Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
Toronto:
This year saw the passing of four much-loved figures of Canadian theatre – Brian Bedford, Ted Follows, William Needles and Janet Wright. A star of Bedford’s calibre is irreplaceable, but with each of these deaths we lost a source of knowledge. Bill Needles spent 47 seasons at the Stratford Festival, including its first, and with his death goes the knowledge of the backstage history of the Festival that has gone unrecorded in the official chronicles.
In alphabetical order here is my list of the ten best productions in Toronto in 2017. As usual, I have excluded productions that have previously appeared on this list such as the Canadian Opera Company’s remount of Siegfried, even though the remount starring Stefan Vinke and Christine Goerke was even better this time than in 2006.
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Breathing Corpses by Laura Wade, Coal Mine Theatre. Under David Ferry’s taut direction, Laura Wade’s play was completely engrossing as a mystery/thriller until ints final scene when we realize that Wade is exploring a different mystery than we expected, namely, that the human mind wants to construe information into set formulae including mysteries and thrillers. It is a play that makes the audience re-evaluate the process of seeing a play.
Bright Lights by Kat Sandler, Toronto Fringe Festival. This is so far the funniest, most tightly constructed play by the prolific Kat Sandler. What happens when a group of UFO abduction survivors begin to suspect one of their number is lying. The play is hilarious but the phenomenon of a group turning on itself has a very dark side.
Come From Away by Irene Sankoff & David Hein. For this warm, big-hearted Canadian musical, Sankoff and Hein took as their subject the way that the people of Gander, Newfoundland, banded together to house, feed and entertain the passengers of 37 planes diverted there because of the 9/11 attacks in New York. The flawless ensemble cast, playing both the locals and the “plane people” shows through wit and catchy music how the common humanity and good will of the people of Gander was exactly what the passengers needed to help them cope with that terrible time.
Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts I, II & III) by Suzan-Lori Parks, Soulpepper. Soulpepper’s most ambitious production of the year also proved to be its greatest artistic success. With allusions to Greek and Roman epics, Parks’s play examines the conflicting emotions in the black slave Hero, who is ordered to accompany his white master on the Confederate side in the U.S. Civil War. Parks shows the corrupting effect of slavery on both blacks and whites and Weyni Mengesha drew extraordinary performances from Dion Johnstone in the title role, Lisa Berry, Derren A. Herbert and Oliver Dennis.
The James Plays by Rona Munro at Luminato. The centrepiece of the Luminato Festival this year was a 2014 trilogy of plays about the obscure predecessors of James VI of Scotland who would later become James I of the United Kingdom. For anyone who thinks history plays are dull, Munro’s trilogy provided a solid rebuke and a reminder that the achievement of peace always requires sacrifice. The National Theatre of Scotland provided an example of the high artistic level of ensemble acting one wish reigned at Canada’s largest theatre festival.
Lucio Silla by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Opera Atelier. It is a cause for celebration when a director’s insight rescues an unjustly neglected work from obscurity. But that’s exactly what Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunnesse-Zingg did with a Mozart opera from 1772 often dismissed as juvenilia. Their vision of Mozart’s opera won acclaim at Salzburg and at La Scala and this year Torontonians were lucky enough to see why. As usual Opera Atelier’s co-artistic directors aimed at clarity of storytelling and psychological realism and uncovered the virtues in Mozart’s opera that had too long been denied it by received wisdom.
Matilda the Musical by Tim Minchin, David Mirvish. There is no doubt that Matilda is one of the finest British musicals, a kind of distaff fantasy counterpart to Billy Elliot. The Canadian cast assembled for this first Canadian production easily matched, and in some ways, surpassed that of the original RSC production. Dan Chameroy was brilliant as the tyrannical Miss Trunchbull, whose passion for order and discipline betrayed a disorder within. No show celebrated children more thoroughly than this with its amazingly talented cast of children including the three girls in the title role.
Mouthpiece by Norah Saldava and Amy Nostbakken. In this brilliant hour-long work, Saldava and Nostbakken play two halves of the same woman Cassandra who feels anxiety at having to give the eulogy at her mother’s funeral. Using physical theatre, song and pure sound itself, Saldava and Nostbakken explore not just Cassandra’s dilemma but the very question of how accurately language can be used to sum up a human life.
