2009

Parfumerie

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:18:58 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
written by Miklós László, adapted by Adam Pettle & Brenda Robins, directed by Morris Panych
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
December 2-24, 2009

"The Shop Around the Corner"

In an obscure 1937 Hungarian play, Soulpepper may have found a delightful alternative to Michael Shamata’s perennially popular version of “A Christmas Carol” that it will stage again next year. Few may have heard of the play “Parfumerie” by Miklós László (1903-73), but most will find the nugget of its plot familiar. Two anonymous pen-pals have fallen in love with each other, not knowing that in real life they both work together and can’t stand each other.

The plot is familiar from the play’s many famous adaptations. In 1940 fellow Central European émigré Ernst Lubitsch made it into the film “The Shop Around the Corner” with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan. In 1949 Robert Z. Leonard shifted the location to the US in his film “In the Good Old Summertime” starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson. In 1963 Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick moved the story back in Budapest in their musical “She Loves Me.” Then in 1998 Nora Ephron brought the action back to the US in the age of e-mail with her film comedy “You’ve Got Mail” starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

In László’s play itself, as adapted by Adam Pettle and Brenda Robins, this plot takes a back seat in the first half to problems brewing between the employees at Hammerschmidt’s Parfumerie in Budapest and their boss Miklós Hammerschmidt. The boss has been in in increasing foul mood lately even though Christmas is approaching and has made George Asztalos the focus of his anger. This reached the point where, like Scrooge, he fires the loyal employee just before the holiday. Hammerschmidt, however, is not motivated by miserliness or general misanthropy. Rather, as we soon discover, he has learned that his wife has been having an affair with one of his employees and has assumed it was George.

Joseph Ziegler is excellent as Hammerschmidt, worn and grumpy but looking as if a secret pain were gnawing at him from inside. It is a real pleasure to see Oliver Dennis in a starring role as George and to be playing a younger character for a change. The tension he creates between what he knows and what he says after he learns that his co-worker Rosie Balaz is his epistolary “Dear Friend” is priceless. If only Patricia Fagan as Rosie could match him in this. She is good at conveying one strong emotion at a time rather than the interplay of conflicting feelings which is what the play demands. As it is Dennis seems to be acting for both of them.

The secondary roles are all well taken. Jeff Lillico makes a strong impression as Arpad the delivery boy who suddenly becomes officious as soon as he’s promoted to salesman. Michael Simpson creates a very sympathetic Louis Sipos, a man who takes it on himself to smooth everyone’s ruffled feathers. Kevin Bundy is suitably oily and supercilious as the local Don Juan, Stephen Kadash. Among the women, Brenda Robins is very funny as the cashier Miss Molnar, who has a crush on Hammerschmidt, while Maev Beatty livens things up as the flirtatious Miss Ratz.

The action takes place on Ken MacDonald’s Art Nouveau candy-box of a set, all pink and chocolate brown. Bonnie Beecher’s lighting gives the scenes a wistful atmosphere. Dana Osborne’s period costumes are attractive, especially the the double-bordered uniforms for the Hammerschmidt employees. Morris Panych’s direction is best when staging the hustle and bustle of the little shop where the employees thank every departing customer in unison for shopping at Hammerschmidt’s. What he is less good at is in sustaining the mood of nostalgia that the setting and design suggest. It helps that he uses the gypsy music of a wandering accordionist (Noah Reid) and fiddler (Miranda Mulholland) to link the scenes, but we don’t quite get the sense of fragility, except when Panych has Arpad begin goose-stepping, which does not quite fit his character. In 1937 this is a cosy world that will soon vanish, a feeling Lubitsch was certainly able to convey in his classic film.

While Panych is good in the scenes between Hammerschmidt and Arpad, as the older man finally recognizes the worth of the younger, he doesn’t really catch all the nuances of George and Rosie’s relationship. As with Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, we should perceive how their apparent irritation with each other is a strange expression of their mutual attraction. Their public personae should really betray something of the romantic private natures that lie beneath.

With a bit of tweaking the present goodish production could become truly enchanting. The play’s themes of the search for love, forgiveness and a better life resonate with the holiday season. László suggests that what we seek the most may be right in front of us if we would recognize it--a fine sentiment to put the materialism of the holidays in focus. We have to thank Soulpepper for rescuing László’s play from oblivion and look forward to a revival of it in the future.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Oliver Dennis and Patricia Fagan. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.

The Madonna Painter

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:59:05 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Michel Marc Bouchard, translated by Linda Gaboriau,
directed by Eda Holmes
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
November 19-December 13, 2009

Factory Theatre is currently presenting the English-language premiere of Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Madonna Painter, a play first staged in Italy in 2003. It is a mixture of history, symbol and magic realism written in a purple prose that sometimes approaches poetry but often, in Linda Gaboriau’s translation, sounds stilted and overwrought. Its 90-minutes begin well enough with an inquiry into the power of art and the objectification of beauty, but in the last 15 to 20 minutes the action, which had been teetering on the brink of pretence, loses all credibility and provokes unintentional laughter.

In 1918 a handsome Young Priest (played by the handsome Marc Bendavid) comes to a small Quebec village with the notion that art can save the populace from the Spanish Flu, a pandemic that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide by 1920. He commissions an Italian artist (Juan Chioran) to paint a fresco of the Virgin Mary in the village church to be paid for by the town’s wealthiest citizen, a necrophiliac surgeon (Brian Dooley). Bouchard tosses up topics concerning art versus reality, flesh versus spirit, beauty versus time, without developing any of them. By the end the Young Priest unaccountably believes that art is idolatry, thus contradicting his initial view, the history of Catholic art and the driving premise of the play.

Bouchard’s characters are more walking symbols than real people whom he forces into actions that often defy logic or necessity. The play would collapse entirely were it not for a superb cast who lend a sense of humanity to Bouchard’s puppets. Bendavid fully captures the Young Priest’s ardour and naiveté, though it’s hard to believe a priest would be so naive not to see through the doctor’s creepy attraction to him, much less to put himself literally in his hands. Jenny Young is excellent as woman the painter chooses as his model against her wishes. Her strong stage presence makes her quasi-mystical position has the keeper of the villagers’ secrets vividly believable. It’s too bad Bouchard dispenses with her character as rashly as the painter. Chioran, half of whose lines are in Italian, conveys both the painter’s swagger and its underlying deviousness. Dooley ably suggests a sinister undertow to the doctor’s friendliness. Bouchard presents one young woman (Shannon Taylor) as so innocent that she takes a description of the changing shape of a penis to mean that men themselves are shape-shifters. If you think that country girls are really that ignorant, feel free to join Bouchard’s fans who acclaim him, mistakenly, as the next Michel Tremblay.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-25.
Photo: Marc Bendavid (foreground). ©Ed Gass Donnelly.

Hamlet

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:33:33 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
written by William Shakespeare,
directed by Graham McLaren
Necessary Angel Theatre Company, Enwave Theatre, Toronto
November 19-29, 2009

Necessary Angel promises its new production of Hamlet will be “a radical re-visioning of one of the world’s greatest plays.” Scottish director Graham McLaren has drastically pared down the text to achieve an intermissionless two-hour running time, tossing out such favourite scenes as Polonius’ advice to his son and the Gravediggers’ Scene. Otherwise, his Hamlet is not so much “radical” as superficial and mediocre.

Hamlet says that “All Denmark is a prison.” To McLaren it seems all Denmark is a pigsty. The single set, also designed by McLaren, is filled with rental furniture heaped with the leftovers and dirty dishes of Claudius’ and Gertrude’s wedding feast of take-out food and cans of pop and beer. Either the royals of Denmark have fired all the servants or events progress at such a rapid pace that no one has time to clean up the mess so that even for the duel between Hamlet and Laertes at the end, the two have to kick detritus out of the way to fight. Other directors have set tragedies amidst piles of junk to show that the present is still encumbered with the past or to indicate that beauty or nobility can bloom in a place inimical to either. Here, in McLaren's nihilist view, the many bodies littering the floor at the end simply add to the trash already there.

Our feelings might be different if we had been given the chance to know or care about any of the characters, but McLaren’s pacing and deletions make this almost impossible. The performances are mixed. Set sometime between the 1960s and ‘80s, Gord Rand’s Hamlet begins as a geeky-looking slacker who complains about revenging his father’s death as if it were just too much work. Much to Rand’s credit, his Hamlet is able to progress from such an unpromising beginning to achieve a real sense of growth and dignity by his “fall of a sparrow” speech. Also excellent is Gray Powell as “Guildencrantz” (yes, the amalgamation of both friends), who serves much more as the a rational Horatio figure than does Steven McCarthy’s Horatio-as-non-entity. Most memorable of all, however, is Eric Peterson’s humourless, neofascist Polonius, who more than Claudius, becomes the real embodiment of evil in the play.

For the most part Benedict Campbell as Claudius reins in his tendency to bluster and is especially fine in the Chapel Scene. Neither Laura de Carteret as Gertrude nor Tara Nicodemo as Ophelia know how to project and Christopher Morris gives us a one-note Laertes. Anyone expecting a “re-visioning” of Hamlet as radical as that presented by Eimuntas Nekrosius at World Stage 2002 will be disappointed. There Hamlet said “To be or not to be” while standing on a block of ice with a buzz-saw overhead. Here, Rand merely tries to asphyxiate himself with a plastic bag. No, this Hamlet is best suited to those who, unlike Shakespeare’s prince, are impatient with contemplation and just want to see the action done with as quickly as possible.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-20.
Photo: Gord Rand. ©Michael Cooper.

7 Stories

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:09:23 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
written by Morris Panych, directed by Dean Paul Gibson
Canadian Stage Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
November 12-December 5, 2009

Morris Panych’s neo-absurdist 7 Stories must have seemed like a breath of fresh air when it premiered in 1989. Since then Panych has revisited the same themes and characters so often in plays like Vigil (1995) and Earshot (2001) that 7 Stories can no longer surprise as much as it once did. Now it’s also clear that some of the author’s very best writing is mingled with much that is only so-so. Nevertheless, the Theatre Calgary/Canadian Stage Company’s co-production for the play’s 20th anniversary is an exceptionally strong one.

As most people know by now, the play focusses on a Man (Peter Anderson, a master of physical acting), clad in the Magrittean uniform of black trench coat, umbrella and bowler, seemingly contemplating suicide by jumping from a seventh floor ledge. This he is prevented from doing by the intrusion of the bizarre goings-on of 13 people (played by only four actors) in the seven windows behind him. The two high points are Christopher Hunt’s hilarious turn as a Leonard, seriously paranoid psychiatrist who sees conspiracy and accusation lurking in absolutely every word the Man says. Then there is Melody A. Johnson’s wonderfully warm portrait of the 100-year-old Lillian, whose reflections of the simple beauties of life give the often manic show its depth. Damien Atkins and Rebecca Northan are very funny as an adulterous couple who spice up their affair by repeated attempting to kill each other, and Atkins shines in another role as Marshall, a gay actor about to marry a woman for her money, who has become so involved in role-playing he’s lost his grip on his identity. These four of the seven stories all contribute to the main question-- “Why should be keep living when we don’t ever know who we are and when we know we have to die anyway?” These four also render the tales of the constantly redecorating couple and the bored misanthropist partygoers largely redundant.

Ken MacDonald’s abstract skyscraper as sky is built in front of the proscenium so that anyone wishing to avoid a neck-ache from looking upwards for 90 minutes would do well not to sit too close to the front. Professional second productions of Canadian plays like this are essential for giving us perspective on our own drama. We can appreciate 7 Stories for its wild flights of imagination, but we can also be happy that Panych has moved on from forcing life to look absurd to finding the comedy in everyday life.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-18.
Photo: Damien Atkins, Rebecca Northan and Peter Anderson.

No Exit

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:52:12 -0500

✭✭✭✭✭
written by Jean-Paul Sartre, directed by Kim Collier
The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre,
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
November 11-21, 2009

"Hell is Big Brother"

Having seen two failed productions of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play “No Exit”, I had begun to think that perhaps the play had become outdated and could no longer work on stage. Then along comes director Kim Collier, who has conceived a brilliant solution to the “problems” of the play. Her 2008 production for The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre, now on tour, is simply stunning and is one of the must-see shows in Toronto this year.

As many will know, Sartre’s play presents hell as an infinitely large but shabby hotel where “guests” are ushered into rooms by a Valet, who never answers their questions. In this case three guests arrive. First, the journalist Vincent Cradeau (Andy Thompson), second the secretary Inez Serrano (Laara Sadiq) and third the socialite Estelle Delaunay (Lucia Frangione). How and why each of them died and why they each merited hell as their eternal reward make up their initial conversations. Then then move on to wonder why they three, who had never met before should be chosen to spend all eternity together. The answer to this question is one of Sartre’s most famous statements, “Hell is other people.”

The most difficult aspect of the play to establish on stage is the sense of claustrophobia. In 2003 the Stratford Festival mounted the play on the thrust stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre, where the actors had to mime their confinement to combat the stage’s inherent openness. Collier’s solution is to invert the play’s perspective. In Jay Gower Taylor’s spooky set the majority of long playing area in the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in taken up with the office-cum-junk room belonging to the Valet. At the far edge stage left are two walls of of a forbidding-looking concrete chamber with a door with metal bolts. Only the inside of the chamber when we glimpse it looks like a hotel room. When the three guests are ushered into the chamber we lose physical sight of them, however, the room has been equipped with hidden video cameras so that on three screens of the wall of the valet’s office we see each of the three displayed from the shoulders up or in further close-ups. Collier’s unorthodox method has thus found a way to make the space the three inhabit seem so small that the cameras can never get a full-length view of the guests.

Also, additional text written by Jonathon Young who plays the Valet, acknowledges our presence as audience so that the guests‘ plight is intentionally given the tacky spin of so-called “reality” shows like “Big Brother” where an audience is entertained by the unhappiness contrived for others. Thus, Cradeau’s famous statement about “other people” is made to refer not just to his two fellow inmates but to implicate the audience itself. Collier adds yet another layer to this by having the Valet point out to us two semidomes in the ceiling of the auditorium, like those concealing closed-circuit cameras, to suggests that we, too, are under surveillance. So is the Valet himself, who has to communicate with us not by speaking but with words like “Help” written on the backs of the mountain of files on his desk.

The use of video solves some of the play’s other difficulties. The talk of collaborators during the war and of lesbians as “femmes damnées” and the characters’ melodramatic lives dates the piece, but when when the actors in Kirsten McGhie’s impeccable 1940s costumes and makeup are seen on screen, we think of the play more in relation to classic French movies and film noir. Sartre gives the three inmates the strange ability to see in their minds what is happening among the living, specifically the point where their existence is decried or obliterated. On stage it is often difficult for actors to play these scenes without staring off into the distance which they had previously established as a wall. Here, Collier used close-ups to separate the actor from his or her surroundings and suggest more clearly that these visions occur in the characters‘ mind eye.

The performances of all four actors are excellent. Thompson may come across as overheated at times but Frangione shows us the energy Estelle expends in trying to maintain her façade while Saadiq gives us a woman who longer has a façade to maintain. Young brings welcome comedy to the show, rather like Clov in Beckett’s “Endgame”, who perceives despite his slightly dimwitted cheerfulness that he is condemned as much as his guests.

Collier cleverly borrows a theme from Beckett defining hell by endless repetition as in “Play” by having the action recommence with the reappearance of Cradeau and cease just when the Valet pushes him once again into the chamber. Along with Brian Linds’ ominous sound design and John Webber’s expressionist lighting, Collier’s “No Exit” represents the kind of production where all elements combine to produce an immensely powerful effect. No future discussion of this play will be possible now without taking Collier’s invigorating re-imagining of it into account.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Andy Thompson, Jonathon Young and Laara Sadiq. ©Tim Matheson.

Talking Masks

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:33:50 -0500

✭✭✩✩✩
written and directed by Adam Seelig
One Little Goat, Walmer Centre Theatre, Toronto
November 13-28, 2009

"The Riddle of the Sphincter"

Adam Seelig’s “Talking Masks” is a riddle of a play, but not so compelling that you actually want to spend time solving it. I have admired Seelig’s work as a director for such difficult plays as Thomas Bernhard’s “Ritter, Dene, Voss” in November 2006 and Jon Fosse’s “Someone is Going to Come” in March 2009. There he shed light on what at first glance seem repetitious, impenetrable texts. With “Talking Masks” he has created a repetitious and impenetrable but rather than shedding light on its meaning, Seelig as director appears intent on keeping it hidden or, in fact, denying that there is one.

The 70-minute work is less a poetic drama than a performance poem for four voices. The reason for the work’s intractability is that it simultaneously constructs and deconstructs itself at every moment. The press release describes “Talking Masks” as “a new play that combines the Oedipus of Ancient Greece with the Biblical and Koranic tales of Isaac and Ishmael to deliver a powerful meditation on the nature of blessings and curses”. From this, one would think Seelig were taking a structuralist approach to mythology in his attempt to unite the story of Oedipus with that of Isaac and Ishmael. In fact, the characters of Greek or biblical mythology are only tangential to Seelig’s theme.

All that really links the three character is that they were bound either by their father or at their father’s behest to face death--Oedipus by exposure to the elements, Isaac (or in the Koran his half-brother Ishmael) in order to be sacrificed. Laius had Oedipus bound to try to escape a prophesy the Delphic oracle that Oedipus would kill him. Abraham bound Isaac (or Ishmael) to fulfill God’s commandment that he should slay what was dearest to him. All Seelig is interested in is that the boy who takes on the name of “Ben” (meaning “son” in Hebrew) is born into a role at birth.

There is no action and no character development except that “Ben”, moves from knowing but not caring that he is bound by a rope to a tree to freeing himself from the rope. Theoretically, such interior action, such as one finds in the plays of Maeterlinck, Yeats or Fosse, could be interesting, but Seelig has buried whatever narrative there is beneath layers of wordplay and far too many metatheatrical signifiers. The play begins with a prelude of almost pure sound poetry from two maternal figures Cathy and Jane, played by Cathy Murphy and Jane Miller. Cathy seems to represent Sarah, Isaac’s mother, and Jane, Ishmael’s mother Hagar, but that is never clear, nor is their relation to “Ben” as Oedipus. All that emerges is that Cathy represents “yes” and Jane “no”.

Next we find Richard Harte as “Ben” in a diaper tied to a two-dimensional tree. He is confronted by Andrew Moodie sitting backwards on a play horse. Given that the word projected on the back of the stage was “asshole” above the picture of the back end of a donkey, those with a smattering of Greek will realize what Seelig is doing. Oedipus was the one who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a human-animal monster that had been terrorizing Thebes. Because of this he was acclaimed King of Thebes and thus became the husband of Jocasta, who (unknown to both) was his own mother. The word “Sphinx” comes from the Greek verb “σϕίγγω” (“I bind”) because she would strangle her victims. The word “sphincter” comes from the same verb representing a band of muscles that constrict. Thus, Moodie on the horse with the talking anus is Seelig’s bawdy version of the Sphinx who confronts a boy who is also “bound”. The wordplay emerging from their dialogue of the two involves Moodie’s insistence that “Ben” is bound both physically and by both fate and death, while “Ben” claims that despite the rope, he is free until death.

Following this “Ben”’s two mothers clothe him in adult garb as if his encounter with the Sphinx had moved him to another stage in life. This would be fitting since the riddle of the Sphinx refers to the three ages of man--four legs, two legs, three legs. In moving from infancy to adulthood, “Ben” language with the two women repeatedly takes on sexual overtones even when they try to teach him his alphabet. In the Oedipus story we have to assume this represents Oedipus’ marriage with his mother. Through dialogue repeated to the point of nonsense, “Ben” somehow grows beyond his mothers’ control, stands up and walks down the long leg of Jackie Chau’s cruciform stage saying that he is free--Oedipus/Isaac/Ishamael free of his fate and actor Harte free of his role.

I fully expected that this was merely the end of the first act. In fact, it was the end of the play. Had Seelig somehow meant the encounter with the Sphinx also to represent Oedipus’ slaying of Laius and Abraham’s intended slaying of Isaac (or Ishmael)? In myth, Oedipus blinds himself and Isaac grows blind. Did Seelig symbolize this somehow or not? Besides this, if we have “Ben” move from four to two legs, why not continue until he reaches three legs, as Oedipus does in “Oedipus at Colonus” and as Isaac does in the story of his twin boys Esau and Jacob?

Seelig does indeed present us with “Talking Masks” but the lack of specificity in what they represent renders the “action” purely symbolic and extraordinarily confusing at that. Although the Walmer Centre Theatre is a very small space, all four actors use microphones to speak in character and do without to speak out of character. As the highly literate Seelig knows, our word “person” comes from the Latin for mask “persona” from “per sonare” because ancient masks had built-in megaphones to amplify an actor’s voice. The microphones are likely an allusion to this and would be sufficient as an alienation technique but Seelig also has the actors directly address the audience as themselves and to give us a bit of biography, likes and dislikes, to underscore yet again that actors are really people playing roles. Fortunately, all four actors give fully committed performances that give the impression that at least they know what the play means. Harte, in particular, impressively speaks his seemingly unmemorizable part of fragments and repetitions as if it were completely natural.

Ultimately, “Talking Masks” presents us with the spectacle of an extremely intelligent writer outsmarting himself. In a thicket of multiple word games and allusions and theatrical deconstruction, whatever had been the underlying story becomes lost and his poem for the theatre fails to become involving as “drama” (from “δρᾶμα” meaning “action” in Greek), whether internal or external.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cathy Murphy, Richard Harte and Jane Miller. ©Sai Sivanesan.

Rocking the Cradle

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:34:28 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Des Walsh, directed by Richard Rose
RCA Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
November 11-December 13, 2009

It may have seemed to be a good idea to transfer the action of Federico García Lorca’s tragedy Yerma from an isolated Spanish village in the 1930s to an isolated Newfoundland outport in the 1960s, but the point of Lorca’s play and much else has been lost in the process. Both Lorca’s original and Rocking the Cradle, Des Walsh’s admittedly free adaptation, centre on the painful descent into madness of a woman obsessed with her inability to have children. In Lorca, Yerma’s obsession functions as a critique of social rigidity reinforced by church and state, whereas Walsh’s Joan seems more a study of individual aberration devoid of wider resonance.

