailed away incomprehensibly and old hands like Tom McCamus as Friar Laurence seemed to play their roles out of duty rather than enthusiasm. One of the duties of an Artistic Director is to prevent a show from going so far off the rails.
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Niagara-on-the-Lake:
After a lacklustre 2012 the Shaw Festival returned to fine form in 2013 with several productions that likely could not be bettered anywhere in the world. The three best were:
Faith Healer by Brian Friel. How can a director make three interconnected monologues dramatic? Well, Craig Hall certainly showed how with the most riveting production of the modern masterpiece I’ve ever seen. Jim Mezon, Corinne Koslo and Peter Krantz were ideally cast as the faith healer, his wife and his manager and turned the trio’s differing views of the events of the past into a thrilling inquiry into the nature of fate itself.
The Light in the Piazza by Adam Guettel. Jay Turvey directed an intense yet sensitive account of Guettel’s beautifully scored quasi-operatic musical about an over-protective mother learning to trust the feelings of her mentally impaired daughter. Patty Jamieson outdid herself as the conflicted mother while Jacqueline Thair and Jeff Irving were radiant as the two lovers. The production left you elated and convinced that Guettel’s work is one of the first great musicals of the 21st century.
Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde. Director Peter Hinton, unlike so many directors before him, found exactly the right tone needed to balance the epigrammatic wit of Wilde’s early comedy with its tendency to melodrama. In so doing he revealed Wilde not merely as formulator of clever paradoxes but as a trenchant social critic. The design by Teresa Przybylski was innovative and the performance of Tara Rosling as the unfairly maligned Lady Windermere was outstanding in depth and nuance.
The least recommendable show this year was:
Peace in Our Time by John Murrell. This adaptation of Shaw’s 1938 play Geneva proved yet again that Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell’s project of having Canadian authors “re-imagine” Shaw’s lesser-known plays is terribly misguided. When Michael Healey adapted Shaw’s On the Rocks in 2011, all he did was reverse the order of acts 1 and 2. To Shaw’s Geneva, all Murrell did was add an unnecessary and clichéd Canadian character, omit some of Shaw’s more blistering criticism of Britain’s relations with fascist dictators and tack on an ending to give the play a cosy new-agey feel when Shaw’s original is deliberately disturbing. If the only Shaw festival in the world cannot do Shaw plays as Shaw wrote them, who else will? Let’s focus on imagining how to do Shaw properly rather than “re-imagining” him which so far has resulted in plays that are neither Canadian nor Shavian.
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Elsewhere in Ontario:
This year three productions seen outside Toronto, Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake deserve special mention:
Mary Poppins by Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge. The City of Cambridge opened its lovely new 500-seat theatre, the Dunfield Theatre Cambridge, with the most complex production in the history of Drayton Entertainment. The production reached such a high level of expertise that it compared favourably with the original production in London in 2004 and with the touring production that reached Toronto in 2011. Under British director Nigel West, Jayme Armstrong was simply delightful as the title character and Mark Ledbetter gave a wonderfully warm performance as Mary’s friend Bert. The Cambridge production was not as elaborate as the original but in this case the result was to focus our attention more fully on the characters which only increased the musical’s emotional impact.
Elf by Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin, Grand Theatre, London. Elf may not be the greatest musical ever written, but it is a hugely enjoyable holiday entertainment and received a first-rate production by the Grand Theatre. Central to the success of the show was the hilarious performance by Liam Tobin as the human boy raised as an elf whose innocence and unflagging optimism ultimately converts the cynical world around him. There were superb performances by Neil Barclay as Santa and Ian Simpson as Buddy the Elf’s human father and Bill Layton’s whimsical design perfectly suited this gentle family-friendly fantasy.
Rouge décanté by Guy Cassiers, Dirk Roofthooft & Corien Baart, NAC, Ottawa. The NAC French Theatre presented this immaculate production from the Toneelhuis and Ro Theater (Rotterdam) about the captivity of Jeroen Brouwers and his mother in the infamous Tijeng concentration camp in Indonesia during World War II. Actor and co-author Dirk Roofthooft gave a devastating performance as a man whose experience of unimaginable horrors has caused him to feel dissociated from other people and from life in general. This disturbing, innovative play was a survivor drama that confronted us with the universal question of how to accommodate ourselves to a past that must not be forgotten and yet find a way to engage with the life we find all around us.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Irina Mishura (back to camera) as Mother Marie and Judith Forst as Madame de Croissy in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Dialogues des Carmélites. ©2013 Michael Cooper.
2014-01-01
Best Productions of 2013