Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✩✩
by Paul Ledoux & David Young,
directed by James MacDonald
Canadian Stage Company/Citadel Theatre, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
March 27-April 19, 2008
The Canadian Stage Company’s 20th anniversary production of Fire allows a new audience to experience one of the biggest hits in the company’s history but to see Ted Dykstra reprising his role as a charismatic Jerry Lee Lewis-like rocker that helped launch his career. Dykstra burns up the stage in his no-holds-barred performances of the five Lewis songs included and in the wonderful, neo-gospel song “Lost Out In Deep Water” by the musical’s co-author Paul Ledoux. Otherwise, some weak performances, odd directorial decisions and unattractive design prevent this revival from blazing as it should.
The curious fact that the rocker Lewis was a cousin of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart inspired Ledoux and David Young to imagine two brothers Cale and Hershel Blackwell (Dykstra and Rick Roberts), sons of the preacher JD Blackwell (Richard McMillan), who both fall in love with the same girl Molly (Nicole Underhay) and use electronic media to rise to fame. Given such a geometrical structure the arcs the two brothers take should be clear, but they are not. Cale’s rebellion against his father and his rise and fall are plainly drawn and brilliantly acted by Dykstra, who really wins our sympathy at the end as the burnt-out wreck of his former self. Hershel’s arc is not so clear due both to the writing and to director James MacDonald’s choices. While Cale’s talent is obvious from the start, we see no spark of Hershel’s. Indeed, MacDonald goes out of his way to make him seem like a clumsy dork. His suddenly holy rage at the end of the long first act seems to come out of nowhere. Only in Hershel's final sermon do we glimpse his eloquence and force. Otherwise, MacDonald has Roberts play him as a clown thus making no sense of Hershel’s own rebellion against his television-hating father or of his success.
Underhay’s acting and singing are both excellent and she reveals Molly’s alternation between the brothers as stages in her character’s growth from immaturity to self-knowledge. McMillan accomplishes the tricky job of making a hellfire-preaching minister believably unbigoted and against mudslinging politics. John Wright, however, who plays Molly’s father, fudges too many lines to be effective much less credible as a down-and-outer who somehow metamorphoses into a Machiavellian politician.
The music--a mix of borrowed rock songs, gospel and Ledoux’s own work--receive strong performances from start to finish that capture the tensions of the period. That’s more than can be said for Bretta Gerecke’s ugly metal set that has nothing to do with 1950s Arkansas, train trestles televangelists’ fake living rooms or anything else it is supposed to represent. The musical ends with Molly posed between two forms of charisma--religious (Hershel) and musical (Cale), but since the action has vilified the former and sanctioned the latter, any balance established between the two is lost. Fire is so pre-occupied with how the title element is dangerous to civilization, it forgets to show it is also necessary.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-03-28.
Photo: Nicole Underhay and Rick Roberts.
2008-03-28
Fire