Unlike Lorca, Walsh omits to mention that Joan (Ruth Lawrence) has married according to her parents wishes not her own, the first and key sign of the woman’s overriding desire to conform. Instead, Walsh begins with a party celebrating the second anniversary of Joan’s marriage to Vince (Darryl Avalon Hopkins) where they seem to be a happy couple. It dawns on Joan, rather too slowly, that Vince’s technique of early withdrawal in lovemaking is a deliberate birth-control method. To mention so clearly the technical reason why Joan is childless undoes the imagery of barrenness in the play and shifts Joan’s problem from a desire to conform to an inability to communicate with her husband. Also undermining the theme of conformity are the numerous traditional songs Walsh has added that seem to celebrate rather than chastise those who breaking social rules.

Lawrence has a thin voice and narrow range that do not fully capture the poetry of Walsh’s text or make Joan a sympathetic figure. Hopkins is suitably taciturn as Vince but needs to communicate the roiling subtext underlying his silence. Of the sever-member cast, only Greg King as Joan’s one possible love-interest, Didi Gillard-Rowlings as her ever-pregnant friend Mary and Jane Dingle as Mary’s mother feel truly at home in the play. Director Richard Rose has created a stunning production from Graeme S. Thomson’s abstract set and video projections and Thomas Ryder Payne’s vivid soundscape. The downside of Thomson’s projections is that a scrim remains in place between the actors and audience for all 80 minutes of the play. It unintentionally symbolizes our detachment, since it forces us to watch the action through a type of screen that shuts us off from the action.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-13.
Photo: Didi Gillard-Rowlings and Ruth Lawrence. ©Justin Hall.

August: Osage County

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 18:02:49 -0500

✭✭✭✭✭
by Tracy Letts, directed by Anna D. Shapiro
Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
November 5-15, 2009

To use that old reviewers’ cliché, run don’t walk to see August: Osage County. There is real urgency. The 2008 Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner for Best Play is in Toronto only till November 15. Miss it and you’ll miss the greatest American play of the first decade of the 21st century performed by a flawless cast headed by the incomparable Estelle Parsons.

Todd Rosenthal’s marvellous set shows us a cutaway view of the three-storey Weston family house in rural Oklahoma. There we meet the alcoholic poet and patriarch Beverly (Jon DeVries), his foul-mouthed, pain-killer-addicted wife Violet (Parsons) and their three daughters Barbara (Shannon Cochran), Ivy (Angelica Torn) and Karen (Amy Warren). When Beverly disappears, it is as if King Lear had had three daughters by Lady Macbeth and abdicated leaving his kingdom to her. Violet suffers from cancer of the mouth literally and figuratively spewing a venom of hatred, disguised as “truth-telling,” over her entire extended brood assembled for a family dinner from hell after Beverly’s funeral.

In the tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, Tracy Letts sees the family as a microcosm of of the nation. Given that Letts’s period is the Bush administration, the “family” has degenerated into drug-addled tyranny that compulsively destroys all ideals in its path in the name of “truth.” Letts’s America anaesthetizes itself through lies, fiction, booze, drugs or sex because it can no longer tolerate the reality it has created. Letts’s portrait may be devastating but it is also devastatingly funny making the play’s 3 1/2 hours speed by.

The 81-year-old Parsons gives a bravura performance as Violet, revelling in her utter vileness and exploring her character's full range from acidic lucidity to drug-induced haze. Cochran’s Barbara, who emerges as Violet’s main adversary, follows in her father’s footsteps descending from self-righteous activity to alcohol as a coping mechanism. To mention only these two is in some ways unfair to the amazing 13-member cast whose ensemble acting is a joy to behold. This huge, rumbustious play shows that while America may be disintegrating its drama is very much alive.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-06.
Photo: Estelle Parsons and Shannon Cochran. ©Robert J. Saferstein.

That Face

Tue, 3 Nov 2009 17:18:48 -0500

✭✭✩✩✩
by Polly Stenham, directed by Kelly Thornton
Nightwood Theatre/CanStage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
October 29-November 21, 2009

That Face is a multiple award-winning British play from 2007 that garnered effusive praise from London critics. The Scottish debut of the play in 2009 left critics thinking the play had been overpraised. That impression is confirmed with the play’s Canadian premiere. On the evidence of this Nightwood/Canadian Stage coproduction, 19-year-old playwright Polly Stenham seems to have taken the gooiest Tennessee Williams gumbo, added a character from Edward Albee and a dash of torture from Martin McDonagh and dished up an overcooked British stew.

The central problem is interesting enough--that of children who become parents to their parents. Martha (Sonja Smits), the nod to Albee, is a mentally ill alcoholic pill-popper, whose condition worsened when she was abandoned by her high-flier husband Hugh (Nigel Bennett). Martha’s children have opposite reactions. Daughter Mia (Bethany Jillard) hates her and seems to reflect this in helping a friend (Athena Karkanis) torture a 13-year-old initiate (Teresa Labriola) to a girls’ boarding school. Son Henry, however, has dropped out of school to help nurse Martha back to health only to be caught up in her sickening oedipal love for him. There are no likeable characters and, contrary to what Stenham would like us to think, we’re quite glad to have the tough Hugh return to sort out his degraded family.

In both the English and Scottish productions Martha was praised as the “life-force” of the play. Not so here, where Smits‘ mumbling impression of alcoholism turns Martha into a maudlin zombie. Turner has it in him to be an excellent Henry, but director Kelly Thornton has him start at such a tempestuous pitch, she gives his character nowhere to go. Rather than developing, Martha and Henry seem trapped in emotional stasis. The normally enlightening Jillard leaves Mia’s changing motivations a mystery. Thornton’s leaden pacing dampens any tension, and for a play that both Thornton and the original critics claim is brimming with black humour, not a whit surfaces, even in scenes clearly meant to be farcical. The play and playwright clearly have potential but it will take a different director and a different Martha to realize it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-03.
Photo: Sonja Smits and Kristopher Turner. ©Guntar Kravis.

Iphigénie en Tauride

Tue, 3 Nov 2009 17:07:23 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Christoph Willibald Gluck,
directed by Marshall Pynkoski
Opera Atelier, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
October 31-November 7, 2009

Opera Atelier has taken a brave step in remounting its controversial production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). In essence, the company is saying that the views of a few uninformed critics will not prevent it from presenting one of the great masterpieces of opera. Back in 2003 when OA unveiled Iphigénie, some objected that director Marshall Pynkoski had played to contemporary tastes by making the friendship of Oreste and Pylade too homoerotic. Read your Greek mythology, learn that intense same-sex friendships in classical and neoclassical times were free to stray beyond the platonic, just listen to (or read) what is sung and you’ll realize Pynkoski is simply being true to the story and its characters.

Oreste (Kresimir Spicer) and Pylade (Tom Macleay), who vowed lifelong love before a god (see Lucian’s Amores 47), are shipwrecked in Tauris where the Scythian king Thoas (Olivier Laquerre) has decreed death to all foreigners. The high priestess Iphigénie (Peggy Kriha Dye), persuades Thoas to sacrifice only one. This only exacerbates the problem since each of the men so loves the other he is willing to die so the other might live. We realize, though the fact is unknown to the characters, that when Oreste is chosen, Iphigénie will have to kill her own brother.

Gluck aimed to reform 18th-century opera by compelling all elements of the work to serve dramatic story-telling. From the extraordinarily vivid storm music at the beginning, Gluck whips up tension that never lets up but instead is channelled into the interior turmoil of the characters. Under conductor Andrew Parrott the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra admirably convey the urgency and modernity of this gripping score. Spicer with his heroically ringing voice creates a powerful portrait of a man driven to the brink of madness. Macleay’s beautifully warm tone is an ideal complement, finely delineating the stability Oreste depends on. OA favourite Dye delivers another gracefully nuanced performance. It’s too bad the normally resilient Laquerre seemed to be under the weather.

Gluck’s demand that dance be fully integrated into the action has meant his revolutionary works are seldom staged. Toronto should be grateful to have a company that not only recognizes Gluck’s genius but is able to make it thrill us as much as it did his contemporaries.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-03.
Photo: Kresimir Spicer and Thomas Macleay. ©Bruce Zinger.

A Summer’s Day

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:12:39 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Jon Fosse, directed by Cynthia Ashperger
Play Inc., Alley Theatre Workshop, Toronto
October 12-November 7, 2009

Is Toronto acquiring a taste for Jon Fosse? A Summer’s Day (1999), the work’s Canadian premiere, is the second production of a Fosse play this year. The 50-year-old Norwegian playwright, frequently performed in Europe, is barely known in North America. If you missed One Little Goat’s production of Fosse’s Someone Is Going to Come last March, Play Inc.’s A Summer’s Day would make an excellent introduction to a man who has carried on the tradition of Beckett and Pinter in his own distinctive way.

Fosse uses extensive repetition and an extremely reduced vocabulary to represent the inadequacy of language in the face of the surrounding void that renders it and existence itself meaningless. Thus, characters in A Summer’s Day hold on to simple words like “window,” “boat,” “waves,” “darkness,” in a vain attempt to make sense of their world. The plot itself is simple. The visit of an Elderly Friend (Lara Arabian) to an Elderly Woman (Cynthia Ashperger) sparks the memory of the Friend’s first visit to the house when the Woman’s husband Asle (Dylan Smith) left to brood on his boat in the fjord and never returned. Asle’s disappearance and the Woman’s petrifaction into a state unfulfillable hope make this a double tragedy.

Ashperger has had the brilliant insight to recognize how similar Fosse’s memory play is to Japanese Noh plays in which characters are compelled to re-enact the memories that forever imprison them. Here, Ashperger uses beautiful, handcrafted Balinese masks for the Elderly Woman, Elderly Friend and others, who have reached a state of immutability, to set them apart from their younger unmasked selves when change was still possible. As an performer Ashperger clearly distinguishes the ritualistic acting style of the Elderly Woman from the naturalistic style of her younger self while maintaining unabating intensity in both. Smith is excellent is conveying the depths of depression that have engulfed an ordinary man. Arabian and Michael Kash, as the Friend’s Husband, fully convey the pain of innocents drawn into the tragedy of others. As a director Ashperger brings out both the poetry and the unbearable tension of a nightmare playing out in slow motion.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-10-23.
Photo: Cynthia Ashperger and Dylan Smith. ©Robert J. Brodey.

BASH’d!: A Gay Rap Opera

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:06:01 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Aaron Macri, Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow,
directed by Ron Jenkins
Craddock and Cuckow Productions,
Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto
October 15- 31, 2009

“BASH’d!”, a “gay rap opera”, is a great show. It packs more wit and substance into a mere 74 minutes than most new musicals do in twice that length. Just as female rappers have taken a form known for its misogynist attitude and appropriated it for themselves to criticize misogyny, so the team behind “BASH’d!” has taken the form, notorious for its homophobia, and made it their own.

Creators and performers Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow derive much humour from the initial set-up. The two appear as winged angels in white with pink hats and introduce themselves as the the gay rappers Feminem (Cuckow) and T-Bag (Craddock). They assume the audience is mostly gay and therefore is totally unfamiliar with rap. To help us out they take us through a sample rap and ask if it was too fast and if we noticed it was all in rhyme. Their real purpose is to tell us the story of Dillon (Cuckow) and Jack (Craddock), a love story that they assure is a kind of “Romeo and Romeo”. Dillon is from a small town (population 700) whereas Jack is from the big city. Dillon’s parents are Christian fundamentalists, whereas Jack has two gay dads. When Dillon comes out to his parents, his father throws him out fo the house and he seeks refuge in the big city. Eventually, Dillon’s eyes meet Jack’s across a crowded dancefloor and it’s lust at first sight, soon followed by love. The two take advantage of newly legalized marriage for same-sex couples and are blissfully happy until Dillon is viciously attacked in a gay-bashing incident.

Everything about the show is rapid and precise--the pace of the storytelling, the pace of the rhyme-slinging rappers, the switches of both among multiple characters, sometimes playing each other. It’s dizzying and invigorating and you don’t want to miss a single clever word. The rappers make full use of the licence that minorities have to satirize their own. Jack’s two dads remind him that it’s all right if he doesn’t turn out gay since 90% of the population is hetero. Jack gives his rural friend a crash-course in gayness by parodying all the gay subgroups--twinks, fag hags, bears, chickenhawks, etc.--and lending him all the clichéd must-haves for any gay music collection. When Jack considers proposing to Dillon, the two turn into Jack’s good and bad angel, by arguing the case fr and against gay marriage from a gay man’s point of view. On the one hand it’s a stand for equal rights. On the other, it’s the assimilationists of gay culture trying to emulate straight culture.

The light-hearted tone may seem to turn 180 degrees with the attack on Dillon, but we have to remember that the the two rap angels likened their story to “Romeo and Juliet”, which also takes a tragic turn immediately after the two lovers are wed. We might assume the show is simply against gay- bashing, but, like Shakespeare’s tragedy, it is also a plea against revenge as a “solution” to any conflict. The fact that Jack and Dillon’s story is being recreated by the two rappers automatically gives the show an inherent metatheatrical dimension and when we discover why our narrators are two angels the show takes on the strange form of a Möbius strip.

Craddock and Cuckow’s performances are a marvel of energy and timing. They successful at all the attempt--hilarious, moving and deadly serious as in the show’s coda naming the names of at least twenty men and women who died because of gay-bashing. Aaron Macri provided the varied beats and selected music samples. With a few exceptions Craddock and Cuckow’s hard core mixture of vulgarity and rhyme is unfailingly witty. Kerem Çetinel’s lighting is key to signalling the rapid-fire changes in place and mood. Ron Jenkins‘ direction gives a show that premiered at the Edmonton Fringe in 2007 and went on to a long run Off-Off-Broadway the feeling that is it fresh and improvised on the spot. It justly one the award for Outstanding Musical at the 2007 New York Fringe Festival and 2007 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding NY Theatre Off-Off Broadway among many others. Whether you’re a fan of rap or not, this show is just too good to miss.

After Toronto, the show moves to the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa, January 12-31, 2010, before joining the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad February 16 - 20.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nathan Cuckow and Chris Craddock. ©Ian Jackson.

The Drowning Girls

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:02:05 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson & Daniela Vlaskalic, directed by Charlie Tomlinson
Bent Out of Shape Productions, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
October 14-November 15, 2009

Three free-standing claw-foot bathtubs on a black tiled floor with three large shower heads above them--this is what you see when you enter the Tarragon Extra Space to see The Drowning Girls by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson and Daniela Vlaskalic. When the light comes again each is filled with a woman in Victorian undergarments--underwater. A place of relaxation and renewal has become a tomb.

The play is an 80-minute version of a 1999 Edmonton Fringe Festival play. Both versions have won many awards, but one can’t help think they reward Charles Tomlinson’s highly inventive staging rather than the play itself. The story is based on the 1915 British case of George Joseph Smith, who married and drowned three women in succession to gain their money. He walked free each time, the death ruled as an accident. The play begins in the form of a chorus with the three dead wives Bessie (Daniela Vlaskalic), Alice (Beth Graham) and Margaret (Natascha Girgis) relating the hopes and fears they shared and the fate they met. This segues into an examination of each case separately and concludes with Smith’s trial after he was caught using a false name.

Of these, the first section is the eeriest and most effective renewing as it does the form of choral Greek tragedy. All three, aged over 20 to over 40, feared they would become that despised creature, the spinster, and longed for the freedom and status women could acquire at that time only through marriage. Smith’s charm took their breath away figuratively, then literally. Unfortunately, we have to hear the women’s stories retold twice again in increasingly more mundane detail. What we never learn is how each of these three very likeable women could have found themselves in a situation where they would see marriage to a virtual stranger as their only choice. It’s hard to believe, as the play suggests, that Smith appealed to these three very different personalities in exactly the same way unless marriage itself, rather than Smith, was their only interest.

All three actors give engaging performances, though why they use Canadian accents for the women and British for all the other characters they play is a mystery. Tomlinson’s clever and varied use of the tubs, water and hidden props is unfailingly imaginative, but the decision to end the show on an upbeat note is bizarre. Smith may finally be convicted but fits of giggles seem an odd response from three women whose lives he callously destroyed.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-10-21.
Photo: Daniela Vlaskalic, Natascha Girgis and Beth Graham. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.

The Nightingale and Other Short Fables

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:00:31 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Igor Stravinsky, directed by Robert Lepage
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
October 17-November 5, 2009

Robert Lepage has given the COC another triumph in his production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables. His previous COC production, Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung in 1993 brought new audiences to the opera because of its sheer theatrical genius.  Nightingale is certain to do the same and is even more accessible. Where Bluebeard was dark and disturbing, Nightingale is buoyant and playful. It is, without question, the must-see theatrical experience of the year.

Inspired by several Asian puppet theatre traditions, Lepage breaks all the rules of conventional operatic staging. For starters, he places the orchestra on stage and puts a tank holding 67,000 litres of water in the pit. The water becomes the aquatic stage for The Nightingale while two platforms on either side of the water plus another behind the orchestra half-hidden by a long, narrow screen become the prime playing areas for the first half of the evening. For this half, Lepage has chosen six short instrumental and vocal pieces finishing with the short opera Renard, a folk-tale about a wily fox and her comeuppance.

Lepage productions always, at some level, examine the nature of theatre. The introductory non-operatic pieces are illustrated by that simplest form of theatre--hand-puppetry--with amusingly inventive shadows cast on the front of the screen by five amazingly talented acrobat/puppeteers.  Renard is illustrated by the same five who combine tumbling with Balinese-style puppets, this time casting shadows from behind the screen.  The Nightingale itself is accompanied by an utterly fantastic display of Vietnamese water puppetry, where lavishly costumed singers, waist-deep in water, move boats across the tank while animating the intricately detailed puppets aboard them. Thus Lepage takes us in a journey not just through Stravinsky but through puppetry itself, from the simple and two-dimensional to the elaborate and three-dimensional, ending, in fact, with notion that art frees man from the hand of death.

With few exceptions the music is performed to perfection--Renard crisp and comic, The Nightingale lush and mysterious.  Olga Peretyatko’s voice gorgeously soars and flutters as the Nightingale. Lothar Odinus conveys all the warmth of the Fisherman who loves her song. Ilya Bannik brings out both the pride and humility in the Emperor she saves. By the end Lepage’s production overwhelms us with its wit and beauty and makes us believe we have not fully lost our childlike sense of wonder.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-07-03.
Photo: Olga Peretyatko and Ilya Bannik. ©Michael Cooper.

The Mill (Part One): Now We Are Brody / The Mill (Part Two): The Huron Bride

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:29:11 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩
Matthew MacFadzean, directed by Daryl Cloran /
by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Christian Barry
Theatrefront, Young Centre, Toronto
October 10-24, 2009

Theatrefront has embarked on its largest project ever with The Mill, a four-play series covering 400 years set in a sawmill in a small Ontario town. Each play has a different author and director but the set, design team and cast remain the same. Part One: Now We Are Brody by Matthew MacFadzean is set in the fiction town of Brody in 1854. Part Two: The Huron Bride by Hannah Moscovitch is set in Jamestown, Brody’s previous name, twenty years before the events in Part One. Part Three by Tara Beagan will premiere in spring next year and Part Four in the fall. The series is meant to give an impression of how four thirtysomething playwrights of varied backgrounds view Canada’s history. It is a plan with great potential, but on the evidence of the first two plays this potential has not been realized. The views of MacFadzean and Moscovitch add nothing to the ideas of Northrop Frye’s “garrison mentality” (1971) or Margaret Atwood’s “Survival” (1972) as defining elements of the Canadian identity. All that is new is the dilution of these ideas through horror movie tropes on stage.

In Brody, Charlotte MacGonigal (Michelle Monteith) comes to Upper Canada to take over an abandoned mill she has inherited from her father. The locals want her out since her father was responsible for horrific event there in the past. Now the mill is haunted by Lyca (Holly Lewis), a mysterious girl in white. In Bride, we discover what these horrors were and how Lyca died, when an Irishwoman, Hazel Sheehan (Monteith) arrives to work for the mill-owner James MacGonigal (Ryan Hollyman), Charlotte’s father. He and Hazel fall in love but the restless spirits of native people buried under the mill wreak a gruesome revenge. Brody combines plot elements from The Exorcist and Carrie, while Bride adds Jane Eyre, The Shining and The Rocky Horror Picture Show into the mix. The plot-driven Bride is much more successful as a stand-alone piece of Grand Guignol than Brody, sadly deficient in plot, character development and pacing.

Monteith and Lewis give the best performances in both--Monteith the sole intense focus of earnest emotion, Lewis, though a clichéd demon child, a frightening portrayal of channelled otherworldly forces. Hollyman, who attempts to match Monteith’s intensity seems merely dazed. Eric Goulem, saddled with playing a stereotyped Quebecois, evokes much, mostly unintentional, humour. Maev Beaty plays the town busybody as if she were the Wicked Witch of the West.

The staging itself is impressive. Gillian Gallow’s set is wonderfully detailed. Andrea Lundy’s lighting is stunningly inventive. Richard Feren’s child’s-tune-goes-spooky is a real earworm. Simon Fon’s stunts and fights are cringe-makingly realistic. It’s just too bad that both MacFadzean and Moscovitch are more preoccupied with recycling as many genre elements as possible than with writing incisive plays about Canada.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-10-16.
Photo: Holly Lewis as Lyca. ©Chris Gallow.

OVO

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 03:25:17 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Deborah Colker
Cirque du Soleil, Grand Chapiteau, Cherry & Commissioners Street, Toronto
September 3-November 8, 2009

“An Almost Perfect Egg”

Cirque du Soleil’s latest show “OVO” has a hard act to follow after the company’s fantastic “Kooza” of 2007. That show, written and directed by David Shiner, was one of the best Cirque shows ever to visit Toronto. It attempted to return to the origins of the company by placing greater emphasis on a narrative as a context for its sequence of amazing circus acts. Cirque 25th show in 25 years, “OVO”, written and directed by Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker takes a different tack. There is a very loose narrative, but her main strategy is to plunge us fully into a bizarre but beautiful alien world. To that end she seeks a greater unity of design and impact through a greater integration of every aspect of the show. The overriding imagery of “OVO” is insect life and every aspect of the show from the costumes and set to the music and presentation of the circus acts is related to it. If only she had devised a satisfying conclusion for the evening, “OVO” could rival “Kooza” as an artistic success.

Unlike other Cirque shows, there are no warm-up clowns for “OVO” and no master of ceremonies. Instead, as we enter the blue-and-yellow Grand Chapiteau in Toronto’s Port Lands, we are confronted with mysterious gigantic egg, presumably the “OVO” of the title, sitting on an oddly shaped stage. This is not the usual circular thrust stage but a thrust in trefoil form, thus already leading us into the world of plants and their inhabitants. After the lights go out the come up again on a vivid scene of all manner of insect life encouraged to wake from their slumber by Master Flipo (Joseph Collard) the head clown sporting colourful antennae.