One Thing Leads to Another by Maja Ardal, Audrey Dwyer, Mary Francis Moore & Julia Tribe, Young People’s Theatre. This was the most inventive piece of theatre I saw the entire year. This amazing quartet of theatre artists created a 23-minute-long work that completely entranced its audience of children aged three to twelve months. The non-verbal work depends entirely on creating variations on the notion of object permanence, a concept vital to understanding reality for human beings at that age. To see those little faces staring at the activities on stage, eyes wide and mouths agape, was like glimpsing the effect of what may be the very origins of theatre itself.
Taking Care of Baby by Dennis Kelly. An ad hoc troupe called The Caretakers presented Kelly’s brain-twisting play that takes the form of a verbatim drama about a mother who has murdered her two children. The catch is that unlike real verbatim drama, everything in Kelly’s play is fictional including the disease that the mother is said to suffer from. What emerges is a dark satire on how all who know the mother exploit her for their own ends while at the same time being a genuinely affecting drama about those like the mother who are being exploited. Director Birgit Schreyer Duarte ensured that the various levels of reality in the play were absolutely clear and drew chilling performances from the entire cast.
On the other hand ...
It may have seemed like a great idea for Cirque du Soleil to tell a story from the world of James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar, but Toruk - The First Flight by Michel Lemieux & Victor Pilon was nothing but a hugely expensive but empty spectacle. The clichéd story, set 1000 years before the events of the movie, recreated on stage the world of Pandora but gave no insight into it or the movie. At the same time the story, with dialogue entirely in the unsubtitled fictitious language of Na’vi, left little room for circus acts. It was a marriage of subject matter and means guaranteed to please no one.
Stratford:
The 2016 Stratford Festival produced several fine shows. The problem is that none of them were by Shakespeare. It is just as well the Festival excised the name Shakespeare from its official title (again) in 2013. The three best shows were:
All My Sons by Arthur Miller. In this play about the supposedly close relationship of two neighbouring families, director Martha Henry had the intriguing idea of casting the roles of the exploited family with African-Canadian actors. This change gave Miller’s dialogue new levels of resonance and served to make the ply more gripping and more disturbing than ever.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by Adrian Mitchell. After sputtering along with plays meant more for adults than children, Stratford’s commitment to family theatre finally had a hit with Mitchell’s 1998 adaptation of the first of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Under the direction of Tim Carroll, the new Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, Mitchell’s version downplayed the Christian allegory and emphasized the adventure, mystery and wit of the story.
Shakespeare in Love by Lee Hall. Oddly enough, the best performances of Shakespeare occurred in the excerpts of Romeo and Juliet that are part of Lee Hall’s adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s script for the 1998 film. Hall successfully finds theatrical means to render the film’s story and director Declan Donnellan drew out the best from the large cast.
The worst show was:
It’s difficult to say. What is worse – making you hate one of Shakespeare’s most delightful comedies or eviscerating four of Shakespeare’s greatest history plays? Trying to present As You Like It as a Newfoundland kitchen party in an 1800-seat theatre simply didn’t work. Being exhorted to have fun while waving pine branches and wearing paper crowns created the atmosphere of a preschool class while constantly distracting the audience from the play itself.
Graham Abbey’s idea of combining Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 into a single play and Henry IV, Part 2 and Henry V into another managed to ruin all four plays. All we got was lots of plot and little of the reflection that makes sense of it. Why does the National Theatre of Scotland revel in three new full-length history plays about James I, II and III, and Stratford can’t manage to produce the models for those history plays by the master of the form?
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Niagara-on-the-Lake:
Jackie Maxwell’s final season as the Shaw Festival solidified the impression that she had never got the hang of Shaw and didn’t really care to. There was only one full-length play by Shaw on the playbill with a lunch-time adaption of part of a Shaw short story as the only other acknowledgement of the Festival’s namesake. Of the offerings the three best were:
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. Director Jackie Maxwell assembled an ideal cast for Chekhov’s tragicomedy and drew vivid, multilayered performances from every cast member who worked with each other to display the Shaw Festival’s greatest gift – its peerless ensemble acting.
“Master Harold”...and the Boys by Athol Fugard. The Festival’s first-ever staging of a South African play proved a huge success. Under Philip Akin’s direction Fugard’s autobiographical play builds in power until its devastating conclusion, a demonstration of the poisonous influence of the apartheid system on both blacks and whites.
