Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
Toronto:
In alphabetical order here is my list of the ten best productions in Toronto in 2014. As usual, I have excluded works that have previously appeared on this list such as the Canadian Opera Company’s remount of Madama Butterfly or Opera Atelier’s remount of Persée.
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Cineastas by Mario Pensotti, Grupo Marea at Luminato. The horizontally divided stage of the Argentine writer/director’s work reminded one of the kind of theatre Robert Lepage used to create before he became too enamoured with technology. In this dazzling piece, actors played out the real lives of five film directors on the lower level and the works they hoped to create on the upper level in a clever exploration of the distance between reality and fiction.
Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi, Canadian Opera Company. Robert Carsen’s production of Verdi’s final opera that moved the action from Elizabethan times to the 1950s was both handsome and satirical at once. Gerald Finlay etched the humour of the famous fat knight in exquisite detail. He led an all-Canadian cast that made one proud of the talent this country has to offer.
Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis, Unit 102 Actors Company. Ronnie Rowe and Andy McQueen gave fiery performances in Unit 102’s hard-hitting production of Guirgis’ breakthrough play from 2000. The play may focus on dangerous prisoners on Riker’s Island, but director David Lafontaine never lost sight that the play is ultimately about faith and redemption. The atmosphere was so fraught and the performances so intense that at the end you felt the breath had been knocked out of you.
Kurios - Cabinet of Curiosities by Michel Laprise, Cirque du Soleil. After treading water with several ecologically themed shows, Cirque du Soleil returned to its origins with a show emphasizing the relation of man and machine. The marvellously realized steampunk style and the energetic electro-swing music united a well-chosen series of acts all concerned with changing the ordinary into the extraordinary. Even the clown, Canadian David-Alexandre Després, was one of the most hilarious the Cirque has ever had.
London Road by Adam Cork and Alecky Blythe, Canadian Stage. This amazing, groundbreaking musical used as its libretto the verbatim statements of people living on London Road in Ipswich where a serial killer had lived. Eleven veterans of the Shaw and Stratford Festivals combined their talents to play 63 characters to portray the changing mood of the neighbourhood from before the killer’s discovery to the community’s attempt to regain normalcy The cast sang the extraordinarily difficult music with aplomb to give us a glimpse of the future of musical theatre.
Lungs by Duncan Macmillan, Tarragon Theatre. British author Macmillan’s 2011 play is a virtuoso piece for two actors. In only 70 minutes they play out the entire relationship of two characters from their first meeting to the end, with time passing on the bare stage with just a gesture or change of tense. The play begins as a satire of young people so given to overthinking their every action that they almost prevent themselves from acting at all. Brendan Gall and Lesley Faulkner are note-perfect as the couple. If you missed the play before, be sure to see it now, revived at the Tarragon until January 25 by popular demand.
Mies Julie by Yaël Farber, Baxter Theatre Centre at Harbourfront World Stage. August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie refuses to die because it continues to be so relevant. South African writer/director Yaël Farber added to Strindberg’s battle of male and female, servant and master, the elements of black versus white and colonized versus colonizer to make Strindberg’s sociosexual conflict even more explosive with no-holds-barred performances from Bongile Mantsai as John and Hilda Cronje as Julie.
Moment by Deirdre Kinahan, Actors Repertory Company. ARC gave the English-language premiere of this powerful play by an exciting young Irish writer. Kinahan took the overused plot device of “family-gathers-secrets-are-revealed” and gave it a significant twist. The secrets are revealed halfway through the action, leaving the rest of the play to focus on the possibilities for forgiveness and healing. Christopher Stanton created beautifully as much tension surrounding the revelation of secrets as for the possibility of forgiveness. In a taut ensemble Ryan Hollyman, Deborah Drakeford and Janet Porter stood out for the intensity of their performances.
Of Human Bondage by Vern Theissen, Soulpepper. Soulpepper’s production was remarkable not only for Thiessen’s riveting adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s difficult novel but for director Albert Schultz’s revelation of a much more daring and inventive side to his direction than he has ever shown before. Both Gregory Prest and Michelle Monteith playing difficult-to-like characters held our interest by revealing their internal contradictions and the shared trait of self-hatred that draws them together. Luckily, Soulpepper is bringing this thought-provoking, highly theatrical evening back in 2015 from May 2 to June 20.