In terms of story, the insect world of ants, fleas, spiders, crickets and scarabs is disrupted by the arrival of the Foreigner (François-Guillaume Leblanc), a shiny, spiny blue bottle fly, with a large egg strapped to his back. This object causes general awe in the populus and it is immediately snatched away from the Foreigner. It reappears in the possession of various characters and is mentioned throughout the show, but anyone seeking plot development involving the egg will be severely disappointed since nothing whatsoever happens with it. Instead, the plot focusses on the Foreigner’s arrival attracting the attention of a lovely chubby Ladybug (Michelle Matlock) and most of the evening’s humour consists of the Foreigner’s maladroit attempts to woo her, her comic huffs and Master Flipo’s attempts to instruct the blue bottle in the art of courtship.

The clown story, however, only really provides interludes between the circus acts rather than binding them together. That function is performed by the extraordinary integration of production elements. Gringo Cardia has designed the trefoil stage, the giant climbable dandelion stalks and the sails at the back that look like neuron-shaped cobwebs. There are also two enormous flowers hidden at either side of the stage that magically open to an impossibly large size before closing again. Liz Vandal has designed the incredible imaginative costumes, looking like a cross between Issey Miyake and Dr. Seuss, comic as for the Ladybug and blue bottle, impressive as for the Scarabs menacing as for the Stick Insect or eerily beautiful as for the Dragonfly and Butterflies. The real winner, though, has to be the fantastic green outfits with cleverly attached, super-sized hind legs of the Crickets. Julie Bégin’s makeup completes the effect for each creature. Eric Champoux’s lighting creates the general impression that the action takes place at night with the ending at break of day. Colker has ensured that the performers of various acts do just appear and disappear. Rather they interact with each other throughout the show to a far greater extent than in previous Cirque extravaganzas. Six leaf-carrying Ants, for example, seen in Act 1, appear as an audience for a contortionist Spider in Act 2. Besides this, Colker has choreographed every movement so that performers not in action do not merely stand, as is usual, but artfully pose or dance between activities.

Berna Ceppas’s music has a distinctly South American flavour that imitates and is sometimes mixed with actual insect sounds. All this, along with Jonathan Dean’s 360 degree sound design gives the impression of our having been shrunken to insect size and completely immersed in their world. No other Cirque show I have seen so completely achieves this effect. Indeed, the whole show is very much like the first twenty minutes of the musical “The Lion King”, the best part, recast as “A Bug’s Life”. In fact, so amazing are the stunt we see in this setting that I frequently had to remind myself that I was seeing a live show rather than a movie with unbelievably advanced CGI. Any movie effects today, even in 3-D, pale in comparison to seeing real bodies moving in real three-dimensional space.

Colker paces the show well. After the initial group dance, we move to a Dragonfly (Vladimir Hrynchenko), whose hand-balancing act is both a test of strength and balance and uncommonly beautiful. Next we move on to the foot-juggling of six Chinese Ants, first plying their Icarian games with gigantic slices of kiwifruit then with miniature cobs of corn and finally, and most amazingly, with each other. Following this are the sensual moves of two Butterflies (Maxim Kozlov and Inna Mayorova), in a rope act called the “Spanish web” that involves various climbs, poses, holds and releases for both on the same rope. For many the highlight of the first act will be Tony Frebourg’s Firefly whose lightning-fast moves and tent-top-high tosses with up to four diabolos are simply mind-boggling. The first half finishes with the intriguing assembly of the largest apparatus ever used in a Cirque show and the careful rigging of its weblike safety net. This unique aerial act for Scarabs combines several types of circus acts in one--banquine, Russian swing and swinging chair--a bit like floor tumbling except done in the air using trapezes instead of a teeterboard for lift.

The pacing is similar in the second half, staring small and becoming big. First up is a contortionist Spider (Svetlana Belova) who can easily sit on her own head and watch her feet scurry by in front of her. Next comes the acrosport of a group of five Fleas who toss each other into the air and recombine in graceful formations. The most impressive act, however, is that of another Spider (Lie Wei) on the slack wire. Who many people can do a handstand on the floor or on a solid bar? Li Wei does them with ease of a moving slack wire and walk hand over hand along it and ride a unicycle upside down along it. He is simply amazing. As a transition we see the arrival of the Creatura (Lee Brearley), look rather like two brown furry caterpillars forming an ex whose Slinky-toy limbs comically lengthen or shorten at will, and tie themselves into knots, only to loosen again for a dance. The climax involves the brilliant green Crickets. The weblike skins have been removed from what looks like an eight-meter-high rock-climbing wall, hidden trampolines are uncovered below it and the stage surface that looked so solid slides open to reveal a power track just below the surface. This fantastic act sees the Crickets fall from the wall only to rise up and attach themselves and scurry up again while some bounce onto the power track and perform complex tumbling line before landing on the very edge of the stage front. So much motion up and down the back wall causes the dizzying illusion that the back wall is really the floor and we are watching all the action from above.

This great combination of design, action and illusion causes a real sense of elation. If only Colker, could have thought of a proper finale we would have left walking on a cloud. Instead, she has the cast bring out a large table which we think is the set-up for another act. Before we know it the various insect performers have stepped up onto the table and down to receive applause. It was about halfway through this that I and the rest of the audience realized that this was the curtain call. The egg of the title is paraded about leaving us to expect more will happen. Eventually we see that all the cast are around the rim of the stage motion to us to stand up.

Every previous Cirque show I have attended has received a spontaneous standing ovation. It is strange, to say the least, that Colker could have managed the complex interactions of the show up to tis point without being able to signal the ending clearly. Besides that, when the performers depart she leaves us with the image of the egg at the table. Much of the audience did not leave but remained standing hoping to see the egg hatch. After all, what would be the most logical conclusion? And since when does a prop brought on a Cirque stage not do something? But, alas, no. We waited in vain. All that needed to happen was for the egg to hatch and some cute child-sized insects to emerge to round of the show. But, as I have said, nothing happens, and we drop down from our elation into a feeling of bewilderment and disappointment.

“OVO” is so good right from the start through the Cricket act that it is a real shame it should fumble just at the end and leave us less than satisfied. I do hope that Cirque du Soleil are able to correct this flaw before the show continues its tour after Toronto. “OVO” is almost perfect. But Cirque du Soleil has garnered such huge acclaim in only 25 years, “almost” is not enough.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: The Ants in OVO. ©Sara Krulwich.

True Love Lies

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 11:51:49 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Brad Fraser
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
October 1-November 1, 2009

Brad Fraser has a reputation for shocking audiences with sordid depictions of sex and violence, but his latest play gives quite a different kind of shock. True Love Lies is like a live two-hour cable sitcom filled with “mature content” but one that aims to please rather than antagonize. It’s quite a departure for Fraser and could likely become his biggest hit yet.

The play begins with a depiction of a clichéd sitcom family. Kane (Ashley Wright) and Carolyn (Julie Stewart) are partners in life and in business, their constant shows of affection causing eye-rolling and wisecracks between their two children--Madison (Susanna Fournier), who is trying to get a job, and Royce (Andrew Craig), their computer geek son. All is well until Madison is barred from a job at a new restaurant because the owner, David (David W. Keeley), once knew Madison’s father. Kane and David, in fact, were lovers and attempts to control the fallout from this revelation propel the action in hilarious and unexpected directions. Fraser has written and directed the play so much in the laugh-a-minute style of TV sitcoms, complete with unnaturally zingy comebacks and much-too-perfect one-liners, that one must assume Fraser has done so consciously to wrench this mindless model, along with the institution of marriage, into unfamiliar territory. In this he brilliantly succeeds so that the play gradually morphs into a genuine human comedy on a more satisfying, more realistic, more emotional plane.

It has an ideal cast who work as a real ensemble. Keeley shows that David, the hunk who attracts both sexes, despite his flair is all too aware his life is leading to loneliness. Wright is fully believable as the now-doughy straight guy who could actually have had a passionate secret life. Stewart’s character seems to be going nowhere until she realizes that chaos can lead to rebirth. Fournier is excellent as a pert, potty-mouthed Lolita who has to confront her waywardness, and Craig successfully turns Royce’s teenaged alienation from funny to frightening. Thus, at a dizzying pace, Fraser’s nuclear family blows up, but its demise is not a cause for sorrow but for discarding boxes of preconceived labels about what human relationships should be.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-10-08.
Photo: Julie Stewart, Ashley Wright and Andrew Craig. ©Ed Gass-Donnelly.

The Guardsman

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:17:39 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
written by Ferenc Molnár, directed by László Marton
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
September 17-October 17, 2009

"The Interplay’s the Thing"

Soulpepper has been playing a key role in Toronto’s theatrical life in refamiliarizing audiences with the works of Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár. In 1999 and 2003 they gave is “The Play’s the Thing” (1926), followed by “Olympia” (1928) in 2005 and now, one of his greatest comedies, “The Guardsman” (1910) in a translation by Frank Marcus. The play has enjoyed enormous success in English in the production with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne on Broadway in 1924 and with Brian Bedford and Maggie Smith at Stratford in 1977. Here, though helmed by Hungarian director László Marton, who has guided Soulpepper to success in Chekhov and in its first Molnár, this production of “The Guardsman” simply refuses to catch fire.

Like most of Molnár’s plays, this comedy is based on the interplay of reality and illusion. Nandor, a famous actor, is married to Ilona, a famous actress. Before he married her, Ilona had the reputation for casting off each of her lovers after the period of six months. Now that they have been married for six months, Nandor is becoming increasingly worried that Ilona, though she has sworn to remain faithful, may be about to take a lover. To test her Nandor decides to disguise himself has a dashing guardsman, to attract his wife’s attention and to attempt to seduce her. If she rejects the advances of the guardsman, he will know Ilona is faithful, If he gives in to the guardsman, he will ask for a divorce.

Nandor is renowned as the master of a thousand voices and disguises. The success of his plan depends on the impenetrability of his disguise. Molnár deliberately gives us conflicting views of this. Bela, Nandor and Ilona’s best friend, recognizes him immediately. Liza, the new maid, does not. Soulpepper describes the play as a “timeless cat-and-mouse comedy” between husband and wife. Indeed, that’s exactly what it should be because that’s where the humour lies. “Who knows what when?” and “Who is pretending to know what when?” is what it is all about. Strangely enough, however, that is not how Marton has directed it.

He has directed it as a stolid realistic play whereas it should be as light as a soufflé. For the play truly to be a cat-and-mouse game we have to see that both husband and wife are toying with each other. Ilona can use her pose of feigned ignorance to frustrate her husband just as he tries to use his disguise to tempt her. What Marton fails to establish is the actorliness of both characters. Think of the theatrical families in Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever” (1924), George S, Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s “The Royal Family” (1927) or, indeed, of the theatre couple of Molnár’s own “The Play’s the Thing”, and you see that actors are shown as always acting whether on stage of not. Marton suppresses this part of the exposition so that Ilona and Nandor off-stage seem so dull that it is difficult to view them as actors at all. Without setting this up, Ilona’s fantasy and Nandor’s plan appear as bizarre quirks rather than expressions of people whose vocation is making fantasies real. Marton wants the revelation at the end to be a surprise, but to do that he has to suppress the question “Does she know or not?” that should run through the action and actuate the comedy.

Given this odd approach, the main actors do not shine as they should. Kristen Thomson is directed to remain enigmatic throughout, and so she is, without any flickers of recognition or secret signs of scorn or amusement. The trouble is that this makes her seem the opposite of vivacious and intelligent. Albert Schultz’s Nandor is so grumpy when we first meet him it wouldn’t be surprising if his new wife started looking elsewhere. At the same time, while he does change his change his voice for the role, his Guardsman is so stiff, it’s hard to see him having the passions he professes or fulfilling his wife’s romantic ideal.

As the couple’s confidant Bela, Diego Matamoros plays essentially the same raisonneur figure he did in “The Play’s the Thing”, although his rationality doesn't have as much irrationality to contrast with as it did with the theatre couple in “The Play’s the Thing”. Dawn Greenhalgh is very funny as Ilona’s “Mother” (who is her servant, not her mother), Michael Simpson is a bit too much as the Creditor and Diana Donnelly not quite enough as the new maid Liza. It is great to see Jennifer Phipps on stage even in the tiny role of the Usherette.

Camellia Koo’s provides a non-realistic Art Nouveau set for Nandor and Ilona’s flat, with elaborate costumes on stands lit behind the cut-out walls. Judith Bowden’s costumes capture the glamour of Art Nouveau, but she should design floor-length gowns for Ilona in such a way that Thomson can easily walk forward in them on a flat surface rather than having to pick up the front every time. This constant fussiness undercuts Thomson’s attempts at graceful movement.

In the end one admires Molnár’s play and recognizes what fun it could be in other hands. It should sparkle and fizz The present production is more like flat champagne.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Kristen Thomson and Albert Schultz. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.

The Walworth Farce

Wed, 7 Oct 2009 00:47:11 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
written by Enda Walsh, directed by Mikel Murfi
Druid Theatre Company, Fleck Dance Theatre, Toronto
October 6-10, 2009

"To Trap the Conscience"

Harbourfront World Stage kicked off its 2009-10 season with a bang in the form an fantastic production of Enda Walsh’s “The Walworth Farce” by the Druid Theatre Company of Ireland. Many of Irish playwright Walsh’s works like “Disco Pigs” (1996) or “bedbound” (2000) have featured people separated from the world and trapped in a self-manufactured reality. Here Walsh brilliantly expands on this theme to critique the nature of history and story-telling itself.

On entering Harbourfront’s Fleck Dance Theatre (the new name since September 2008 of the Premiere Dance Theatre), the audience is treated to one of the most realistically grungy stage sets in recent memory. Sabine Dargent’s design makes it appear that the inhabitants of a one-room apartment have attempted to divide the space into three with a bedroom with home-made bunk beds stage right and a filthy kitchen stage left separated from the central living room by rows of studs only partially covered by drywall and without doors. The numerous locks on the door suggest a fear of the outside.

This is the home on the Walworth Road in London of the Irish father Dinny and his two sons, Sean and Blake. After a blackout we hear Bing Crosby singing “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” and the action begins with Dinny (Michael Glenn Murphy) in a slippery toupee and the older son Blake (Raymond Scannell) in a dress apparently warming up for a performance while the younger son Sean (Tadhg Murphy) arrives home from Tesco only look in dismay at the two items he finds in his shopping bag. After a second blackout the family launches into a furiously paced performance of a play in which Blake plays all the female roles using three ratty wigs and Sean a variety of male roles signalled by wearing glasses or a false moustache.

The contrast between the characters‘ grade school-level acting with its over-demonstrative gestures perfectly suits the hyperbolic script, apparently by Dinny, that involve the funeral of his mother, killed by a kick in the head from a dead horse flung over the hedge of gooseberries that she was picking. The play-within-a-play comes to a dead halt and Dinny steps out of character for the first time when the sandwiches for the funeral are not what he expected. It transpires that Sean took home the wrong bag from Tesco because he was sent into a daze by one of the clerks (Mercy Ojelade) actually being friendly towards him.

After violently beating Sean, Dinny signals to continue the play and a second funeral is held by relatives of Dinny for the death of their father. You can’t afford to blink or you’ll miss something. Not only are there the quick changes for Blake among at least five roles, and Sean among at least three, but the two when out of sight of Dinny interact at themselves. Director Mikel Murfi makes this extraordinarily complex action both absolutely clear and breathtakingly rapid and dextrous.

Despite the title the play is, in fact, a tragedy in the mode of “The Spanish Tragedy” (c. 1582) by Thomas Kyd or “Women Beware Women” (1621) by Thomas Middleton in which a play-within-a play leaves the stage littered with bodies and players are killed for real in the course of acting. It fascinating how Walsh manages to renew this antique plot device to make it so horrifying. For all the vigour of their awful performances and the hilarity of Dinny’s script, Walsh’s play has an underside that is not at all comic. We discover that Dinny and his sons have fled their hometown of Cork and left their mother there with the vague hope they would sometime return. For the past fifteen years Dinny has not left the flat nor allowed Blake to leave it. Only Sean is allowed to go and then only to get the food used as props in the family play. Dinny has filled the minds of his sons with the imaginary terrors of the outside world so that they will not leave him. The play is his version of the events that led him to flee Cork and its constant repetition is meant to inculcate this version of the past into his sons’ minds. Meanwhile, Sean’s brief excursions into the outside world and his knowledge of the real events that happened in Cork, have led him and Blake to harbour a secret plan to murder Dinny one day and seek their freedom.

In its specific political dimension, Walsh’s family represents the Irish literally as an island in the world, afraid to turn outward for fear of losing its identity and comforting itself instead with repetitions of its fictional past glory. On another level, the play criticizes any group that will not allow its own self-serving narrative of the past to be altered by the facts. And, on yet another level, Walsh seems to critique story-telling and playwriting themselves, no matter how inventive in incident and language, if its point is to reinforce rather than challenge its audience’s preconceptions.

This is a major play, gripping from its absurd beginning to its terrifying conclusion with red-hot performances from the entire cast. Harbourfront World Stage performs an invaluable service to Toronto when it brings us plays like this so we can get a glimpse of some of the newest and most exciting developments in theatre outside Canada. That exposure helps us not to be trapped in our own world and in our own narratives like the hapless characters of Walsh’s extraordinary play.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Michael Glenn Murphy and Tadhg Murphy. ©Robert Day.

Rock ’n’ Roll

Tue, 6 Oct 2009 12:27:02 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Tom Stoppard, directed by Donna Feore
Canadian Stage Company/Citadel Theatre,
Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
October 1-24, 2009

Overheard while exiting Rock ’n’ Roll, a husband says to his wife, “I thought this would be more like Jersey Boys.” No, as these confused patron discovered, despite the title Tom Stoppard’s latest play is not a glitzy musical. Instead, it’s a lush tapestry of ideas that makes most contemporary plays look like threadbare chintz. Canadian Stage and the Citadel Theatre have mustered a fantastic cast who give impassioned performances, but such a demanding, intellectual work needs much more incisive direction than Donna Feore provides.

The action covers the period 1968-1990 in both Cambridge, England, and in Prague, Czechoslovakia. We follow the lives of the ardent communist Max (Kenneth Welsh), a professor expounding revolution from his safe ivory tower, and his Czech student Jan (Shaun Smyth), who returns to Prague to save his mother when he learns of the Russian occupation. Jan is politically naive, his main passion being rock music by British, American and Czech bands, especially Pink Floyd. The crumbling of democracy in Czechoslovakia and the radicalization of Jan parallels the deterioration due to cancer of Max’s wife Eleanor (Fiona Reid) and Max’s infidelity.

This is as much as Feore get from the play. What she misses is that Stoppard uses Czech history and rock music only as examples in a larger argument. Why does Stoppard include so much discussion of Sappho’s poetry? Why do Max and Eleanor have a major confrontation over the difference between meanings of “brain” and “mind”. Why are there constant references to the god Pan throughout the play? In Feore’s production this larger picture never emerges. She never makes clear that Stoppard views both communism and capitalism as systems that can never tame nature (Pan) because nature also includes disorder, of which rock music is one form of celebration. To make things worse, Feore imposes a deadening stop-start pace to the play through overextended transitions between the many scenes. Just where concentration is needed, Cameron Davis’s psychedelic video projections distract.

Nevertheless the 11-member cast is uniformly excellent. Smyth is outstanding in charting the enormous arc of Jan’s psychological journey. Reid is terrific as the fierce but dying Eleanor in Act 1, and in Act 2 as Eleanor’s brain-fried daughter Esme. Welsh is forceful as the coddled curmudgeon who can’t admit he’s wrong. Feore misses that the intellectual arguments among these four are not there for their own sake but as products of strong emotions that link them. If she has seen this Rock ’n’ Roll would pack a punch strong enough to knock out any musical.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-10-06.
Photo: Patrick Kwok-Choon, Alex Paxton-Beesley, Belinda Cornish, Shaun Smyth, Donald Carrier, Jacklyn Francis, Fiona Reid and Kenneth Welsh. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.

Antigone

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:16:05 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Jean Anouilh, directed by Chris Abraham
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
September 17-October 17, 2009

"The Devil is in the Details"

Soulpepper’s first foray into ancient Greek tragedy comes in the mediated form of Jean Anouilh’s 1944 French adaptation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” (442 BC), first staged in occupied France, where it resonated strongly with conflict of the Resistance and the Nazi’s puppet government. While the performances of Liisa Repo-Martell as Antigone and R.H. Thomson as Creon are superb, uneven acting among the rest of the cast and odd directorial and design decisions undermine their effectiveness.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the events of Antigone take place after those depicted in Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and “Oedipus at Colonus” and picks up the action directly after Aeschylus’ “Seven Against Thebes”. After Oedipus' death, his sons, Antigone’s brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, were to rule Thebes in alternate years. After the first year Eteocles refused to step down causing Polyneices to raise and army to oust him. In battle both kill each other so rule of Thebes passes to their uncle Creon. In an attempt to quash further rebellion, Creon gives Eteocles a state funeral as the defender of the state and dishonours Polyneices by leaving him unburied and prey to wild animals. Creon decrees that anyone who attempts to bury Polyneices will be executed. Antigone, engaged to Creon’s son Haemon, is outraged and manages to partially bury the body despite the guards in constant watch over it. Sophocles‘ play and Anouilh’s adaptation begin just after Antigone has done this deed.

Anouilh’s adaptation updates the action to the present but its most important change is to eliminate the character of the prophet Tiresias in Sophocles who enters to warn Creon that the gods support Antigone and he will bring on his own downfall if he opposes her. Anouilh thus sets the action purely in the human realm. At first it seems to represent the struggle of the individual (Antigone) against the state (Creon), but as the play progresses and the futility of Antigone’s action is made clear, it comes to represent to the existential choice to live and die an “authentic” life, in Sartre’s phrase, or to live one of compromise.

Director Chris Abraham seems to be fully aware of this, but many of his and the designers’ decisions mar the play’s effectiveness. He has coarsened and coloquialized Lewis Galantière’s 1947 translation, so that modern inanities like “ I think I know where Creon is coming from” sit uneasily alongside Anouilh’s poetic prose.