A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde. Director Eda Holmes discovered in this insightful and gripping production that the best way to make Wilde’s non-Earnest plays work on stage is not to force them to be versions of Earnest. Contrary to what one might imagine from Earnest, Wilde gives his wittiest remarks to his most callous characters so that wit becomes a sign of superficiality and corruption that threatens the few good people who try to resist the pull of a vicious world.
The worst show, however, was:
Alice in Wonderland by Peter Hinton. Peter Hinton’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s novel was hardly an adaptation but an attempt to put the novel verbatim on the stage with no sense of what does and does not work in the theatre. A series on nonsensical encounters may be fun to read about but they are deadly dull on stage as episodes with no dramatic thrust or conflict. A score of lacklustre songs by Alan Cole did nothing to dispel the boredom of empty spectacle.
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Elsewhere in Ontario:
This year at least seven productions seen outside Toronto, the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival deserve special mention:
The Nether by J. Haley, Theatre Aquarius, Hamilton. This was the best show seen outside of Southern Ontario’s three dominant theatrical cities. Theatre Aquarius gave this cyber-mystery about the nature of identity and morality in game-playing an absolutely first-rate production and director Luke Brown kept the tension high throughout the play’s absorbing 90 minutes.
The rest in alphabetical order were:
The Birds and the Bees by Mark Crawford, Blyth Festival. Crawford followed up his massive 2014 hit Stage and Doe with another delightful character-driven comedy about people who mentally set up moral roadblocks to their own happiness and then rationalize after the fact why these barriers have come down.
Fly Me to the Moon by Marie Jones, Grand Theatre, London. Irish author Marie Jones’s play is a wonderful showcase for two middle-aged female actors. In Carmen Grant and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, the Grand Theatre found the perfect actors to embody two caregivers whose recently deceased client holds a winning lottery ticket. The two actors make the women’s moral contortions justifying claiming the dead man’s winnings into a rich, satisfying comedy.
Magic Unicorn Island by Jayson McDonald, Ottawa Fringe Festival. Though Jayson McDonald has toured this solo show across Canada, he has never played it in Toronto. I was lucky then to have seen it in Ottawa. In only one hour McDonald, making his own sound effects, takes us from the creation of the universe to a conflict to the finish between adults and children who are the last beings on Earth to espouse idealism. It is a acting tour de force for McDonald and a devastatingly funny, devastatingly bleak vision of a world that now seems all too familiar.
Mamma Mia! by Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus, Drayton Entertainment, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge. Drayton Entertainment was granted the rights to stage the first regional production of this 1999 West End and later Broadway blockbuster. Knowing that the initial camp appeal of the show had worn off, director David Connolly presented the show as a straightforward musical comedy with an emphasis on the mother-daughter relationship at its heart. Looking at the story this way made it even more resonant and with performers like Blythe Wilson and Danielle Wade as the leads the show never set a foot wrong.
On a First Name Basis by Norm Foster, Foster Festival, St. Catharines. The new Norm Foster Theatre Festival is not only the first festival devoted to the plays of a Canadian, but the first devoted to those of a living Canadian playwright. This play, the Festival opener, starred Foster himself and proved, if any proof were necessary, why Foster is the most produced of all Canadian playwrights. The interplay between Foster and Patricia Vanstone as an author and the housekeeper he has employed but ignored for 20 years begins in hilarity but ends with the wistful realization of two people who may have maintained their façades vis-à-vis each other for too long.
Pocket Rocket by Lea Daniel & Gary Kirkham, Lost & Found Theatre, Kitchener. Lost & Found Theatre premiered this absolutely charming play that follows four Southern Ontarian kids by focussing on the street hockey games they play with each other in 1967, 1981 and 1995. It’s a wise and gentle comedy that shows how the experience of playing a game together gradually binds quite different individuals in an unbreakable friendship.
©Christopher Hoile
Photos: (from top) Sharon Wheatley as Diane, Rodney Hicks as Bob and Geno Carr as Oz (foreground) and ensemble in Come From Away, ©2016 Matthew Murphy; Tim Campbell as Chris and Sarah Afful as Ann in All My Sons, ©2016 David Hou; Moya O’Connell as Yelena and Neil Barclay as Vanya in Uncle Vanya, ©2016 Emily Cooper; Andrea Runge and Nigel Shawn Williams in The Nether, ©2016 Bank Media.
2017-01-01
Best Productions of 2016