Talking Heads by Alan Bennett, Precisely Peter Productions. British director John Shooter took three of Alan Bennett’s thirteen acclaimed monologues known collectively as “Talking Heads” and set them in three rooms of the Campbell House Museum. Impeccably performed by Naomi Wright, Jason Gray and Alex Dallas, Shooter’s brilliantly simple idea turned the Campbell House into a kind of British version of Dante’s Inferno, where the characters we happen upon are compelled to tell us their stories seeking sympathy, forgiveness or understanding. It was a fascinating notion one hopes Shooter pursues with more of Bennett’s ironic tales.
On the other hand ...
This year saw a number of Canadian plays, many by well-known authors, so poorly written or with such improbable plots that they should never have been allowed past workshopping to reach the stage. These included: The Art of Building a Bunker by Adam Lazarus & Guillermo Verdecchia (Factory Theatre), The Bakelite Masterpiece by Kate Cayley (Tarragon), Bingo! by Daniel MacIvor (Factory Theatre), Death Married My Daughter by Dean Gilmour, Danya Buonastella and Nina Gilmour and Michele Smith (Theatre Smith-Gilmour), A God in Need of Help by Sean Dixon (Tarragon), Paolo and Daphne by Ned Dickens (Theatreworks) Sextet by Morris Panych (Tarragon), Soliciting Temptation by Erin Shields (Tarragon) and The Wanderers by Kawa Ada (Cahoots Theatre).
The award for the most poorly presented classical play in Toronto goes to Soulpepper’s production of Tartuffe, directed with a leaden hand by László Marton and serving too often to showcase the severe inadequacies of members of the Soulpepper Academy.
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Stratford:
The 2014 Stratford Festival saw a general rise in quality although only two thirds of the offerings could be classified as artistically successful. The three best shows were:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Stratford stages this comedy so often, you might think there was nothing new to say about it. Director Chris Abraham completely disproved this notion. He set the play at a reception for a gay wedding in the backyard of a house in present-day Stratford. To entertain the couple, their friends stage Shakespeare’s play using whatever comes to hand and casting parts with whoever is available. Therefore, both Oberon and Titania were male, Peter Quince and Lysander were female and all the fairies were played by children. Abraham’s concept changed the play from the usual mindless romp to a deeply satisfying celebration of diversity and inclusivity.
Crazy for You by George and Ira Gershwin. With Ken Ludwig’s expanded version of the 1930 Gershwin hit Girl Crazy, director/choreographer Donna Feore proved once again that her forte is dance-heavy musicals. American Josh Franklin and Canadian Natalie Daradich gave period-perfect renderings of the string of Gershwin standards and tap-danced up a storm. Feore masterfully guided the exuberant action so that the energy level gradually built up to such a point it (figuratively) blew the roof off the Festival Theatre by the end.
The Beaux’ Stratagem by George Farquhar. Stratford stages English Restoration and 18th-century comedy so seldom, it might be thought a risk to mount one on the Festival stage. Yet, under Antoni Cimolino’s direction, Farquhar’s 1707 play proved to be surprisingly modern in outlook and and, after Abraham’s Dream, the most enjoyable comedy at Stratford this season. Colm Feore and Mike Shara were well matched as two rakes who intend to bilk young women who fall in love with them of their fortunes. In the play it is they, however, who fall in love with two beauties thus undermining their own plans. The cast spoke Farquhar’s elegant, witty dialogue so beautifully, you really hated to leave such a world of refinement when the play ended.
Among several candidates for worst, one stood out for its incredible hubris:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play by William Shakespeare. It might have seemed like a major coup to entice the world-famous director to Stratford, but Peter Sellars proceeded to create the most perversely contrary interpretation of a Shakespeare play that Stratford has ever seen. Sellars sought to bring out the dark side of Shakespeare’s comedy but in so doing gave us two hours of unrelieved angst and dread often wrought by deliberate misreading of the lines, including treating the Pyramus and Thisbe play as if it were deadly serious and filled with ponderous existential paradoxes.