For Creon’s office where all the action takes place, Lorenzo Savoini has created a room of full-height raised-panelled walls of dark wood, looking at once both elegant and funereal. To make an allusion to classical Greek theatre, the single large door should ideally be placed in the centre of the back wall. Savoini has it in the side stage left. Worse, he has inset part of that wall with a bank of CCTV monitors which not only have become a design cliché but are in fact too small to be useful. Worst, however, is the large square column he places in the middle of the stage left playing area. While this gives the room a sense of weight, it also forces the vast majority of the action into the stage right half of the stage. I, sitting in house right, found my head turned for uncomfortably long periods toward the stage right for the intermissionless one hour and forty minutes.

Dana Osborn’s costumes are appropriate given the modern setting. Giving Repo-Martell to make her look like a young girl is simple but effective. Giving Jordan Pettle as Haemon a hoodie, however, is a mistake. He’s the king’s son, not some teenager hanging out in the mall. Giving a jacket and tie to the little boy who serves as Creon’s page made him look silly. And I do wish he did not have to pull out a PDA near the end to check Creon’s schedule and thus ruin the sombre mood with unintended humour.

Liisa Repo-Martell as Antigone and R.H. Thomson as Creon are equally intense as they must be for the play to work. Repo-Martell shows us an Antigone, so deeply affected by the past horrors she has seen, that she already seems more at home with death than life when we first meet her. Her haunted expression, her odd laughs to herself, are chilling. As Anouilh’s intended her inability to compromise seems both heroic and absurd, in the existential sense, at the same time. Meanwhile, Thomson paints a masterful portrait of a man who never sought to rule, but having the reins wants to impose order to break with the multiple tragedies of the past. The irony is, of course, that the very rigour he imposes leads only to further tragedy. Thomson’s depiction of when this dawns on Creon is shattering.

A third fine performance comes from Jeff Lillico as the Guard, the common man caught up in the life-or-death struggle between uncle and niece that he doesn’t understand. Claire Calnan as Antigone’s superficial sister Ismene is meant to be a foil to Antigone’s intensity but need not be quite so devoid of personality as here. Jordan Pettle does really seem to become fully engaged with his role as Haemon until he confront Creon at the end. Maggie Huculak is oddly hysterical as Antigone’s Nurse, certainly not the one to comfort and calm others as one would expect. The most bizarre performance, however, comes from David Storch as the Chorus, who also pitches in to play a few bit parts. This is the role Laurence Olivier played at the work’s English-language premiere in 1949. Storch speaks in the oddly hollow voice he has lately been cultivating, which works well in comedy, since it makes anything serious he says sound ridiculously pedantic. Here it is totally inappropriate, as are his sudden, inexplicable fits of shouting. Rather than dispassionate or wryly ironic guide to the action he should be, he seems more like a mad professor. With such strength in Repo-Martell, Thomson and Lillico, it is a pity that Abraham allows so many rogue details to get in the way.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Liisa Repo-Martell and R.H. Thomson. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.

The Boys in the Photograph

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:57:56 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, book and lyrics by Ben Elton, directed by Ben Elton
Mirvish Productions/Manitoba Theatre Centre,
Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto
September 25-November 1, 2009

Most people know that The Boys in the Photograph that premiered in Winnipeg earlier this year is Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton’s revision of their musical The Beautiful Game of 2000. Anyone who thought that Lloyd Webber could only write about femmes fatales, felines and falling chandeliers will be surprised to find that he can also write about ordinary people experiencing complex human emotions. Under Elton’s meticulous direction, the deliberately unglitzy, ungimmicky production is is impeccably performed by an all-Canadian cast. Yet, many will feel that the show requires even further revision to be fully successful.

Set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, from 1969-72, the musical follows the lives of boys, Protestant and Catholic, all once players on the same football (i.e., soccer) team together. The team photograph of the title is a reminder of the one time their passion for “the beautiful game” overcame their political and religious divisions. The first difficulty with Elton’s book is that the long first act, devoid of narrative drive, functions almost entirely as background leaving the plot proper to begin only in Act 2. The second is that Elton’s over-explanatory dialogue continually harps on the theme “Violence and hatred are bad” as if the action and setting did not make that abundantly clear. He is most successful in comic scenes as when the the newlywed Catholic lovers John Kelly (Tony Lepage) and Mary Maguire (Erica Peck) confront their first sexual experience.

Lloyd Webber’s score, one of his strongest in years, combines 1970s pop with Irish folk influences to create one memorable tune after the next. The duet “All The Love I Have” and Mary’s powerful indictment of violence “If This Is What We’re Fighting For” will likely join the composer’s other classic songs.

At the end of the performance Elton himself came on stage to praise the cast as equal with the best on Broadway or the West End. This indeed is the show’s chief glory. The cast works with such dedication and unity of purpose the energy it generates sweeps all before it. Peck’s performance itself is truly outstanding as she subtly delineates her character’s growth in maturity and understanding. Lepage creates such an outgoing character in John Kelly, he surprises you with the depths of emotion he can convey. Richard Harte is chilling as the villain of the piece, while Richard McMillan is a delight as the priest/football coach who knows more about the profane world than you’d expect. The show is alone worth seeing for these and the many other superlative performances themselves. If Elton could make the first act more compact, cause the central crisis to arise sooner and, most of all, allow the action to speak for itself, The Boys in the Photograph should go on to the great success it deserves.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-09-30.
Photo: Tony Lepage (centre). ©Bruce Monk.

Mimi, or A Poisoner’s Comedy

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:55:30 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
music and lyrics by Allen Cole, book and lyrics by Melody A. Johnson and Rick Roberts, directed by Alisa Palmer
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
September 23-October 25, 2009

The Tarragon Theatre has opened its 39th season with the world premiere of Mimi, or A Poisoner’s Comedy, a musical so ineptly written and directed it is a waste of the considerable talents of all those involved. With its title character a serial killer and its frequent use of symbolic pies, the musical unavoidably invites comparison with Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979), always to its own detriment.

Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630-76), a.k.a. Mimi (Trish Lindström), so outrages her father (Victor A. Young) with her debauchery that he has her lover Godin de Sainte-Croix (Ron Pederson) imprisoned and threatens to cut off her funds unless she reforms. While inside, Sainte-Croix learns the secret of poisoning which he imparts to Mimi upon his release, not knowing that she will find murder an addictive thrill. The story’s intriguing possibilities are ruined by a superficial book by Melody A. Johnson and Rick Roberts far too convinced of its own cleverness. While Allen Cole provides zestful music and a haunting refrain in the “Pigeon Pie” song, the muddy diction of the four male singers makes the complicated lyrics incomprehensible even when they can actually hit the notes Cole has written. In contrast, Tamara Bernier Evans in a variety of roles and Lindström singly clearly and well and are the least inclined to chew the scenery.

The show’s worst flaw is its complete failure to explore its subject matter. There’s no reason “dark comedies” can’t have substance. If fact, one expects it. Johnson and Roberts make much of Mimi’s sympathy with her mother, but this gives us no clue to her utter heartlessness. The real Mimi poisoned her husband, their children, her father, her four siblings, her lover and unknown numbers of poor people. This Mimi kills only four, but any time the story comes near to peering into the darkness of its subject, it shifts into cheap comedy as when the limbless man Mimi poisons as an experiment falls face-first into his pie. Like Sweeney Todd, Mimi could have been presented as an expression of the hypocritically moralistic society around her. Instead, the creators give us a forgettable under-rehearsed slapstick cartoon.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-09-29.
Photo: Marin Julien and Trish Lindström. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.

Madama Butterfly

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:30:13 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Giacomo Puccini, directed by Brian Macdonald
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
September 26-November 3, 2009

Opening the COC’s 2009-10 season is Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in the timeless production designed by Susan Benson and directed by Brian Macdonald. Though the production was first mounted in 1990, it seems brand-new and with its use of wood and muted palette of colours looks as if it were specifically created for the Four Seasons Centre. The elegant simplicity of Benson’s design, the subtlety and range of Michael Whitfield’s lighting and the dramatic rightness of Macdonald’s direction make this the most warmly satisfying production of an opera the COC has ever commissioned. Please, let’s have more from this team in future.

Any discussion of the performances must note that there are two casts of principals who alternate throughout the long run. The cast seen on opening night featured Romanian soprano Adina Nitescu as the former geisha Butterfly, David Pomeroy as her lover Pinkerton, Allyson McHardy as Butterfly’s servant Suzuki and James Westman as the U.S. Consul Sharpless, who tries to dissuade Pinkerton from a marriage Pinkerton does not regard as binding. The second cast in these roles is Yannick-Muriel Noah, Bryan Hymel, Anita Krause and Brett Polegato.

I mention this because my primary difficulty with the opening night production was the performance of Nitescu. Though she has a powerful voice, she sings with little subtlety. Butterfly is said to be only 15 years old, trained in the arts of the geisha, fragile and demure. At no time does Nitescu convey any of this. She strides about, head erect, full of overweening pride, staring people full in the face. Icy stubbornness not romantic faith perversely makes one of opera’s most beloved heroines strangely unsympathetic.

Luckily, this is not true of the others. Pomeroy is in fine voice and captures just the right mix of dashing handsomeness and utter callousness. McHardy is a warmly sympathetic Suzuki and Westman a deeply compassionate Sharpless. Under the baton of the ebullient Carlo Montanaro, the COC Orchestra made Puccini’s score utterly gorgeous, thrilling in its sweep and full of detail. Given that the design, direction and orchestra are the same for all performances, you may wish to check which cast is singing when before buying your tickets.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-09-29.
Photo: Adina Nitescu and David Pomeroy. ©Michael Cooper.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Mon, 7 Sep 2009 11:52:28 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by David Grindley
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
August 21-October 30, 2009

"’The fierce vexation of a dream’"

Stratford’s last production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was only five years ago. That one, incongruously set in a rainforest, was directed by Leon Rubin and is generally referred to as the “bungee-jumping ‘Dream’”, since bouncing fairies are what caught most people’s attention. This year’s “Dream” will probably be known, somewhat incorrectly, as the “punk rock ‘Dream’” because of its loopy design.

At least British director David Grindley and designer Jonathan Fensome have decided to place the action on the bare Festival stage and have reinstated the balcony missing for several seasons. But that’s about all that is positive. As soon as the initial scenes in Athens are over the balcony comes crashing down on the stage bending up boards where its point impacted the floor. Until we return to Theseus’s court, that, somehow, represents the forest where the lovers escape and where the mechanicals rehearse their play. Why the ruined Festival stage represents that magical world is anybody’s guess unless Grindley and Fensome are making a nasty comment about how Shakespeare has fared there recently. Besides being boring to look at for two hours and in no way even suggesting a forest as its upright pillars might have done, the fallen structure covers up the sweet spot centre stage and forces Grindley to block the action around its perimeter. Actors often climb into the downward-pointing apex and climb up the side of the vee, but it always seems more as if Grindley is trying to use the structure than that it is a natural part of the landscape.

Fensome’s costuming is also peculiar. The Athenians are dressed as if it were the late 1950s, in fact, about the time the Stratford Festival was founded. The fairies, however, are dressed in black leather, with ultra-think-soled boots, torn net stockings, with tattoos, piercings and hair moussed into odd shapes. The first question is: “Why do the fairies look like punks and goths from the 1990s instead of the bikers and their girls from the 1950s?” The fairies are always held to represent an older culture that mortals have forgotten, not one from the future. Second, “How do these urban ‘bad‘ kids, whether from the 1950s or the 1990s, in any way reflect the forces of nature?” Every one of the lines they speak, so overflowing with quaint horticultural and entomological references, is totally incongruous coming from a group whose only encounter with natural being might be the worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle or a smashed fly on the windscreen.

It’s true that the dissension between Oberon and Titania over possession of the Indian boy has caused chaos in nature. Grindley acknowledges this through the profusion of autumn leaves on the stage. The fairies themselves represent order and healing. That’s why they bless the Theseus’s household at the end of the play. That’s why the confusions in the forest actually sort out the lovers‘ difficulties. Puck’s mischievousness has a purpose even he can’t see. Oberon wants to end his rift with Titania to restore order in nature. Thus, to costume the fairies as troublemakers and adolescent rebels against order, is completely contrary to the sense of the play.

Compounding the problems with the design are peculiarities in direction. According to the text the lovers‘ flight through the forest causes their clothing to be torn by twigs and brambles. Grindley does have fairies pick at the lovers’ clothing as they pass by, but they lose most of their clothing through wilful unmotivated. Bruce Godfree’s Lysander suddenly takes off everything but his underwear. Ian Lake’s Demetrius decides to take off his pants with his shoes still on. Why? It all looks like a cheap bid for laughs. The asses head for Bottom consists of Puck’s two pointy shoes for ears and some fake teeth. Is that all the magic he can muster? It looks stupid and leaves the resourecless Puck barefoot.

If the acting were uniformly fine it might be possible to ignore some of the production’s peculiarities, but, unfortunately, it is not. The best performance comes from Geraint Wyn Davies as Bottom, one of the most nuanced performances of that role I’ve seen. Too many actors play this character at such a high pitch from the start that he seems more a caricature than a character. Here, Wyn Davies makes him a believable human being, an enthusiast but not the usual raging egomaniac. His use of a lovely Welsh accent helps soften all his lines and with it Bottom’s personality. He’s not an idiot but a naïf. One of Grindley’s most unusual ploys is to have Bottom play Pyramus’s speech over Thisbe’s bloodied scarf in total earnestness so that it actually becomes moving. After all, the mechanicals thinks it so, so why shouldn’t we experience it that way? Grindley treats Thisbe’s speech over Pyramus the same way. Grindley here at least follows Theseus's view of the mechanicals‘ play that “never anything can be amiss, When simpleness and duty tender it”.

Dion Johnstone and Yanna McIntosh make an excellent Oberon and Titania, both exuding power and sensuality. It would be nice not to have the distractions of Johnstone 1980s’ Michael Jackson haircut and McIntosh’s off-kilter Amy Winehouse do. Tom Rooney’s Puck is a problem. Looking cool in his shades and skinny-legged pants, he plays him as an insolent punk with attitude. One could easily believe he is Oberon’s equal, not his servant, and indeed, the Grindley’s deliberately de-emphasizes the hierarchical order of the fairy world that mirrors that of the humans.

Timothy D. Stickney delivers all of Theseus’s lines in the same shout. Cara Ricketts’ Hippolyta, won by pistol not by the sword, is appropriately sullen in the first scenes of the play, but unaccountably comfortable with her new life, and even affectionate, even though only one day has passed. This is all the more unbelievable since Grindley begins the play with Theseus shooting a couple of Hippolyta’s comrades point bank. Of the lovers Laura Condlln as Hermia gives the best performance. She is the clearest-spoken and the only one to find humour in her character rather than in her stage business. Bruce Godfree is probably next best as Lysander, but Ian Lake is a dull Demetrius and Sophia Walker an unmodulated Helena.

All the mechanicals are all good--Michael Spencer-Davis as Peter Quince), Skye Brandon as Flute, André Sills as Snug, Kevin Hanchard as Starveling and Victor Ertmanis as Snout. John Innes is also very effective as Egeus, Hermia’s strict father.

Given Grindley’s murky interpretation, it is probably appropriate that lighting designer Michael Walton should cast the stage in a thick gloom, unchanging and unrelieved until the sun suddenly rises as a kind of afterthought at the end of Act 4. The audience at the matinee I attended greeted the curtain call with a loud ovation, apparently because the rock ‘n‘ roll of the fairies had triumphed over the crooner music favoured by the mortals. If the play were about one triumphing over another, the applause might be justified. The play, however, is about the harmony of both and it is doubly depressing that in dumbing down the play, Grindley ignored this essential point and that the audience did not notice.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Yanna McIntosh and Dion Johnstone. ©David Hou.

Zastrozzi

Fri, 4 Sep 2009 14:20:30 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
written by George F. Walker, directed by Jennifer Tarver
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
August 23-October 3, 2009

"Inanity Masquerading as Insanity"

“Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline” becomes the first play by the popular Canadian playwright George F. Walker that the Stratford Festival has ever staged. The Festival calls the play “a Canadian classic”, but for a country with such a relatively short theatrical history, especially in English, this is a meaningless designation. From 1977 it is one of Walker’s early plays that like “Beyond Mozambique” (1974) or “theatre of the Film Noir” (1981) could be viewed as “exercices de style”. The play is all surface no substance, like a kind of live cartoon in period costume. It could be very funny if staged in that light, but unfortunately Jennifer Tarver, who directed Brian Dennehy last year in Beckett, directs the play with stultifying earnestness.

Walker based his play on a plot summary he read of the 1810 novel “Zastrozzi” written by poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when he was 17. The play feels like it was based on a plot summary rather than a full novel because it is all plot and no depth. In Walker’s version set in the 1890s, Zastrozzi, the self-proclaimed “master criminal of all Europe” has been trying to avenge himself on Verezzi, an artists and self-proclaimed visionary, for the murder of Zastrozzi’s mother. Though Zastrozzi is an atheist, he knows Verezzi is a pious Catholic. Therefore, rather than merely killing Verezzi, Zastrozzi wants to kill his soul by forcing Verezzi into committing suicide, a cardinal sin, thereby sending himself to hell. To so this, Zastrozzi uses his own mistress Matilda, the self-proclaimed greatest seductress in Europe, to seduce and reject Verezzi and thus drive him to suicide. But, there are two complicating factors. Verezzi has already fallen in love with the virgin Julia and Verezzi’s, tutor Victor has been aware of Zastrozzi’s plan all along.

If this all sounds overheated and just plain silly, it is. In fact, “silly” is a word that crops up frequently in the text when the characters describe others‘ actions. The main disappointment with the play is that given the gothic plot and three characters who view themselves as superhuman, Walker’s language seldom rises to the level of characters’ fantasies of the conflict of absolute good and evil and too often remains ploddingly pedestrian. With its nonsensical plot, cartoonish characters and undistinguished dialogue, all that can make “Zastrozzi” work on stage is its style of presentation, a theatrical panache to make in into a kind of children's adventure show for adults.

Tarver, however, approaches the play as if it were some rediscovered work by Beckett. The lighting, gestures and movement are all tightly controlled on the bare stage. If this were a play by Beckett this would serve to emphasize the poetry of his minimalist language. In the context of “Zastrozzi”, it only emphasizes the play’s vapidity.

Of the six actors, only two show any feeling of how to play overblown characters with a sense of irony. As the whip-cracking Matilda, Sarah Orenstein is able to play camp without going too far. She is convincingly seductive but also aware that seduction is just a game she happens to be good at. The other actor, surprisingly, is John Vickery as Victor. Here, fortunately without his put-on British accent, he embodies all the seriousness of a man who is not merely Verezzi’s tutor but the one who continually saves him from ruin, all too aware of his charge’s insanity. Oliver Becker as Zastrozzi's servant Bernardo could join this group, but he finds humour in the dimwittedness of his character rather than in his playing style.

Rick Roberts, otherwise a fine actor, never gets hold of the mock-demonic nature of Zastrozzi. He has been directed to be so icy than instead of chilling us his cool down what little vigour there is in his lines. Rather than seeming like boundless evil confined within a human body, he seems more like the ghost of man who doesn’t realize he’s dead. Andrew Shaver’s Verezzi is an embarrassment. Shaver plays him as if he were Peter Shaffer’s Mozart in “Amadeus” but his attempts to portray the insane Verezzi make him seem merely petulant, effeminate and affected. Amanda Lisman, who plays a listless Roxane in “Cyrano de Bergerac” gives us an identical Julia.

The play’s design is also peculiar. Though Walker has moved the action ahead to the 1890s, designer Teresa Przybylski has costumed everyone except Matilda in the swashbuckling garb of the 17th century. Matilda, for unknown reasons, is in a 1960s red mini-dress. The baggage carts she uses to move items on and off stage are efficient but how exactly are they related to the play or its themes? Lighting designer Robert Thomson creates clean squares of light on the stage as one might for an avant-garde play. They’re very nice but but their very exactness goes completely contrary to the neo-gothic atmosphere of the play.

In a season where the stage fighting has been notably lacklustre, fight director Todd Campbell, along with Simon Fon and Casey Hudecki, has succeeded in creating the most exciting sword fights of any play this year. They really are the highlight of the play. If only the direction and acting could rise to the energy level of these battles, this inane display of style over substance might actually be worth seeing.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive
Photo: Rick Roberts and John Vickery. ©David Hou.

The Entertainer

Wed, 2 Sep 2009 12:22:57 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
written by John Osborne, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 15-September 20, 2009

"Why You Should Care"

The Shaw Festival inaugurates the Studio Theatre, an exciting new performance space, with “The Entertainer”, the first play by John Osborne that the Shaw Festival has staged. The Studio Theatre is otherwise known and used as Rehearsal Hall 1 and has become the space where the one-acts for the annual Directors Project are staged. This is the first time the space has been open to the general public. With only 176 seats it is the smallest of the Festival’s four venues and has been configured as an alley theatre with the audience on two sides of a long, narrow performing area.

It is an excellent venue for “The Entertainer”, which alternates scenes of domestic disharmony in the Rice family’s front parlour with scenes of Archie Rice, the music hall performer of the title, in excerpts from his routines. The main oddity is that Peter Hartwell’s design for this configuration places two stages at either end, suggesting that Archie is performing at more than one venue during the course of the action which is not necessarily the case.

On the Shaw Festival website, Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell says, “Our production of ‘The Entertainer’ deliberately steps outside of the Shaw Festival’s mandate representing a continuum of provocative playwriting that includes Shaw, Noel Coward and now John Osborne.” In fact, “The Entertainer” though first performed in 1957, is not really so far outside the Festival’s mandate. First of all, given that Shaw died in 1950, John Osborne, born in 1929 is one of Shaw’s contemporaries. Second, Osborne uses the decline of the music hall as a metaphor for the decline of Great Britain. Musical hall flourished approximately from 1830-1960 which completely encompasses Shaw’s lifespan. Although Osborne is known to have abjured Shaw and all he represented, he is, as Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington points out in his excellent note, not really as unlike Shaw as he liked to think. Both were ardent exploders of social and national pretences and myths. As Billington mentions, Shaw uses the decline of the house in “Heartbreak House” of 1919 to represent the decline of Britain into the abyss of World War I. In fact, the received wisdom in Britain that “everything changed” after Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” of 1956 has done a lot of harm to Britain’s appreciation of Shaw and its own drama of the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, because of the Shaw Festival, Canada now has a greater knowledge of Shaw and plays of that period than do the British and has developed a tradition of how to perform Shaw that Britain has not. In September this year in London, for example, “To True to Be Good” will receive its first performance in Britain since 1975, whereas the Festival has already staged it here three times since then.