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Niagara-on-the-Lake:
The Shaw Festival had a very strong 2014 season, though, worryingly, it seems to have lost its grip on its namesake playwright. The three best were:
Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey. Under Jackie Maxwell’s passionate, insightful direction, O’Casey’s 1924 domestic tragedy was easily the most powerful play of the Shaw season. In one of her finest performances, Mary Haney played Juno Boyle, a woman vainly trying to hold her family together in the midst of the “Troubles” in Dublin. Jim Mezon played her loveable but useless husband as a Falstaffian mixture of cowardice and bravado. Meanwhile, Haney’s Juno suffers as a kind of female Job who loses everything she holds dear. It was hard to imagine a superior production.
The Sea by Edward Bond. The Shaw Festival’s first foray into Edward Bond was a great success with director Eda Holmes getting Bond’s grim humour just right. Fiona Reid excelled as the indomitable village queen bee Mrs. Rafi while Patrick Galligan gave his best-ever performance as the draper Hatch, who pitifully descends deeper and deeper into madness. Holmes’ clever use of billowing cloth for scene changes made the sea of the title an ever present force that mocks the mightiness that human beings try to muster.
When We Are Married by J.B. Priestley. The most side-splitting comedy of the season was Priestely’s 1938 play directed to perfection by Joseph Ziegler. I had seen a starry production of the play in London (UK) just in 2011, but the Shaw production outshone by far in the unity of its ensemble and in its attention to detail. Priestley’s exploration of what happens when six self-proclaimed pillars of the community discover they are not legally married is a wonderful satire both on male-female relationships and on social pretensions.
The least recommendable show this year was:
The Philanderer by George Bernard Shaw. Why American director Lisa Peterson, whose Director’s Note showed she had little notion of what Shaw’s play or period was about, was allowed to direct Shaw at the Festival Theatre is a mystery. She succumbed to the fallacy that older plays have to be goosed up to be made funnier and larded Shaw’s satire on maleness and femaleness with such exaggerated movements and other ill-considered comic notions that Shaw’s soufflé of a play completely collapsed.
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Elsewhere in Ontario:
This year at least four productions seen outside Toronto, the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival deserve special mention:
Les Misérables by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge. Though mainstream newspapers ignore it, Drayton Entertainment is becoming an increasingly important force in theatre in Southern Ontario. Nothing could prove that better than this, the first regional production in Canada of the world’s favourite musical. The great virtue of director Alex Mustakas’ production was that it concentrated on clarity of storytelling rather than on the special effects and myriad costume changes that mar Cameron Mackintosh’s latest version of the show. Of the three productions I have seen, Mustakas’ was easily the most insightful and the most moving.
Run for Your Wife by Ray Cooney, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge. Drayton Entertainment had a second major hit with its flawless production of Ray Cooney’s archetypical British farce. Marcia Kash proved yet again that she is one of the few directors in Canada who understands how farce works. Pace, timing and attitude are everything. With an excellent cast including two former Shaw Festival actors, she caused Cooney’s tale of a cheerfully clueless bigamist to have audiences doubled over with laughter.
Shrek The Musical by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, Grand Theatre London. Shrek is one of those rare instances where the musical is actually better than the movie it is based on. With a cast combining stars from Stratford, Mirvish and Soulpepper, director Susan Ferley showed off this satirical fairy tale in the best possible light. Liam Tobin, who was so hilarious as the title character in Elf last year, returned as the evil, but vertically challenged Lord Farquaad and proved he could be just as funny as a villain as had been as the hero.
Stag and Doe by Mark Crawford, Blyth Festival. In Mark Crawford’s play one couple’s stag and doe party has to share the same hall with another couple’s wedding reception. Some playwrights would simply approach this story as a situation comedy. Crawford, however, excelled in downplaying this aspect of his plot to make the play a comedy of character. The play’s humour thus did not rely on zingy one-liners but on close observation of how people in unusual circumstances interact. Well written and blissfully funny, Crawford’s play is sure to have a long life throughout Ontario and beyond.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Mr Microcosmos (Karl L’Ecuyer) and Mini Lili (Antanina Satsura). ©2014 Martin Girard.
2015-01-01
Best Productions of 2014