In “The Entertainer” we meet the Rice family, whose only method of dealing with each other and with life is by anaesthetizing themselves with large quantities of alcohol. Billy Rice, Archie’s father and a former music hall performer himself, spends most of his day in his favourite chair reading the newspaper and decrying what he finds there. We meet Archie’s second wife Phoebe, who works at Woolworth's and accepts that Archie’s philandering as part of his being male. The younger generation are represented by Archie’s daughter Jean, who has come to pay a surprise visit. She has broken off her engagement with her boyfriend Graham and taken part in a rally at Trafalgar Square against Britain’s involvement in the Suez Crisis. Jean’s brother Frank was the first to dissent from the family’s knee-jerk conservatism by refusing to be conscripted, a decision that cost him six months in jail. All, however, are united in their worry over Frank’s brother Mick, who did join the army and who has been been taken prisoner oversees.

One of the main reasons “The Entertainer” continues to be revived is that Osborne has created such a complex, fascinating if ultimately repugnant character in Archie Rice. Benedict Campbell is especially good in the musical hall scenes with Reza Jacobs as his faithful pianist and less-than-comfortable sidekick that alternate with the domestic scenes. His jokes are ancient and his music is outdated. He seems to know it but resents the audience for not responding the way they used to. As the play progresses Campbell shows how Archie’s revulsion completely undermines his routines so that they are so longer even superficially funny. His signature song “Why Should I Care?” changes in meaning from a happy-go-lucky tune to song riddled with cynicism. In his programme note Billington suggests that Osborne sees something “heroic” about Archie, but in this production that is nowhere evident. His persistence in his trade despite its decline into interludes in a twice-nightly nude revue looks like foolishness and his inability to change or start a new life in Canada looks like cowardice. In the domestic scenes Campbell is less successful. He uses jokes and songs to defuse tension but his sudden changes of mood seem to come out of nowhere and often to appear as bluster. Nevertheless, his sudden imitation of a black woman singing the blues when he hears news about Mick is a moment of eerie, hair-raising theatricality.

Corrine Koslo, in one of the richest roles she has had in a long time, rises fully to the challenge of presenting Phoebe in all her pitiful soddenness. Koslo shows that Phoebe was once a woman full of life and humour, but the dullness of her life with Archie has driven that out of her. Either he is away performing or philandering or he is at home verbally abusing her for becoming the sad frump and alcoholic she has become. Koslo’s is a heart-rending performance of a woman who has lost all her dreams and who struggles to maintain a genteel façade as she numbs her pain with alcohol.

David Schurmann gives an excellent performance as Billy Rice. Initially, we may laugh at his obvious racism and jingoism as the product of an ageing mind. But when we see how Archie’s music hall performances are informed by the same views, we see where Archie learnt his repellent ideas. Schurmann maintains our ambiguous response to Billy throughout the play--a seemingly kindly old gentleman on the one hand, an arch-conservative bigot on the other.

As Jean, Krista Colosimo seems to turn herself on and off. When she is “on”, she is very good as she recognizes all over again the numerous reasons why she left home in her family’s interactions. In the long passages, however, where Jean looks on but has nothing to say, Colosimo seems to turn “off” and it is impossible to judge what her character is thinking. In contrast, Ken James Stewart, with less stage time that Colosimo, is always “on”, his face reflecting immediately the changing moods he feels even when he is silent. His performance of the bluesy “Singing for You” about his brother Mick, is remarkable in its fierceness as it cuts through the Rices’ treacly hypocrisy. Graeme Somerville and Ric Reid make brief appearances as Jean’s boyfriend Graham and Archie’s successful brother Bill. Both turn up only to have their offers--security for Jean, change for Archie--rejected.

Given a family with such explosive dynamics that looks back at theatrical Tyrone clan of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and forward to the drunken game-playing vigil of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, it is surprising that we feel so little tension. In large part this is due to the leisurely pace set by director Jackie Maxwell that never seems to pick up speed over its three hours and 15 minutes. Maxwell uses Esther Maloney as the Club Girl to hold up signs signalling the show’s 13 scenes. This is a Brechtian device appropriate to the play’s structure, but it does mean we don’t snap in and out of the music hall scenes as quickly as we should. Also, given that Hartwell has provided Maxwell with two stages on the stage, it is odd that only in the last act Maxwell begins to locate some of the Rice family’s set speeches on these stages rather than in their parlour. Greater use of the two stages in this way would blur the division between the music hall and the parlour and underline Osborne’s point that this family of performers is always performing, whether at home or not, to the extent that they are no longer in contact with reality.

While the production may not be ideal, we still must applaud the Shaw for reviving “The Entertainer” and revealing what a fascinating work it is. Osborne may have rejected all things Shavian, but his once-inflammatory play now looks very much like a continuation of the tradition of Harley Granville Barker. I have always thought that the Shaw Festival mandate should include Shaw, his contemporaries--even those who died in 1856 and those born in 1950--along with plays set in that period. Alexandre Dumas, père (1802-70) is thus one of Shaw’s contemporaries as are Tom Stoppard (born 1939) and Michael Frayn (born 1933). The range of those who were alive when Shaw was is quite amazing and embodies the massive changes that occurred during that period. I am glad the Festival is beginning to explore these paths. I am also very pleased with the Studio Theatre, a much more comfortable and intimate space that the pit-like Studio Theatre at Stratford. “The Entertainer” may be a demanding evening but it and its venue hold out the promise exciting things to come.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Benedict Campbell. ©Emily Cooper.

The Shadow

Tue, 1 Sep 2009 11:26:05 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Omar Daniel, directed by Tom Diamond
Tapestry New Opera Works,
Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
May 21-30, 2009

The Shadow, a 90-minute opera by composer Omar Daniel to a libretto by Alex Poch-Goldin, was one of the most successful of Tapestry New Opera Works’ recent commissions. Daniel showed real talent as a opera composer while Poch-Goldin created a story that combined humor with an ever-increasing tension. The full house at the opera’s final performance (seen May 30, 2009) and the work’s enthusiastic reception suggested that this new opera definitely has a future.

The story take place in Barcelona amidst the weird colonnades of Gaudì’s Park Güell, looking in Camellia’s Koo’s attractive set like dinosaur legs with the Barcelona skyline along its back. In Gaudì’s day a strange practise of debt-collection was in force. If a client did not repay money borrowed from the Mafia, he would be followed everywhere by a “Shadow” in top hat and tails who would publicly announce the client’s indebtedness wherever he appeared. Poch-Goldin imagines Raoul, an introverted postman, who falls in love with Allegra, the daughter of a wealthy man on his route. To realize his dreams Raoul borrows money from the local Don and lavishly woos Allegra as the extroverted “Hernando”. Soon enough the Shadow appears, a character who may also be a figment of Raoul’s guilty imagination.

Daniel’s complex, highly imaginative score combined the spiky rhythms of the Neoclassical Stravinsky with the dense harmonics of Alban Berg. Each person in the opera was characterized by a collection of instruments within the seven-member band--Raoul by the strings, the Shadow by a jazz ensemble. Further, Raoul and Allegra had themes particular to their inner and outer natures, the latter employing Spanish dance rhythms. The baritone Raoul frequently sang falsetto to express his dreams while his Shadow, a counter-tenor, often used his chest voice to menace Raoul. Chimes sounded throughout, a reminder of life’s brevity.

Peter McGillivray used his rich, resonant baritone to create an immediately engaging portrait of the tragicomic Raoul. Daniel gave Carla Huhtanen numerous opportunities to display her pure soprano and effortless coloratura as Allegra, a character one wished Poch-Goldin had given more substance. Counter-tenor Scott Belluz commanded a full, rounded tone and clearly relished the role of the elegant, eerie Shadow. Theodore Baerg lent his mature baritone to the money-loving Don, while Daniel gave tenor Keith Klassen a humorous showpiece aria, performed with gusto, in his small role as a waiter. Under conductor Wayne Strongman the Tapestry Ensemble played with precision and great feeling for both the opera’s humor and its underlying sadness.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2009-09.
Photo: Scott Belluz. ©Michael Cooper.

Ways of the Heart

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:41:30 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Noel Coward, directed by Blair Williams
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 1-October 11, 2009

"Two Out of Three"

“Ways of the Heart” is the last of the collections of one-act plays that make up Noel Coward’s “Tonight at 8:30” to open at the Shaw Festival. It thus rounds off the first-ever production in Canada of the complete 10-play series. The final trio comprises “The Astonished Heart” (1935), “Family Album” (1935) and “Ways and Means” (1936). “Family Album” is the only one of these that the Shaw has staged before and that was back in 1971. Director Blair Williams, who brought the riotous comedy “The President” last year, is blessed with the last two plays on the agenda, but cursed with the first.

“The Astonished Heart” is probably the least well-written of all plays that make up “Tonight at 8:30”. Unlike the other nine, here it seems as if Coward has tried to cram all the events of of an Ibsen-like tragedy into too small a space. Something has to be excised and here, unfortunately, it seems to be the motivations for the characters. When the play opens we see Barbara Faber, wife of world-famous psychiatrist Christian Faber (the Noel Coward role), waiting anxiously with Faber’s colleague Tim Verney and his secretary Susan Birch for the arrival of the mysterious Leonora Vail (the Gertrude Lawrence role). When Leonora does arrive the similarity of this entrance to her very first entrance into that room causes Barbara to relive in flashback everything that has transpired between that moment and now. In this it bears a strong resemblance to “Shadow Play”, another play in “Tonight at 8:30”, where too much of a sleeping drug causes Victoria Gayforth to relive her life with her husband up to the point where he asks her for a divorce.

The music and surrealism that lighten “Shadow Play” are absent from “The Astonished Heart” and so is any rigorous logic. What we watch is initially presented as what Barbara recalls, but soon enough we see scenes that she could not have witnessed. After the death of her husband, Leonora has returned to England, apparently with the firm intention of winning Barbara’s husband away from her. Why she should wish to hurt her old school-friend in such a fashion is never explained and remains a gaping hole in the plot. After leading him on, Leonora successfully hooks Christian, but while she is not interested, he is in “love”. He is still in love with Barbara although the physical side of their relationship is over. Barbara is, in fact, happy that Christian should indulge this side with Leonora, even if Leonora is not. In scenes Coward’s characters speak of but we never see, Christian apparently can’t help himself from psychoanalysing everything Leonora tells him and thus ruins her most precious memories. Without ocular proof this is all far too difficult to believe. Besides this, Coward wants the symbolically named Christian’s conflict to represent the conquest of the mind by matter, with Leonora representing matter. Rather than elation, Christian’s relationship leaves him in a profound state of depression.

Without fully realized backgrounds or psychologies for the characters or a consistent symbolism for the action, it is impossible to care about any of the characters. Blair Williams and his fine cast do an excellent job of convincing us that at least they know and care about what it all means even if we don’t. As Barbara, Laurie Paton conveys a sense of profound understanding to which we wish Coward would give us some access. As Leonora, Claire Jullien plays the sly temptress who is tormented by the prize she wins. David Jansen’s Christian is an enigma. We understand the irony of a psychiatrist not understanding himself, but Coward makes Christian’s explanations excessively vague. What Jansen does show is a man who inexplicably descends into the depths of depression when he glimpses an aspect of his inner self he finds repugnant. This is a case where we can at least appreciate the talent of the actors involved even if Coward has not given us sufficient information to understand their actions.

After intermission, “Family Album” places us on much firmer ground. The action is set in a drawing room in Kent in 1860. The Featherways household is discover in deep, elaborate mourning. The five Featherways siblings--Jasper, Lavinia, Harriet, Emily and Richard--three with their spouses, have gathered just after their father’s funeral. Lavinia, who, unlike the rest, has never moved away from home seems hit the hardest and much of the comedy comes from the slightest reference to death or to the grave sending her into paroxysms of weeping. The others are not quite so hypersensitive and would rather down a few toasts. After a bottle has been consumed moods lighten all round, even in Lavinia, and songs are sung and dances danced as a box of toys from the attic brings out the happiness the siblings once knew together when they were young. The play concludes with shocking news from Lavinia followed by a general celebrations.

This is a highly enjoyable show, its mock seriousness serving as a useful restorative after the deadly seriousness of “The Astonished Heart”. With eight actors on stage throughout the action, this is much more an ensemble piece like “Star Chamber” than a showcase for only two actors as so many of the “Tonight at 8:30” plays were intended. The Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence parts are Jasper and Jane, but you would never really guess it from the overall effect. The two characters who attract the most attention are Lavinia and the Featherways’ ancient butler Burrows. Laurie Paton is really very funny as Lavinia. You can already guess from the exaggerated nature of her grieving that “the lady doth protest too much”. She charts Lavinia’s progress from uprightness to reluctant celebration to scandalous drunken revelation in delightful detail. As Burrows, Michael Ball plays the most decrepit servant you’ve ever seen on stage. His shaking, unsteady gait and stone-deafness seem to spell destruction, miraculously averted, for any objects in his care. The four songs come as a surprise, especially the well-known waltz “Hearts and Flowers”, and help to heighten the strange unreality that pervades the piece.

Following one of the most ingenious set changes ever seen at the Court House Theatre, we shift from Victorian England to the very different comic world of the contemporary Côte d’Azur for “Ways and Means”. Husband and wife Toby and Stella Cartwright (the Coward and Lawrence roles) are discovered in bed deeply perturbed about their future. They are guests in the home of a fabulously wealthy woman but have gambled away all of their money to the extent that they don’t even have enough to tip the servants when they leave, and it is clear that Olive, their hostess, requires their departure soon to make room for new guests. To ask Olive for a loan would be too humiliating and, these being upper class Brits, to find work is out of the question. When all seems lost, their saviour arrives in the unlikely form of a former valet turned cat-burglar.

The pacing is brisk, the dialogue witty and the amoral solution is part of the fun. Claire Jullien and David Jansen are very funny as the financially challenged couple, he morose while she remains perky. Patrick McManus is excellent as the burglar Stevens and Blair Williams draws much humour from his inbred sense of politeness to the Cartwrights despite his new vocation. Lisa Codrington has a fine cameo as Olive, whose glamourous demeanour shows she could never understand the Cartwrights’ problem and Jenny Young has a hilarious walk-on as a demented Russian princess.

Set designer Sue LePage and costume designer Judith Bowden have created three completely different looks for the three plays--sleek, moderne and metallic for “The Astonished Heart”; fussy, mouldy and trussed up for “Family Portrait”; sunny and flouncy for “Ways and Means”. Bowden deserves special recognition for the Victorian fantasy of her costumes for “Family Portrait” that combine, leather, lace, zippers and numerous other fastenings to make the characters all look as if they were all discreetly into bondage. Louise Guinand’s lighting matches the mood of each piece perfectly--bleak for the first, gloomy for the second and bright turning into pleasant moonlight for the last.

Blair Williams shows he has a full understanding of exactly the style that each piece requires. He draws such strong, emotional performances from the cast in “The Astonished Heart” we almost forget the play’s weaknesses. Luckily, that proviso is not necessary for the final two plays where Williams’ sense of invention only heightens the comedy. If you have the patience, do see “Ways of the Heart” if only to marvel the extraordinary versatility of the Shaw company of actors in the first play. Then sit back, relax and enjoy the unadulterated fun of the second two.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Claire Jullien and David Jansen in Ways and Means. ©David Cooper.

Born Yesterday

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:35:51 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Garson Kanin, directed by Gina Wilkinson
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 23-November 1, 2009

“This Blonde is Platinum"

“Born Yesterday” is the runaway hit of this year’s Shaw Festival. Garson Kanin’s 1946 comedy about bribery, crooked politicians in Washington, DC, and the stereotyping of women could not be more relevant in light of recent scandals. Besides gorgeous design, sensitive direction and a rock-solid cast with Deborah Hay in an outstanding performance in the central role of Billie Dawn, the show is sheer perfection.

The play, probably most familiar from the classic 1950 film directed by George Cukor starring Judy Holiday, Broderick Crawford and William Holden. In both play and film, Harry Brock, a violent, low class tycoon who has made his fortune clearing and selling junk, comes to Washington with his showgirl mistress Billie Dawn, whose bank account he uses to hide his assets. Brock wants to enter high society but sees that Billie’s near total ignorance will be a liability. He therefore hires Paul Verrall, a journalist who would like to investigate Brock, to teach Billie etiquette and give her a general education. The problem is that Billie, blonde though she is, is not inherent dumb. the more she learns from Paul, the more she begins to see through her boyfriend’s schemes.

The play resonates more than some Broadway plays of the period because combines two archetypal plots. One, as in Molière’s “School for Wives”, shows an overbearing misogynist guardian who tries lock his female ward away from all men so that she will love only him. The other, as in Shaw’s “Pygmalion”, shows a pupil who learns enough to surpass her master. Kanin has linked both so that the “Pygmalion” plot underlies the overthrow of the guardian in the “School for Wives” plot.

Deborah Hay gives the funniest, most endearing comic performance from an actress I’ve have seen in decades. She has perfect comic timing that make Billie’s initial cluelessness and unpolishedness hilarious. Simply her unfocussed demeanour as she nearsightedly walks about because she thinks glasses will make her look ugly is funny not to mentions the other layers of comedy she builds upon it. And yet, Hay communicates a fragility in Billie that makes us sympathize with her and actually fear for her when Brock gets into one of his rages. The important gin game she plays with Brock in Act 1, shows that even if she needs her toes to tally her score, she has an innate intelligence that lies dormant. The naive but utterly fundamental questions she asks Verrall as he educates her shows that she also has an innate sense of right and wrong. Hay captures our hearts with her first entrance and we cheer her along until she triumphs in the end. Hay is absolutely wonderful and it is worth seeing the play simply to see her performance.

Nevertheless, the rest of the cast is also in top form. Thom Marriott is superb as petty tyrant Brock. He’s brash, uncouth and not a little bit frightening. He’s a big, tall loudmouthed bear of a man who could easily kill a person without intending to. He’s dragged himself out of the gutter through his scheming and now is frustrated that he has reached a national level where the law may impede his further progress. Yet, when Brock says he loves Billie, despite his generally rough treatment of her, Marriott makes us believe he actually does Billie even if he loves her more as a possession than as a person.

Gray Powell is also excellent as Paul Verrall. He shows us how Paul’s concern for Billie gradually changes from professional interest to pity to love. The more she learns the more he sees in her the idealistic world view he seems to fear he is losing. We hope both for Billie’s sake and for Paul’s that he can win Billie away from Brock’s brutal sphere of influence.

Kanin has surrounded this triangle with a gallery of conflicted characters. Patrick Galligan plays Ed Devery, a lawyer dismayed at his own cynicism in helping a thug like Brock and who is becoming an alcoholic to numb the pain of his lost ideals. Lorne Kennedy plays Senator Norval Hedges, whose influence Brock is trying to buy. Kennedy portrays him as pompous but weak and without Devery’s crisis of conscious to make him sympathetic. Donna Belleville plays his socially adept but airheaded wife who is really just an upper-class version of Billie with better diction and manners. Ali Momen is Brock’s brother Eddie, a comically constant reminder of the gutter his brother has escaped. The one positive character is the hotel maid Helen, played by the perky Beryl Bain. For a play from 1950, it is notable that Kanin shows Billie sharing her books with Helen, thus relating his depiction of gender oppression to racial oppression.

Sue LePage has created a gorgeous set of what is meant as the most expensive suite in the hotel with a two-storey living-and-dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Mall. She has obviously delighted in creating a wardrobe of well-observed all-money-no-taste outfits for Billie. Alan Brodie’s indoor and outdoor lighting is so natural, you often forget you are watching a play. Director Gina Wilkinson has a clear understanding of how the play works and allows the tension to build up slowly but inexorably even as the mood changes from sheer comedy to suspense. The most brilliant scene is the gin game between Billie and Brock played at a natural pace in total silence. This shows a trust of the audience that highlights without gimmicks a crucial aspect of the relation between the two. The pacing in that scene as in the whole play is perfect. The Shaw Festival, as usual, as multitude of fascinating plays on offer, but if you have the chance to see only one, this is it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Deborah Hay and Gray Powell. ©David Cooper.

Dido and Aeneas

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:02:12 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Henry Purcell, directed by Patrick Eakin Young
Opera Erratica, Winchester Street Theatre, Toronto
August 18-29, 2009

Opera Erratica has joined forces with the Classical Music Consort to form “Underground/Opera,” a project that aims to use new media to re-invigorate the multi-media art form that is opera. Currently they are presenting a fascinating production of Henry Purcell’s 1689 masterpiece Dido and Aeneas that combines the CMC’s playing of Purcell’s music on authentic instruments with modern costumes and staging and a projected video background created by Patrick Eakin Young. If this sounds familiar, it’s because at last year’s Fringe Festival, Young and conductor Ashiq Aziz approached Handel’s Acis and Galatea the same way to much acclaim.

Young’s take on Purcell’s opera is to present the action from the point of view of Belinda (Charlotte Corwin), the faithful servant of Dido, Queen of Carthage (Susanne Hawkins), who falls hopelessly in love with Aeneas (Olivier Laquerre), the Trojan whose destiny is to found Rome. Thus, in this play of memories, the video background is filled with shadows and phantoms, sometime reflecting what the characters do on stage, sometimes dancing their wilder thoughts as they remain stationary. In this hour-long work, Young can use this technique to give the characters greater psychological depth or to create comic effects as when a drunken sailor finds that his shadow can dance a better hornpipe than he can.

The playing of the CMC under Aziz wonderfully crisp and taut. Hawkins gives an exquisitely sensitive performance of Dido’s two famous arias. The rich-voiced Laquerre infuses Aeneas with much more sympathy than is common. Corwin’s pure-voiced Belinda gives even her happiest songs a tinge of melancholy. Counter-tenor Andrew Pickett makes an eerily unnerving Sorceress. The one distracting element is Young’s use of the surtitles screen not for the opera’s English text but for his own commentary from Belinda’s viewpoint on the action. The remarks add nothing that is not already implied by his direction, and, luckily, can easily be ignored. Otherwise, Young’s conception is well thought-out, blending the gorgeous music-making of the instrumental ensemble, singers and chorus with an insightful re-envisioning of the story.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-21.
Photo: Susanne Hawkins and Olivier Laquerre. ©Patrick Eakin Young.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 03:07:03 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Joseph Ziegler
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 23-October 9, 2009

"A Long Day’s Journey into Dawn"

The Shaw Festival is staging its second play by Eugene O’Neill after its successful presentation of “Ah, Wilderness!” in 2004. “A Moon for the Misbegotten” was written between 1941-41 and first performed in 1947. It serves as a kind of sequel to O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (written in 1941) by showing us what happens to James Tyrone, Jr. (now called “Jim” instead of “Jamie”) after the events of the earlier play. The Festival gives it a gripping production with superb performances from the entire cast. People who tend to think of O’Neill’s plays as being depressing will not be prepared for the uproarious comedy that dominates the first half of the play. Yes, the story does become serious but the overall effect is a sense of a final reconciliation with the past that functions as a release. In terms of setting and structure “A Moon for the Misbegotten” could be viewed as “A Long Day’s Journey into Dawn.”

The action is set outside a run-down farmhouse in Connecticut in 1923, eleven years after the events in “Long Day’s Journey”. Jim’s father James Tyrone, Sr., and his mother Mary have both died and his younger brother Edmund has moved away. Jim has a dark secret that is tearing him apart and pushed him deeper into alcoholism, but what it is is not revealed until very near the end of the play. Jim, however, does not become the focus of the play until the second act. The first act focusses almost entirely on the riotous relations of the Irish immigrant Hogan family that rent the house from Jim and the feud they have with their wealthy neighbour, T. Stedman Harder, who wants to buy the farm from Jim so he can expand his own property and evict the trouble-making Hogans.

The play begins with the escape of Mike, the youngest and last of Phil Hogan’s sons, who can’t stand the beatings and ravings of his perpetually drunken father any longer or the shame of living with his sister who has the reputation in town as a whore. Mike is sorry that he is now stranding Josie as the only child left to deal with Phil, but he knows he has to get away so he can begin to live. When Jim drops by he is more like an old friend than a landlord. He gets along better with Phil and Josie than he does with the city folk he usually associates with. Beneath her rough exterior it’s clear that Josie is smitten with Jim but is convinced that she could never complete with the beauties that Jim knows in the city. What’s most important for Phil is that Jim promises never to sell the farm to anyone but him. A visit from T. Stedman Harder to complain about the Hogan’s pigs overrunning his land ends in Phil Hogan’s beating Stedman and frightening him out of wits. While this is an hilarious joke for Phil, it only impels Stedman to get rid of the Hogan’s as soon as he can. The main twist in the plot comes when Phil returns from the local pub claiming he heard Jim promise to sell the farm to Stedman. Knowing that Jim has a soft spot for Josie, he hatches a scheme whereby Josie will offer herself to Jim, even to the point of getting him in bed, whereupon Phil will confront him and force Jim into marrying Josie or at least give him compensation, the farm, for his base intentions. This puts Josie in an impossible situation by setting a mercenary face her unconditional love for Jim.

The entire cast gives superlative performances but what will likely surprise frequent Shaw Festival-goers is Jim Mezon’s turn as Phil Hogan. We’ve seen him as Andrew Undershaft (1998) in “Major Barbara”, Boss Mangan in “Heartbreak House” (1999), Shaw’s Julius Caesar (2002) and Henry Higgins (2004) and outside the Festival as Werner Heisenberg in “Copenhagen” (2004). While always commanding immense power on stage, none of these roles, especially as Shaw’s eloquent rationalists, will prepare you for the pure, unbridled comedy he creates. He plays Hogan as a character of Falstaffian proportions, not in shape as much as in hilariously outsized nature of everything he does from drinking, sweating and cussing to boasting, laughing, conniving, feigning repentance and threatening vengeance. He’s a clown with a vicious streak, a tyrant and a baby all at once. It’s an amazing, massively entertaining performance from first to last.

In the key role of Josie is played by Shaw newcomer Jenny Young. It’s true she is not the plain, bosomy big-boned girl that O'Neill describes, but then a glance at photos of famous productions of the past reveals that few Josies have fully fit O’Neill’s description. Her lack of beauty does not have to a fact but rather part of her negative view of herself, just as her supposed sluttishness is a rumour she has deliberately encouraged. Jenny Young completely succeeds in creating a Josie with a seemingly impervious exterior of roughness in speech and action, born of years of combating her father. Yet, she crucially shows us Josie’s vulnerability beneath this exterior, that there have been years of dreams she has denied herself for fear of disappointment. No matter how much she denies it, when Jim says he sees more beauty in her than she knows, we know he is right. As the tension builds throughout the second act, our heart goes out to her character, caught as she is in the terrible dilemma her father has created for her.

The third important player is David Jansen as Jim. At first he may seem a little too smooth, a little too cool for the role, but that is merely the defensive front his character puts up, a city-boy style that seems out of place in the country. Once Jim returns to Josie in Act 2 and the confessions begin, Jansen digs deeper into his character than I’ve seen before and the humiliation his revelations bring him and rawness of his shame are painful to watch. His long interaction with Josie in Act 2 is really like a long dance of changing decisions of what to hide, what to reveal, until a sad kind of reconciliation is achieved.

Director Joseph Ziegler has directed the work with a masterful hand especially in turning the corner ever so subtly from the raucous comedy of the beginning to dark night of sadness and the coldness of dawn of the ending. Billy Lake as Mike Hogan and Patrick McManus as T. Stedman Harder make every word of their small roles count in setting up the action. Christina Poddubiuk’s design is detailed and very well broken down right to the point of showing the stain where the continually sweating Hogan habitually puts his head in his favourite chair. Louise Guinand’s lighting expertly creates mood as well as signalling the the passage of time, so crucial to the play’s symbolism.

Outside of opening nights, patrons at the Shaw Festival are far more reserved about giving standing ovations than patrons are at the Stratford Festival, where they occur so often as to be meaningless. Therefore, when after a long pause the audience at an ordinary matinee at the Court House Theatre spontaneously stood to acknowledge the heroic work Mezon, Young and Jansen had done in bringing O’Neill’s play to life, one could only agree that one had seen something truly outstanding. Let’s hope for more explorations of this American master in future.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jenny Young and David Jansen. ©Emily Cooper.

Billy Bishop Goes to War

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:45:20 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by John Gray with Eric Peterson, directed by Ted Dykstra
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
August 12-29, 2009;
July 10-August 5, 2017

Soulpepper’s revival of Billy Bishop Goes to War is a self-recommending production. It stars Eric Peterson and John Gray, who created the musical in 1978 that became one of the most produced Canadian plays ever written. Now they both are 62, the age when Billy Bishop died, and have revised the script to reflect this.

Rather than being costumed as two World War I fliers reliving Bishop’s achievements, Peterson is in pyjamas, a robe and slippers while Gray at the piano is in contemporary casual wear. Camellia Koo’s set is made up of suitcases, military trunks, paintings, old photos and toys, as if Peterson and Gray were rummaging through an attic and finding the history hidden there. With “props” and various theatre names painted on these items, director Ted Dykstra brings out the metatheatrical nature of the production as a re-creation and transformation of earlier productions.

The achievement of the piece is in formulating, perhaps for the first time, what a Canadian hero is like. He is clearly not like the British with a centuries of heroic models, etiquette to follow and hierarchies to accept. Rather Peterson and Gray emphasize not only how accidental Bishop’s heroism is but how aware he is of his oafishness and his luck. In their telling of the tale, Bishop becomes a pilot not because of any romantic love of flying, but because he doesn’t want to die in the mud of the trenches. In airplanes that were little better than “kites with motors,” Bishop’s primary goal is simply to survive. Downing a plane does give him a thrill and his bloodlust increases with the number of his kills. Yet, no one need worry that the show glorifies war. The most resonant songs in the show, like “Friends Ain’t S’posed to Die,” reflect on the pointlessness of it all, especially when another war is right around the corner.

The performances of both Peterson and Gray are more poignant now, the bravado of war more clearly naive. Peterson glides among his eighteen roles as effortlessly as Gray’s accompaniment segues between skilful mood-setting and clever word-setting. This is a Canadian classic that deserves the name and with Peterson and Gray, what more could you ask for?

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-13.
Photo: Eric Peterson as Billy Bishop. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.

In Good King Charles’s Golden Days

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:58:58 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
written by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 21-October 9, 2009

"‘The Universe is Curved’"

“In Good King Charles’s Golden Days” (1939), completed when Shaw was 83, used to be written off as a product of Shaw’s dotage. This, the Shaw Festival’s third production of this once-obscure work has proved yet again that that glib dismissal is simply not true. In fact, as Allan MacInnis’s revelatory productions showed in 1997, “King Charles” clearly looks forward to such other witty plays of ideas involving historical personages as Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” (1974) and “Arcadia” (1993) and Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” (1998). Eda Holmes’s current production makes certain missteps and does not have the excitement of discovery that animated MacInnis’s, but it still demonstrates that this is a vibrant, thought-provoking work that seems amazingly modern.

In “Travesties” Stoppard, knowing that James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara were all in in Zurich at the same time, imagined a play in which they would interact. So in “King Charles”, Shaw has Charles II of England, his mistresses and several of their most notable contemporaries all happen to meet and debate topics in science, religion, politics and art, which Shaw cleverly demonstrates are all versions of the same human endeavour to understand the world. In this case the many figures unintentionally unite in 1680 in Cambridge in the study of Isaac Newton. In a fine performance by Graeme Somerville, who captures both his brilliance and impracticality, Newton considers that his greatest work will not be in in science or mathematics but in decoding the Bible. He’s a bachelor and intellectual, utterly incapable of dealing with the details of the everyday world. That job is left to his stern housekeeper Mrs. Basham, played Mary Haney fully in her comic element. This paradigm points to the play’s conclusion about the roles of men and women. As an innocent witness Shaw includes a maid Sally, well played by Esther Maloney.

First to arrive are “Mr. Rowley” (none other than Charles II) and George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends better known as “Quakers”. Quakers, who seeks an inner enlightenment through group meditation, represent a religious stance outside the dogmas of either Protestants or Catholics, who would presently be at war with each other in England. Ric Reid is well cast as Fox, combining both a rough, unprepossessing appearance with forcefulness of speech. As for Charles II, Eda Holmes has erred in allowing Benedict Campbell to fall back on his technique of pompous bluster that he used to such ill effect as Shakespeare’s Henry IV at Stratford. When Peter Hutt played the role in 1997, we felt an increasing unease in Charles that was unresolved by the end of Act 1. As the only character to appear both acts of the play, Shaw clearly intends for Act 2 to serve as the resolution of the agitation in this character. If Charles is played as a superficial and unflappable egotist as Campbell plays him, there is no tension to be resolved in the second act.

The cause for the rise in tension is the arrival in Newton’s study Charles’s three mistresses--Nell Gwynn, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland and Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. They also are mistresses in another sense of the term. The famed actress Nell is a mistress of language. Barbara is a mistress of beauty. Louise is a mistress of politics in that the King is financially dependent upon her connections with the King of France. In Act 2 we meet a fourth and superior kind of beauty in Catherine de Bragança, who, importantly, is his wife. Nicola Correia-Damude is excellent as Nell, who enjoys a freedom the others do not have in that she is not stuck in a single role but makes her living by playing many roles. Through her Shaw makes the point that everyone is acting a part, perhaps the King more than anyone. Claire Jullien and Lisa Codrington make the two duchesses a study in contrasts. Both are clearly more superficial that Nell, but Barbara has beauty without rationality while Louise has beauty with too much calculation.

The greatest irritant of all arrives in the form of James, Duke of York, Charles’s younger brother. While Charles converted to Protestantism to become King of England, James is proudly Catholic. It is Charles’s ability, tiring though it is, to be all things to all people, that has allowed him to reign successfully, whereas James’s pride and inflexibility, as Charles knows, will be James’s undoing. Andrew Bunker perfectly conveys James’s pig-headed self-satisfaction.

Shaw, thus having set up comparisons and contrasts between science and religion, inner vision versus dogma, being versus role-playing, Realpolitik versus political might, finally gives us the artist’s spin on all of this with the appearance of German-born Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), the royal portrait painter. He is played with just the right diffidence and strength of German accent by Ken James Stewart. His announcement that there are no straight lines in the Duchess of Cleveland just as there are none in nature, sets off flights of speculation that has the 17th-century characters foreseeing the most advanced ideas of the 20th century. Earlier in the play, the Duchess of Cleveland flippantly suggests that the earth could be ten million years old instead of the official 4000 years arrived at by the Bishop Ussher in 1650 and accepted by Newton. To this George Fox says, “Are ten million years beyond the competence of Almighty God? They are but a moment in His eyes.” With Kneller’s announcement, “Motion in a curve is the law of nature,” Newton exclaims anticipating Einstein, “Then not only is the path of the cannon ball curved, but space is curved; time is curved; the universe is curved.” Trying this act together, Newton notes to Kneller that “You and God are both artists”. All the characters, however, in their various ways are interpreters of creation.

After the wild crescendo of ideas in Act 1, Shaw gives us a decrescendo into calm in Act 2, where Charles and his wife, the Portuguese Catholic Catherine of Bragança, in a sensitive performance by Laurie Paton, are the only characters. Just as Mrs. Basham tided up after Newton, so here Catherine tidies up after Charles. She tidies up his inner life as well and unlike the narrow-minded Mrs. Basham is infinitely sensible. The King’s mistresses mean nothing to her because she knows only she has his love. She is clearly the one who gives Charles the power to continue through one conflict after another. She sees Charles as a man but knows when to dress him up to act the role of King. Charles may be financially dependent upon the Duchess of Portsmouth, but he is emotionally and spiritually dependent on Catherine.

Shaw is known to be pro-feminist and in the preface to this play he states that a law should state that men and women be represented in government in equal numbers. Rather than finding the feminist aspects in the play itself, Holmes has added a prologue and epilogue to Act 1. She has the maid Sally poring over Newton’s papers before he enters and then return to them at the end in an attempt to show how women were denied education. Besides setting the play off on the wrong note, it is also unnecessary since the whole force of the play leads to Charles’s salute to Catherine, “May the Queen live for ever!” The wealthy women in the play may have been educated but the play clearly shows that wealth cannot but intelligence since the two revelations to Newton about the universe come from non-scientists. Besides, Nell Gwynn brought herself up from the gutter and is now the greatest interpreter of England's greatest playwrights. Catherine says she was born to rule but as a Catholic the English will not let her. If we substitute “woman” for “Catholic”, we see how Shaw is making the point in the Preface using simply a different prejudice.

Camellia Koo has given Newton an elegant circular study placing him at the centre while Michael Gianfrancesco has designed the impressive period costumes. Given that Holmes ends the play with Catherine contemplating to a mobile of the sun and planets, one might have thought, given Koo’s set and all the talk about curves and gravitation, that Holmes would play more in her blocking with who is orbiting whom. While Holmes has not found all the humour in the play that MacInnis did in 1997 and she does not make the interplay of ideas as gripping, you still leave invigorated by Shaw’s dazzling attempts to link all aspects of human endeavour to each other, to show how every discipline has something to teach and something to learn from the others.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Ric Reid, Graeme Somerville, Mary Haney and Benedict Campbell. ©David Cooper.

Fear and Misery in the Third Reich

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:08:22 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willet,
directed by Esther Jun
Deus XM, SummerWorks Theatre Festival,
The Theatre Centre, Toronto
August 8-16, 2009

A democratically elected government demonizes an ethnic, group, creates a concentration camp, allows dogma to influence science and spies on its own people. If only this had died out with the Third Reich, but Deus XM knows it hasn’t. A highly talented, racially diverse cast immediately universalizes Brecht’s 1938 critique of governments that use fear to quash dissent. Though director Esther Jun stages only nine of the standard 27 vignettes that comprise the play, she fully captures its essence. The cast works as a true ensemble, but one must mention Marjorie Chan’s outstanding performance as “The Jewish Wife” making her final phone calls before she flees the coming horror.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-10.
Photo: Ben Sanders, Ash Knight, Lisa Li, John Ng, Marjorie Chan, Edwige Jean-Pierre and Hillary Thomson. ©Esther Jun.

Greenland

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:40:15 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Nicolas Billon, directed by Ravi Jain
The Greenland Collective, SummerWorks, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
August 7-15, 2009

Greenland consists of three chilly monologues directly addressed to the audience. The subject is personal isolation. The problem is we don’t care. Glaciologist Jonathan (Andrew Musselman) has discoved a new island revealed by the receding ice off Greenland. The playwright makes him so nerdy he actually is as boring as he claims. Jonathan’s wryly comic actress wife Judith (Claire Calnan) bitches unsympathetically that the price of stability with Jonathan is boredom. The school project on Greenland of step-daughter Tanya (Jajube Mandiela) makes her realize (symbolism alert) how isolated people are there. Beautifully acted though the piece is, only Tanya’s last speech about missing her dead brother arouses any emotion.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-10.
Photo: Jajube Mandiela, Andrew Musselman and Clare Calnan.

The Epic of Gilgamesh (up to the part when Enkidu dies)

Sat, 8 Aug 2009 14:21:51 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by Erin Shields, directed by Gideon Arthurs
Groundwater Productions, SummerWorks Festival, The Theatre Centre, Toronto
August 7-16, 2009

The subtitle for The Epic of Gilgamesh is “(up to the part when Enkidu dies)” meaning that Groundwater Productions is staging only half of the original Babylonian epic. The primary flaw is that neither playwright Erin Shields nor director Gideon Arthurs has decided if they are presenting an important story or sending it up. Shields’ language vacillates between anachronistic jokiness and attempts at poetry. The action is a quick, superficial dash through the story with the many characters poorly introduced. Frank Cox-O’Connell is too weak as Gilgamesh, the world’s mightiest king, but Speedo-clad Carlos González-Vio is quite effective as the half-wild Enkidu.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-08.
Photo: Carlos González-Vio as Enkidu. ©A.Mandolin.

The Ecstasy of Mother Teresa or Agnes Bojaxhui Superstar

Sat, 8 Aug 2009 11:42:01 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Alistair Newton
Ecce Homo, SummerWorks Festival, The Theatre Centre, Toronto
August 6-14, 2009

The Ecstasy of Mother Teresa mixes cabaret-style comedic and dramatic sketches with song-and-dance numbers in too scattershot a fashion either to illuminate or satirize its subject. Is it surprising a devout Catholic nun should espouse Vatican doctrine against birth-control and abortion or regard the poor as blessed? Performers whose forte is singing, not acting, give lively accounts of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s reworded “Mother T. Superstar” and several versions of Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag.” However, Kaitlyn Regehr’s portrayal of Mother Teresa’s crisis of faith is so quietly moving and so deeply felt it undermines noisy attempts around it to debunk the woman.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-08.
Photo: Kaitlyn Regehr as Mother Teresa.

Señorita Mundo - An Operatic Allegory

Sat, 8 Aug 2009 03:41:21 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Njo Kong Kie, directed by Kico González-Risso
Music Picnic, SummerWorks Theatre Festival,
The Theatre Centre, Toronto
August 7-16, 2008

Don’t let the words “operatic” or “allegory” put you off this immensely entertaining musical gem. Njo Kong Kie’s electronic music, played on a laptop, is full of good tunes and dance beats with wonderfully rich voices floating on waves of techno and trance. Julius (Keith Klassen) is celebrating his 40th birthday, but an uninvited guest (Vilma Vitols), the Spanish title’s “Miss World,” drops in. We can guess the many things she might represent long before her unmasking, but the fun is in the duo’s sizzling flirtation and Julius’s sudden awakening from party-time narcissism to a glimpse of life’s mystery. Let’s hope for a second run.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-08.
Photo: Vilma Vitols and Keith Klassen. ©Lydia Charak.

The Devil’s Disciple

Fri, 7 Aug 2009 11:50:21 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
written by George Bernard Shaw,
directed by Tadeusz Bradecki
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 9-October 11, 2009

“A Divine ‘Disciple’"

Often we need to have someone from outside look at familiar works to give them a new perspective. That is exactly what has happened with the Shaw Festival’s fourth production of Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple” (1897) directed by acclaimed Polish director Tadeusz Bradecki. Bradecki is, of course, no stranger to the Festival. This is the ninth production he has directed here and third Shaw play after “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” in 1997 and “Heartbreak House” in 1999. What he has achieved is to find exactly the right tone between melodrama and satire to make this 19th-century play fresh, exciting and very funny.

Previous productions of “Disciple” have tended to emphasize how different the play is from Shaw’s other works. Bradecki succeeds by emphasizing its similarities. Shaw always satirizes humanity’s propensity to romanticize its own activities. Just as he satirizes heroism and romantic love in “Arms and the Man” (1894), so he does in “Disciple”. What Bradecki makes so clear is how Shaw maintains the structure of 19th-century melodrama while mocking it at every step with his content.

The play is unusual for Shaw in that it is set in America, specially in new Hampshire in 1777 during the War of Independence. Dick Dudgeon, the title character, has received his nickname because he proudly proclaims he honours the Devil not God, because it is clear what happens on earth is the Devil’s work. He returns to his family home where is mother is mourning, at least in show, the death of her husband whose will is about to be read. When it turns out his father has left everything to him, Dick invites his despised orphaned cousin to stay and states he is a rebel against the British unlike the rest of his cowardly family. Right from the start Bradecki makes the link clear between Dick’s mother’s concern for propriety and order with tacit support for the hierarchy that creates the status quo.

What happens when that hierarchy is corrupt and repressive? Surprising reversals and revelations of character are the result. In Act 2, Dick visits the Reverend Anthony Anderson and his wife Judith at the Reverend’s request, in what would seem to be a meeting of opposites. When the Reverend is called away and British soldiers raid the house, Dick allows himself to be arrested as the Reverend. Now in Judith’s eyes, Dick seems the hero and her own husband the coward. But there are more surprises to follow.

The play has been very well cast. Evan Buliung may be the best Dick Dudgeon the Festival has seen. Previous incarnations like Gordon Rand in 1996 or Jim Mezon in 1984 have had an aura of latent heroism about them despite all the rude things they say and do in Act 1. Buliung, however, seems like a scoundrel and wastrel from his first entrance. He exudes contempt for all the “proper” folk around him and Bradecki makes sure the “proper” folk visibly bristle with disapproval and fear in his presence. Yet, Buliung makes it perfectly believable that he would allow himself to be arrested as the Reverend. It is not some sudden urge for self-sacrifice but seems simply a part of his contempt for authority that he will allow them to persist in their mistake.

For her part, Fiona Byrne is excellent as Judith. Her loyalty to her husband and the laws of propriety are innate reflexes but not hypocritical like those of Dick’s mother. It is wonderful to watch in Acts 2 and 3 how Byrne shows the raging battle inside Judith between attraction and repulsion for Dick. He initially represents everything her husband is not and she is necessarily curious what kind of person could be like this. But when Dick allows himself to be arrested her turmoil increases. It is an extremely nuanced performance that finds the subtle comedy in Judith’s crisis of character.

Peter Krantz gives Reverend Anderson an appropriate earnestness but it is clear that he is much less hidebound than his parishioners. Krantz lends Anderson an air of unconventionality that explains his invitation to Dick and looks forward to his transformation at the end. Donna Bellevile is pleasure as Dick’s mother, too preoccupied with seeming pious to realize how thoroughly hypocritical she is.

As the American rebels‘ opponents Jim Mezon and Peter Millard reflect the same divisions we see in the American populace. Millard as Major Swindon unquestioningly espouses whatever the received wisdom is on any subject. Mezon’s General Burgoyne, however, is a realist and ironist, a kind of upper class British parallel to Dick, who sees the political motives behind patriotic poses and holds to the realities on the ground rather than the unfeasible order from London. Mezon, who has played the role of the Shavian rationalist before, has completely mastered the tone, timing and gestures of this character to create the maximum wry comic effect.

In smaller roles we should also note Jonathan Widdifield as Dick's clumsy, benighted Christy Dudgeon, Anthony Bekenn and Guy Bannerman as the comically stolid William and Titus Dudgeon, Lorne Kennedy as the unflappable rationalist Lawyer Hawkins, young Lucy Campbell as the frightened child Essie and Richard Stewart, who shows the humanity in the British Sergeant.

Peter Hartwell has given the play a clean, spartan design, with much beautiful use of wood. While the spareness reflects the character’s humble dwellings, it also gives the play a very modern look, composed as it is of neat rectangles and squares. The lovely curves of the period costumes contrast with these lines to make it look like historical characters are placed within a modern context, which, of course, being in Shaw’s play, they are.

Bradecki takes a page out of the late Neil Munro’s brilliant direction of “Misalliance” in 2003, by having some of Shaw’s copious stage directions spoken by British soldiers as a kind of chorus. He even inserts his own writing in to point out that Fort George in Niagara-on-the Lake was built when the British were forced to withdraw from Fort Niagara across the river. Strange but true that it should take a foreign director to make Shaw’s play immediately relevant to the audience watching it. This imaginative move is only one of many in a production of Shaw’s play that may never be bettered.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Evan Buliung in black and cast members of The Devil’s Disciple. ©David Cooper.

The Menaechmus Twins

Wed, 5 Aug 2009 11:48:14 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Plautus, directed by Melee Hutton
Theatreworks Productions’ Stone Circle Project,
Withrow Park, Toronto
July 29-August 9, 2009

The idea of “Shakespeare in the park” has become so commonplace that it is a pleasure to find a theatre company willing to try something different. Since theatre originated in the open air, it is strangely restrictive that Canadian companies should revive only Shakespeare’s plays in that manner, and only a handful of his plays at that. What a treat, then, that Theatreworks Projects’ Stone Circle Project has decided to stage The Menaechmus Twins, a comedy by the Roman playwright Plautus (c. 254-184 BC), whose plays influenced comedy from his day into the present.

In fact, we know The Menaechmus Twins best because it forms the basis for Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. In both plays a set of identical twins are separated in a shipwreck and grow to manhood in different countries. When one arrives in the home town of the other, cases of mistaken identities escalate until the two are reunited. Shakespeare tries to outdo Plautus by giving his twin brothers twin slaves, but it’s fascinating to see how the original story plays out. Most notably Plautus’ comedy is resolved not by an abbess as deus ex machina but by the reasoning of a slave.

Director Melee Hutton has had the clever idea of presenting the play as if it were part of a travelling circus of a century ago. This at once emphasizes the play’s theatricality and allows the actors a broad playing style. Ryan Hollyman and Wayne Ward as the two brothers, Menaechmus of Epidamnus and Menaechmus of Syracuse, look nothing alike, but that is part of the fun. Hutton gives them distinct comic personalities, Hollyman’s character inclined to depression while Ward’s is always on the verge of anger. Jeffrey R. Smith is absolutely hilarious as M. of Epidamnus’ parasite Sponge (“Peniculus” in the original), the most grossly unctuous hanger-on you’ve ever seen. In contrast, the overheated M. of Syracuse is blessed with the slave Messenio (the excellent Adrian Proszowski), the most rational person in the play. Sarah Evans does fine work not only as M. of Epidamnus’ outraged wife and her rival next door, the prostitute Erotium, but also as the Prologue, who clearly sets forth the complex story. Plautus’ plays originally were sung. To compensate Bryce Kulak provides melodramatic underscoring and tuneful music hall-like songs at key moments. The production may be rough-and-ready, but it fills in a crucial gap in our theatrical knowledge and is a whole lot of fun at the same time. Let’s hope for more next summer.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-05.
Photo: Cast of The Menaechmus Twins.

Star Chamber

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:04:35 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Noel Coward, directed by Kate Lynch
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 11-October 11, 2009

"Order, Order"

Of the ten one-act plays that Noel Coward wrote under the collective title “Tonight at 8:30”, “Star Chamber” is the least known. The reason is simple. After only one matinée performance on March 21, 1936, Coward withdrew the play from the series. In staging “Star Chamber” along with the other nine plays, the Shaw Festival is not only giving “Star Chamber” its Canadian premiere but mounting the absolutely complete “Tonight at 8:30” in repertory for the first time in Canada.

The play portrays a committee meeting of a theatrical charity for a home for destitute actresses where the participants are so self-absorbed they pay scant heed to the subject at hand. The title is a pun on the original English “Star Chamber” or “camera stellata” active until 1641, a secretive body that enforced laws against prominent people. Barry Day’s excellent note in the programme explains that “it was precisely at this moment that [Coward] took over the Presidency of the Actors’ Orphanage from Sir Gerald du Maurier .... Presumably he felt that satirizing people who were engaged in good work, no matter what their personal affectations, was in questionable taste. He took his own duties seriously--and took the play off.” Coward’s scruples are admirable, but they did plunge a highly enjoyable play into obscurity until its first professional revival in 2000.

In William Schmuck’s amusing design the committee meeting is situated on stage in front of a an incongruous seascape partially obscured by racks of such bizarre costumes it’s hard to imagine what kind of play in being rehearsed. Around a large table the participants have to make do with all kinds of seating including fake-granite garden bench and a fake rock for J. M. Farmer (Guy Bannerman), the non-thespian secretary of the fund. He is the first to arrive since he has a lot of facts and figures to present to the executive committee for Garrick Haven concerning its expansion, renovation and the costs involved. But he has not reckoned on the nature of the actors he has to deal with.

One by one they traipse in making theatrical entrances and greetings. First is Hester More (Marla McLean), an intense young actress, the kind of person who automatically believes in the least rational explanation for any phenomenon. Then comes the vaudeville comedian Johnnie Bolton (Neil Barclay in the role Coward played), filled with theatre stories which he repeatedly launches into without ever being allowed to finish one. Next come the aging but famous actress Violet Vibart (Sharry Flett), the meek Elsie Brodie (Jenny L. Wright) with baby in pram and Julian Breed (Evan Buliung), the West End’s leading man of the day.

After them comes Maurice Searle (Mark Uhre), an actor who has sold out to Hollywood and has grown his hair long for some swashbuckler. His plea of “Don’t look at me!” of course has just the opposite effect. Next is the grand Dame Rose Maitland (Gabrielle Jones) in a tartan cress, vest, jacket, cape and cap. She is the kind of person found in every committee who is a stickler for rules of order and when she notes that the president has not yet arrived, assumes the presidency herself. She tries to begin the meeting when in bursts Xenia James (Fiona Byrne in the Gertrude Lawrence role), who makes the splashiest entrance of all. Schmuck has updated the action from the 1930s to the 1960s so that Xenia looks just too smashing in a floral mini-dress, mod cap and white go-go boots. In the original she brings her lapdog Bravo. In the Shaw production the is accompanied by a Great Dane, Atherton. As Coward must have known we, like the committee members, pay virtually no attention to what is going on as long as the dog is on stage, especially when he is licking Xenia’s mouth as she tries to speak.

When Atherton is finally banished off stage, the meeting begins in earnest. The group seriously tries to understand Farmer’s presentation, but given that they have the attention span of gnats, every mention of one of the old dears in the home calls forth unfinished reminiscences and unrelated anecdotes.

Kate Lynch has paced the comedy perfectly so that the gradual crescendo from relative calm and order into complete noise and chaos is as inexorable as it is hilarious. Finally, Farmer is left rattling off absurdly detailed calculations about the renovations to a group involved in multiple mini-conversations paying no attention whatsoever--that is, until a press photographer (Kelly Wong) shows up, whereupon they drop everything to pose in various combinations.

Coward’s satire may be specifically be directed against actors, but anyone who has every been on a committee will recognize the characters types and the dynamics he so cleverly portrays. Nevertheless, Coward underscores that the actors are fundamentally kind-hearted and do mean well even if they can’t focus on specifics. Byrne stands out for her sheer panache as does Barclay, who brings a note of pathos to a character everyone disregards and who belongs to a dying tradition. Fundamentally, though, “Star Chamber” is really an ensemble piece that shows off the Shaw Festival’s renowned strength in this area. To fill out the show Lynch inserts three Coward songs that draw the actors together despite their differences--”Any Little Fish”, “World Weary” and the well-known “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”. The first is begun by Barclay to recall the good old days. The second is given an hilarious rock-and-roll rendition by Uhre complete with screams and yelps, while Buliung gives an appropriately sophisticated delivery of the third. This a rarity that no Coward aficionado will want to miss but, more than that, it will please any theatre-goers seeking to fill their lunchtime with laughter.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Marla McLean, Fiona Byrne, Sharry Flett, Evan Buliung, Neil Barclay, Gabrielle Jones and Jenny L. Wright. ©Emily Cooper.

The Harder They Come

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:20:19 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
written by Perry Henzell, music and lyrics by Jimmy Cliff, the Maytals, the Melodians and others,
directed by Kerry Michael and Dawn Reid
Mirvish Productions, Canon Theatre, Toronto
August 23, 2009

If you go to The Harder They Come expecting a reggae-infused vacation from reality, think again. Perry Henzell, writer and director of the 1972 cult film of the same name, adapted the movie for the stage in 2006 and retained all the moral and emotional contradictions that made it such an art house hit.

If you’re not adept at Jamaican patois much of the detail in the dialogue will go missing, but the show is so well acted that the plot is still clear. As in the film, Henzell updates the story of 1940s Jamaican hoodlum Ivanhoe Martin to the 1970s and re-imagines him as a country-boy trying to make strike it rich in the big city of Kingston. What he’s got is a gift for singing and song-writing. Jimmy Cliff played Ivan in the film and five of the fifteen songs in the musical are his. What Ivan finds is corruption in every part of society--in all aspects of the music business not to mention in the police and in the marijuana trade. His murderous stand against the establishment makes him an outlaw to the government but a hero to the people.

The production by the Theatre Royal Stratford East and UK Arts, on this the first stop of an international tour, conceives all the action as taking place in a banquet hall with an on-stage band where a “ni-night” or wake for Ivan conjures up his story. Though taken from many sources, the songs all move the action forward or comment upon it. In this context, lyrics to such hits as “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and the title song take on multiple meanings. The British cast, almost all of Jamaican origin, give uniformly excellent performances. As Ivan, Rolan Bell, a rubber-legged triple threat, shows us the dreamer in both the innocent and the outlaw that makes our reaction to him so complex. Lain Gray as his ganja-selling friend Pedro and Joanna Francis as Ivan’s girlfriend Elsa are filled with passion, and the all the rest create a vivid gallery of portraits of Jamaican life. For those who think of reggae as sunny background music, this show should open their eyes to its political content as well as the suffering and joy it expresses, all the more effective for being so exhilarating and infectious.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-07-24.
Photo: Rolan Bell (centre) as Ivan. ©Robert Day.

Sunday in the Park with George

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:20:22 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, directed by Alisa Palmer
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 22-November 1, 2009

"A Chilly Day Out"

Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” (1984) is a musical that demonstrates perfectly the advantages of the Shaw Festival’s expanded mandate. The first act depicts the painting of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s masterpiece “Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte” (1884-86), while the second act, set one hundred years later, depicts the artistic trials of Seurat’s imaginary great-grandson named George. The musical thus represents in the most obvious fashion an incident from the period of Shaw’s lifetime (1856-1950) and a modern commentary on it. Modern works set in Shaw’s lifetime, of course, do the same thing implicitly, but “Sunday in the Park” demonstrates explicitly how we of today derive and obtain new inspiration from the works of the past.

The musical receives a production excellent in every way. Its impact depends mostly on how open a person is to its subject matter. The struggles of artists are always difficult to dramatize sympathetically whether on stage or on film because the artist’s primary struggle is internal while his external conflicts with those around are petty in comparison. A playwright can show a painter madly dabbing away, a sculptor chipping away or a composer scribbling notes, but these external shows give us no access to the often unconscious judgements the artist makes moment by moment. As we should all know by now, biography may offer a context but not an adequate explanation of how or why a an artist creates.

Bearing all this in mind, “Sunday in the Park” comes off as a musical very advanced in composition and dramaturgy but ultimately rather coldly cerebral. Admittedly, it seems odd to accuse a musical of being too intellectual when the vast majority of the genre, especially in recent years, are so mindless. Nevertheless, throughout “Sunday in the Park” one keeps admiring what Sondheim and book writer James Lapine are doing without ever becoming engaged in the story. What comes out quite clearly in this productions is James Lapine’s critique of the shabby way society treats artists in both the 19th and the 20th centuries. (For clarity, I will call the French Georges Seurat “G-P” and his American descendant “George”.) Inspired by scientific studies on colour and perception, G-P in the 1880s invents pointillism, a new mode of painting not with brushstrokes but by covering the canvas with tiny dots that the eye blends into colours and forms into shapes. Despite this, he is ridiculed by other painters, never sells a painting in his lifetime and dies at the age of 31. George in the 1980s also links science and art in inventing the “chromolume”, a blending of sculpture, sound and video art, but spends more of his time rounding up funding for his projects than creating them. The implication is that in the world of modern art it is safer for George to keep creating the same successful product than to try something new even though he senses a creative drought inside.

It is hard to imagine a better cast. Steven Sutcliffe conveys an innate sense of vulnerability to make G-P/George as sympathetic a character as possible. His voice which has deepened and taken on a heroic tinge perfectly suits his characters’ mixture of self-assertion and doubt. Julie Martell gives a fine portrayal of her two roles, first as G-P’s mistress and model Dot (based on Seurat’s mistress Madeleine Knobloch), second as his grandmother Marie. She makes Dot’s frustration with G-P’s total absorption in his work completely understandable as well as her subsequent decision when she becomes pregnant to marry another man for security. As Marie she avoids any clichés in portraying an elderly person and makes Marie an intelligent person you wish the creators would let you know better. It’s too bad she has to sing such a lovely and important song as “Children and Art” in the restrictions of her character as an old woman.

Sharry Flett as the Old Lady (Seurat’s mother) and the art critic Blair Daniels and Gabrielle Jones as the lady’s Nurse and museum board member Harriet Pawling always light up the stage. Indeed, Flett and Sutcliffe as mother and son deliver the most moving song of the evening in “Beautiful”. Jay Turvey and Patty Jamieson are suitably haughty as the rival artist Jules and his wife Yvonne in Act 1 and suitably nondescript as a museum director and a composer in Act 2. Kyle Blair and Melanie Phillipson as Franz and Frieda, German servants to Jules are comically hypocritical, proper and stiff in public even as they carry on affairs with their masters in private. Robin Evan Willis and Saccha Dennis are lots of fun as the two giggly Celestes. Neil Barclay and Melanie Janzen are excellent as two American tourists bored with Paris who cut their trip short to return home. Among the characters who do not occur in pairs, Kawa Ada makes a fine impression as a Soldier with his wooden double in Act 1 and as a snooty artist in Act 2, while Mark Uhre stands out as the angry Boatman of Act 1, whose cynicism helps undercut the work’s idealism of art, and as the seemingly gay Billy Webster of Act 2 who reacts to everything with disdain.

Judith Bowden’s design is beautiful although she is necessarily restricted in the choices in Act 1 in recreating, no matter how effectively, Seurat’s painting on stage. It is in Act 2 where her creativity has more play in an array of outré costumes for wear-all-black museum crowd of the 1980s. Alan Brodie’s lighting is key to making the illusion of life turning into a painting, and vice versa, work on stage.

Conductor and arranger Paul Sportelli leads the 11-piece band in a precise reading of Sondheim’s musically sophisticated, pointillist score that sounds quite unlike a Broadway musical and far more like cross between Stravinsky in his neoclassical phase and John Adam’s minimalism. Alisa Palmer provides the sure direction, eking as much humour and emotion as she can from the work. She can’t counteract the overwhelming feeling the piece gives of confinement and stasis. Sondheim has G-P sings of “order” and “control” as his guiding principles, but the musical itself comes off as the embodiment of too much order and control at the expense of insight and feeling. The second act, focussing on the modern George's mid-life crisis and inspiration by visiting La Grande Jatte is sentimental without being moving. Sondheim fans will need no encouragement to see such a fine production of the musical in an ideal venue that permits that rarity in the modern world, the music to be sung and played unamplified. People who love older musicals by Rodgers or Loewe for their sweeping tunes and big emotions will likely find “Sunday” a bit too cold and self-involved.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cast of Sunday in the Park with George. ©Michael Cooper.

Play, Orchestra, Play

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:32:03 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Noel Coward, directed by Christopher Newton
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 11-October 31, 2009

"A Terrific Trio"

“Play, Orchestra, Play” is the title the Shaw Festival has given to the second instalment of its production of Noel Coward’s complete cycle ten one-act plays entitled “Tonight at 8:30”. This one consists of “Red Peppers”, “Fumed Oak”, “Shadow Play”, all three of which premiered in Manchester in 1935, the last two, in fact, on the same evening. This trio, in contrast to “Brief Encounters”, makes a thoroughly satisfying triple bill. It helps that the three are more closely knit together in theme and are staged a smaller venue like the Royal George Theatre. It also helps that they are expertly directed by Shaw Artistic Director Emeritus Christopher Newton.

“Red Peppers” takes its title from the stage name of song-and-dance duo George and Lily Pepper (Jay Turvey and Patty Jamieson), who are on the music hall circuit doing the same act that George’s grandparents did. We see the Peppers on stage doing their routines and telling their corny jokes and watch them backstage sniping at each about bungled cues, complaining about the tempi of the drunken conductor Bert Bentley (Kyle Blair) and berating Mr. Edwards (Steven Sutcliffe) the unctuous manager of the hall, for the low quality of his establishment. An air of nostalgia hangs over all these petty disputes which seem to have grown more rancorous because all the participants are aware that the form of entertainment they provide is dying out.

Designer Cameron Porteous brings out the period detail in the hackneyed sets and overused costumes of the Peppers, and Jane Johanson provides them with purposely old-fashioned choreography. Tyler Devine’s video design that lets us follow the Peppers through narrow passageways to their dressing-room has the paradoxical effect not of making their lives more immediate but presenting them as if part of a documentary.

Turvey and Jamieson are perfectly matched, with Jamieson as a real live-wire who doesn’t know when to hold her tongue and Turvey as the one to tries to mitigate her rants until he perceives and outside threat and takes up her side. Sutcliffe, expertly dressed and made-up to look like a middle-aged man vainly trying to give the impression of youth, is hilarious as the manager. Wendy Thatcher has a marvellous cameo as the once-famous Mabel Grace, a West End “star” who now, for unknown reasons, plies her noble art in music halls.

Newton maintains the atmosphere of a small provincial theatre by using two lovely ladies as “Presenters” (Saccha Dennis, Jacqueline Thair), who gracefully walk, sometimes sing, across the stage in flowing yellow gowns to post a placard announcing the title of each show before posing and disappearing into the side doors. After the raucous close of “Red Peppers”, they duly effect a transition by covering the placards for that show the those of the next, “Fumed Oak”.

This is the least known of the three plays and in the present production turns out to be a real treat. The title refers to the dingy style of furniture popular in 1930s respectable middle-class households but also suggests that the suburban life of compromise and complacency might leave some members of these households more fumed that the furniture. The first half of the play shows us a typical breakfast in the Gow household. Doris (Patty Jamieson), a motormouth of discontent, upbraids nonstop her aged mother (Wendy Thatcher), who pays rent to live there, and her own continually snivelling daughter Elsie (Robin Evan Willis). When they can get a word in they snipe at her. Meanwhile, the seemingly meek man of the house, Henry Gow (Steven Sutcliffe), dines silently and cringes at his family’s more egregious insults and reprimands. In the second half of the play the tables are turned. Henry has summoned up the courage to tell off his family and does with one surprising revelation after the next. Sutcliffe brings off this venting of fifteen years of bottled-up rage brilliantly. The others as the three generations of women in his life are all comically insufferable.

Newton sensibly places the intermission here. What follows is “Shadow Play”, basically a one-act musical, that the Shaw last staged in 2001 as a lunch-time show. Here we meet the evening’s third set of bickering couples, this time in the upper class, in the person of Simon and Victoria Gayforth (Steven Sutcliffe and Julie Martell). The couple has just attended a Wend End musical and Victoria has a raging headache. She wants nothing else but to sleep and takes three Amytal rather than her usual two. Just at this inopportune moment Simon, who has been having an affair with Sibyl (Robin Evan Willis) wants to have a serious talk with her. He asks for a divorce, but she can’t think properly as the drug takes over. Soon memories of the musical mingle with her fondest memories of Simon as she plunges into unconsciousness.

Coward’s bold experiment has lost none of its freshness and makes most contemporary musicals look stodgy by comparison. Here Tyler Devine’s video design comes into its own. Victoria’s projected bedroom wall wobbles like a pool's surface as she tries in vain to stay focussed on Simon’s words. Eventually it dissolves entirely shading from background to background, sometimes with overlapping images, as Victoria’s dream follows its associative path. It turns into moving images, especially effective for the scene in a train compartment or in a car driving through London. Unlike many video designers, Devine’s images always enhance but never overwhelm a scene.

In this piece Sutcliffe is very like a young Noel Coward in diction and in singing. Martell is a very appealing Victoria. In Johanson’s Astaire-inspired choreography the two dance beautifully together so that the dream does take on a healing function that Simon claims it does. The high-level cast has Patty Jamieson (who played Victoria in 2001) as Victoria’s loyal friend Martha; Kyle Blair as Michael Doyle, the man Victoria has been encouraging in revenge for Sibyl; and Jay Turvey as Martha’s husband. Melanie Phillipson shows poise as Victoria’s maid Lena and in fine voice leads the reprises of two of the show’s three main songs “Then” and “You Were There”. The third song “Play, Orchestra, Play” gives the trio of one-acters its title.

The three plays each featuring sparing couples each lead to different conclusions. That in “Shadow Play” is the most ambiguous since it is hard to pinpoint exactly when Victoria’s overdose of Amytal affects her perception. Simon claims she imagined his request for a divorce. Or does the experience of witnessing Victoria’s intense, apparently vocal, dream about their first love cause him to change his mind? It is a fascinating musical and precedes in its musical exploration of the subconscious Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark” (1941) by six years and Richard Rodgers’ “Oklahoma!” (1943) by eight.

Of the two instalments of “Tonight at 8:30” that have opened so far, “Play, Orchestra, Play” provides an ideal example of how Coward intended his collection of plays to work together as a variety of genres and as a variety of stories that gain in meaning through their propinquity. This makes us look forward to the third instalment “Ways of the Heart” opening August 1 and the orphaned “Star Chamber” opening July 11.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Patty Jamieson and Jay Turvey in Red Peppers. ©David Cooper.

Albertine in Five Times

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:25:26 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
written by Michel Tremblay,
directed by Micheline Chevrier
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 10-October 10, 2009

"The Quincunx"

With “Albertine in Five Times” the Shaw Festival is staging its first play by Michel Tremblay in a fine new translation by Linda Gaboriau. One supposes the 1984 play fits into the Festival’s expanded mandate since the fictional Albertine, born in 1912, has lived more than half her life during the period of Shaw lifetime (1856-1950). We meet her in 1982 at age 70 when she has just arrived in a retirement home. There, left alone with her memories, she converses with herself at the ages of 30, 40, 50 and 60, as represented by four other women, and with her sister and only confidante Madeleine. The play provides a wonderful showcase for the some of the Festival’s strongest actresses, but the play and the direction leave a number of questions unresolved, most notably how a woman who has been filled with such rage throughout her life can possibly settle into the confinement of her new life.

Director Micheline Chevrier has arranged the five Albertines in the form of a quincunx with Albertine at 70 (Patricia Hamilton) at the centre, the Albertines at 30 and 40 (Marla McLean and Jenny L. Wright) behind her and the Albertines at 60 and 50 in front of her. This establishes two diagonals representing opposing forces within Albertine with Albertine at 70 at their intersection. The Albertines at 30 and 50 are the most optimistic, the first recuperating in the countryside and enjoying a sense of peace for the first time, the second having made hard decisions regarding her two difficult children and enjoying the independence and sense of self-worth her first job gives her. On the other axis are the Albertines of 40 and 60, both bitter and cynical--the first fed up with her life, her children and her relatives‘ meddling, the second addicted to sedatives after a family disaster and in a state that no longer cares about anything. Chevrier makes quite clear that Albertine at 70 in trying to adjust to her new abode is trying to identify with the selves at ages 30 and 50 and to exclude the negativity of her selves at 40 and 60.

Providing a contrast to the five conflicted Albertines is Madeleine (Nicola Correia-Damude), who in her short life was happy in all the ways Albertine was not--happy in love, in marriage, with her children, with herself. Her presence makes us want to know what caused these two sisters to have such different personalities and such different lives. Tremblay’s answer seems to point to an inexplicable fate. The youngest Albertine tells us that she has always been filled with a barely controllable rage, the the desire to destroy, and indeed she is resting in the country after having vented that rage against her own daughter. Through a choral section for the five Albertines, Chevrier, like the Albertines, tries to point the finger at men as the cause, when in fact, the youngest Albertine’s statement along with Madeleine’s happiness with her husband suggest that Albertine’s rage does not have such a reductive cause and may reflect rather an inchoate perception of her existential status. She perceives the ultimate meaninglessness of life but personalizes it. The young Albertine says outright that when she was beating her daughter she knew she was really trying to strike out at life.

All six actors give superb performances. Hamilton’s look of apprehension and resignation in accepting her room as the last place she will ever be makes anyone shiver in recognition who has relatives in a retirement or nursing home. She radiates a gratefulness to be alive, but her fierceness of her attitude towards Albertine at 60 suggests issues that are unresolved. McLean at first exudes the warmth and joy of youth, but when we find out exactly why she is resting in the country the savageness that breaks out is terrifying. Wright gives an extraordinarily intense performance as Albertine at 40, a portrait of a soul in hell, the anger turned outward that so alienates Madeleine is equal to the anger turned inward on herself. She is like a fire consuming itself but which, paradoxically, creates a chill all around it.

Haney is equally intense as a character in denial. She gives all of Albertine at 50’s lines of self-promotion, her praise of herself, her independence and her hard decisions, such a sharp edge that it seems as if she realizes the hollowness that lies beneath. Thatcher as Albertine at 60 has to struggle with a problem not of her making. This Albertine after the shock of her daughter’s death has let herself go and drifted into addiction and deliberate isolation. Designer Teresa Przybylski clothes her in a dirty dressing gown and slippers but gives her a wig of long yellowing grey hair that makes her look as if she were 90 not 60. The photographs in the programme make it quite obvious that the hairline on Thatcher’s wig recedes far too much compared to the hairline on Hamilton as Albertine at 70. How is it no one noticed this? This flaw in costuming will make most people, even those who know the play, believe that Thatcher represents an Albertine of a decade or so beyond Hamilton and that Albertine at 70’s strenuous rejection of Thatcher’s character has to do with rejecting the depressing image of what she will become. At least as Chevrier has directed the play, this works as a more plausible explanation of their relationship. Since Tremblay’s text does not make Albertine at 60’s age clear until about halfway through the play, Przybylski’s design leads only to confusion.

Despite this, Thatcher shows that the rage that motivates Albertine is still there even though Albertine at 60 uses pill after pill to dull it. Correia-Damude is well cast as the counterbalance to these five aspects of a woman’s anger and guilt. Beaming with health and poise she makes the desiccation of the others’ world views look all the more desolate. She also makes clear that the consciously satisfied Madeleine could, without wishing to, easily be mistaken for flaunting her happiness and provoking jealousy and resentment in an unstable nature like Albertine’s.

Przybylski’s set consisting of abstract grillwork gives audiences little of interest to look at though it does suggest the both the balconies of Montreal as well as the cage that all five Albertines feel around them. It really falls to Ereca Hassell’s complex lighting to reinforce the constantly changing moods of the piece and the constantly changing alignments of some parts of Albertine against the the others.

Chevrier’s direction endeavours to bring out the pathos of all the women’s situations, even though that actually works counter to the text. Various Albertines state that she cannot cry and that she would be happy if she finally could. Yet, McLean and Wright, in particular, present their characters with such emotion that they do cry, in spite of themselves. This makes us wonder if Chevrier has not really got a firm hold on what kind of woman Albertine is, i.e. a woman who looks at the world not emotionally but with a dry-eyed rage. It is love that Albertine longs for, to give and to receive, but that is exactly, for reasons that remain mysterious, what she lacks. Chevrier seems not to have found the key to bringing out Albertine’s pain of an internal and external deficit of love without sentiment. If the production as a whole is not fully satisfying, the talent of the cast is never in doubt and in fact bowls you over with its power.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cast of Albertine in Five Times. ©David Cooper.

Brief Encounters

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:30:28 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Noel Coward, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 20-October 24, 2009

“Delectatio Interrupta"

“Brief Encounters” is the first instalment of the Shaw Festival’s production of Noel Coward’s cycle of ten one-act plays from 1935-36 known as “Tonight at 8:30”. Once al the instalments have opened this will the first time in history that all ten will have been performed together in repertory. “Brief Encounters” is the Festival’s title for its collection of three plays--“Still Life”, “We Were Dancing” and “Hands Across the Sea”. While the cast and design are excellent, director Jackie Maxwell has made some odd choices that make this a less than satisfying evening.

First up is “Still Life” (1936), perhaps the most famous of the ten and made into one of the classic of British film by David Lean under the title “Brief Encounter” (1945). The Shaw previously staged the play as a lunch-time show in 2000, and it must be admitted that that production was far more effective than the present one. Set in the lunch room of the train station at Milford Junction, the play shows us the first meeting, falling in love and inevitable parting of Dr. Alec Harvey (Patrick Galligan) and Laura Jesson (Deborah Hay), both already married with children. Two other couples provide a comic counterpoint to this tragic romance--the conductor Albert Godby (Thom Marriott) flirts with Myrtle Bagot (Corrine Koslo), who runs the lunch room, and the refreshment seller Stanley (Gray Powell) flirts with Beryl Waters (Krista Colosimo), the waitress.

Designer William Schmuck creates quite a realistic run-down public room on stage with a central revolving door and a large clock with revolving hands suggesting the pressure of time and change upon all the characters. Adam Larsen’s exceptional projections vividly create the effect of lighted passenger trains arriving and departing just past the lunch room’s frosted windows. He also underscores the passage of time by showing the shadows of the girders of the station’s roof moving over the set between scenes as the sun shifts in the sky.

Galligan and Hay are excellent as the central couple--he filled with a sense of hope against hope, she with a growing sense of doom--as their relationship progresses. Marriott gives a fine portrait of a happy-go-lucky character and Powell is clearly a younger version of Albert but with more restraints because of his lower position. Koslo’s Myrtle, however, is so standoffish toward Albert that it’s a wonder he persists. There is little of the rapport Neil Barclay and Nora McLellan displayed in 2000 and, with it, not enough of the full extent of Myrtle’s hypocrisy. Maxwell presents Beryl as merely a dull serving girl and seeks comedy from it, whereas in the earlier version director Dennis Garnhum heightened the poignant atmosphere by showing that Beryl’s inattention was due to her worry about her mother’s declining health.

The greatest sin Maxwell commits is not allowing us to savour the play’s ending. The set flies apart and the piece of the set where the isolated Laura is sitting glides slowly backwards into the dark, a fine depiction the collapse of her world. If only Maxwell had placed an intermission here to allow us to deal with the ambiguous feelings the play arouses. But no, she plunges us without a break directly into the farcical world of “We Were Dancing” (1935) when we’re not in the mood. The giddy world of the play set in the fictitious British island colony of Samolo, a kind of Singapore with a view of Sumatra on a clear day, seems even sillier and jars after the distressing ending of “Still Life”.

There is a link between the two plays. Here Louise Charteris (Deborah Hay), a married woman, enjoys a magical dance with Karl Sandys (Patrick Galligan), after which both suddenly realize they’re in love. Unlike the furtive lovers of “Still Life”, these two immediate blurt out their new-found romance to Louise’s husband Hubert (Thom Marriott) and his sister Clara (Goldie Semple) and demand it be recognized and acted upon. The comedy derives from the disparate ways Hubert and Clara react--he with increasing calm and rationality, she with increasing outrage directed first at the couple and then at her milquetoast of a brother. Maxwell states in her programme note that Coward’s one-acters were written to showcase his and Gertrude Lawrence’s talents. Galligan and Hay, who play their parts, do amaze us in making the 180 degree turn from tragedy to comedy in so short a time. Nevertheless, this may be farce but it is still Coward, a point Maxwell seems to forget by encouraging wild gestures and absurd poses.

When Karl tries to explain how he and Louise fell in love he breaks into the title song “We Were Dancing”. This and the accompaniment are pre-recorded so that, disconcertingly, Galligan and eventually the entire cast are lipsynching to the music. Not only that, but Maxwell has decided to stage the song as the Balinese equivalent of a Bollywood dance number. This would be fun enough in isolation, but it really comes out of nowhere and, to top everything off, ends the first half of the evening with an intermission in the middle of the play!

This is a mistake for many reasons, the worst being that it destroys the pacing of “We Were Dancing” which is central to its humour. The lovers note that “the moment” has passed, which Maxwell has made much too long with the interposed interval. Again the set flies apart and relocates us in an upper-class drawing room in London for the final play “Hands Across the Sea” (1935). Designer William Schmuck has provided furniture and an entry hall, but otherwise the wall-less “apartment” is entirely exposed to Larsen’s projection of a gloomy London skyline.

The link between these plays is that Lady Maureen Gilpin (Deborah Hay), aptly nicknamed “Piggie”, has invited a couple who were kind to her in Malaya to visit her in London, but she has forgotten all about it. When a Mr. and Mrs. Wadhurst (Thom Marriott and Corrine Koslo) arrive, she assumes they are the same people. The play is a cutting satire of the pettiness and self-centredness of the upper classes since as more and more of Piggie’s friends arrive, the more this in-group ignores the the patiently sitting and politely smiling Wadhursts. Maxwell tries to force a deeper meaning onto the comedy by having barrage balloons appear in the sky accompanying the arrival of each guest. She seems to be saying that just as Piggie’s guests ignore the Wadhursts so they were wilfully ignorant of the coming signs of World War II. This effort fails because few people will know that what look like quilted blimps are actually barrage balloons, and even those who do know will wonder why they appear in a play that premiered in 1935 when the RAF Balloon Command was not formed until 1938. More importantly, how exactly are the meek Wadhursts in any equivalent to a Nazi threat?

Of the three plays, this is the least effective probably because it needs to be staged in a smaller space. It is a situation where nothing that the characters say is important. Rather is it the multiple glances to and fro as to “Who are these people?” and “What should I do about it?” that are funny but don’t come across in a large theatre.

Goldie Semple, who is condemned to play obnoxious women in all three plays, is especially good in this last as the drunken, cynical and gossippy Clare Wedderburn, the epitome of a class turned completely in upon itself. Hay is very funny as Piggie, particularly when she tries via a kind of jig to shake out of her disorganized brain the names of her guests. As the military men Patrick Galligan, as Piggie’s husband Peter, Gray Powell as Major Gosling and David Schurmann as Lieutenant Commander Corbett are all practically interchangeable. Maxwell tries to derive comedy from the Wadhurst’s placidity and eventual drunkenness, but increasing signs of discomfort might seem more logical and funnier. She should also to try to integrate Wade Bogert-O’Brien playing Mr. Burnham but mistaken as the Wadhursts‘ son more into the action.

The effect of the evening is that of listening to a great symphony live only to enter a restaurant where pop music is blaring. The unsettledness caused by the lack of an intermission where it should be and the placing of one where it shouldn’t never resolves itself. It’s adds up to a case of pleasure interrupted.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Patrick Galligan and Deborah Hay in Still Life. ©David Cooper.

Ever Yours, Oscar

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:15:02 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by Peter Wylde, directed by Brian Bedford
Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford
June 20-August 29, 2009

"Oscar, Not So Wild"

A fine show to see in tandem with Stratford’s current production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” is “Ever Yours, Oscar”, a selection and compilation of Oscar Wilde’s letters by Peter Wylde read by Brian Bedford, this year’s Lady Bracknell. The few facts one may know of Wilde’s life, such as his conviction and imprisonment with hard labour, for “gross misconduct” (i.e., homosexual relations) with Lord Alfred Douglas, don’t really give any insight into Wilde as a person. Wilde consciously wore a mask in public, as one letter states overtly, but it is the mask that most people know. Peter Wylde’s compilation of letters and telegrams Wilde wrote from age 14 until his death at 46 provides an intriguing glimpse behind the mask.

The intent of Peter Wylde’s compilation, which includes only minimal commentary as to the place, time and circumstance of writing, is to show Wilde as a much more rounded human being than one might gather from his plays or published prose. The first letter from the 14-year-old Oscar that critiques the fabric and colour of nightclothes his mother has sent him would seem to fit into the general public perception of him. But a letter written on his famous American tour in 1882 specifies in great detail the kind of jacket and knee-britches he wishes made for his appearance in Chicago. The reason is that his public in Ohio was visibly disappointed when he did not appear before them in knee-britches. Thus, it is clear that Wilde regarded his garb as an aesthetic dandy as a costume, one element of the façade he had constructed for public view.

We hear a love letter to Constance Lloyd, who became Wilde’s wife and bore him two children. We hear the letter he writes to his son saying how desolate her death has made him. This is a side of Wilde few may know. We hear how much he enjoys his tour to Leadville, Colorado, on his lecture tour. The miners fall asleep during his talk about Italian painting but he thinks it a more authentic response than that of fawning socialites he meets elsewhere. The dinner they prepare for him in a mine shaft is wonderful and he revels in the privilege they give him of opening a new tunnel to be named after him. When he accepts a job working for the ladies‘ magazine “The Women’s World”, it’s it quite remarkable how he wishes to change its focus on fashion to stories on social topics and child-raising that will appeal to a woman’s intelligence. The audience would have to know plays other than “Earnest” to realize that Wilde thought women were intelligent and deserved equal rights. It is fascinating to hear Wilde give his first sketch of the plot of the play that would become “Earnest”.

The overall emphasis in the 75-minute show, however, is rather strange. We move from a letter to Wilde’s Canadian confidant Robert Ross about the scandal that the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, has initiated directly to a picture of Wilde in prison, without a word about the trial. It could be that Peter Wylde thinks this bit of biography well trodden, but to present nothing at all is peculiar. The last fourth of the piece dwells to an unusual extent on Wilde’s experiences in prison as and, in particular, on his sympathy for child prisoners, aged fourteen and under, who at the time were placed in the same jail with adults. The longest letter in the show is one detailing what Wilde feels should be done to better the lot of child prisoners. They should not be held in solitary confinement. They should have proper food. They should have some sort of schooling. This letter reveals not only the bizarre cruelty Victorian England visited upon children beyond its infamous use of child labor but it also underscore Wilde’s concern for children’s rights. A further letter, written when Wilde was in exile in France under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth, expresses his delight in hosting a party to celebrate Queen Victoria. Peter Wylde’s general point in including this material seems to be to suggest that homosexuals can enjoy the presence of children in a completely non-sexual way. It’s useful to point out that homosexuality and pedophilia are not the same thing, but it is odd to have so much of so short a programme dedicated to this topic.

There are other lacunae. Robert Ross, to whom many of the letters are addressed, is mentioned only as Wilde’s Canadian friend. No mention is made that Ross, lived as an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal or that he and Wilde were lovers before Wilde met Lord Alfred. We also hear none of the letters that Wilde is responding to.

“Ever Yours, Oscar” is not a play. There is no set, except for a blown-up photo of Wilde on the back wall, or costumes, and the text is not memorized. Brian Bedford merely strides up to a podium and literally reads out the stack of transcribed letters before him. As everyone knows, Bedford is a marvellous reader and it is a pleasure to hear his voice bring life to these letters. Yet, prices of $89.69-$63.70 are rather steep for such a short evening. By comparison, a fully-staged, multi-character play by Soulpepper in Toronto costs $68-$50. Since Bedford’s lectern is placed just at the point where Aisles 2 and 10 would cross the stage, anyone sitting in the category B seats will see only the back of Bedford’s head. There are 36 cushions on the stage where anyone may sit for $10, but only those who’ve kept up their yoga will wish to do that.

It is a pleasant enough experience that will likely have you running out to buy Richard Ellmann’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1989 biography of Wilde (only $14.96 on Amazon) to find out the whole story or “Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters” edited by Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland (only $6.78 on Amazon). But, on the whole, the show should be presented free or for a minimal sum like one of the “Platforms” the National Theatre in London gives to provide background to its plays. Rabid fans of Bedford will not hesitate, but for $89.69 you can find out much more about Wilde elsewhere.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Oscar Wilde. ©Napoleon Sarony, 1882.

Julius Caesar

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:12:06 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by James MacDonald
Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
June 6-October 31, 2009

"Thumbs Down"

The Stratford Festival’s seventh production of “Julius Caesar” was easily the worst show of the six that debuted during the Festival’s opening week. Fine performances in two central roles are overwhelmed by poor to mediocre performances in all the others, dreadful design and uninspired direction. The Festival may have put “Shakespeare” back into its official name, but on the evidence of Des McAnuff’s “Macbeth” and this “Caesar”, the Festival has to relearn how how to stage the plays of its namesake playwright.

The first difficulty audiences will encounter with this new “Caesar” is its off-putting design. Director James MacDonald emphasizes how universal the questions of the play are concerning the rights and wrongs of assassinating a tyrant, and the designs he approved by Davis Boechler are clearly meant to underscore this universality. Yet in mixing ancient and modern, East and West, all they create is a bizarre, disharmony that alienates us from the action. The Roman senators wear modern Western business suits except that between the jacket and the shirt, Boechler adds a shin-length Indian kurta with a pleat and asymmetrical front to create an allusion to the Roman toga falling beneath the jacket. Over the jacket they wear a diplomatic sash. On other occasions they wear an embroidered shawani over the kurta.

If Boechler had followed through on this idea, there would be little to complain of except that the conspirators, in only their kurtas and hard shoes, look like a fraternity of nerds in nightshirts. Calphurnia and Portia are in what seem to be 1960s party dresses with high heels. The Roman mob are in everyday 21st-century garb. To disguise themselves the conspirators wear Venetian tricorns and masks. The Soothsayer is a legless 1960s hippie. When we move into the battle scenes of the second act, the rebel forces under Brutus and Cassius are in modern grey-toned camouflage suits with engineer caps while their commanders wear long padded trench-coats and ball-caps. The strangest turn comes when Octavius‘ soldiers enter looking like black, ant-shaped robots from some sci-fi movie. The questions “Where are we?” and When is this?” quickly shift from puzzling to incomprehensible.

Here Boechler’s set designs only compound the problem. If the action is really set everywhere and anytime, why, then, do we see Octavius and Mark Antony walking on a map of the Roman Empire circa 44bc, projected onto a screen? Why, if we are in Rome or in a universal everywhere is it snowing on and off during the battle scenes? Rather than illuminating text of character, the design sets up a barrier between us and the play.

Some actors can give fine performances no matter what their surroundings. Gearing Wyn Davies is excellent as Caesar. He conveys the man’s pride and arrogance through carriage and gesture. The fact that he is so aware of his own charisma makes clear why he should inspire both envy and flattery. Ben Carlson relates Brutus directly to both Macbeth and Hamlet, two characters he has played for whom Brutus seems like an early sketch. Like Hamlet he debates whether to act of not to act. Like Macbeth he is haunted by the consequences of his deeds. Unlike either, he is an idealist torn between two unpalatable options the political world offers, either of which will lead to his ruin. Carlson, intelligence informing every word of his crystal clear diction, manages better than anyone I’ve seen to carry Brutus tragedy fully to its conclusion. He makes Brutus’ remark, “Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes” into the same insight Hamlet and Macbeth have in acknowledging the unavoidability of fate.

Compared to Wyn Davies and Carlson, the rest of the cast seem tired and disheartened. Tom Rooney’s Cassius is perfunctory and weak. Rooney hardly mines the complexities of the part such as the role calculation and envy play in Cassius‘ hatred of Caesar. Jonathan Goad does not give us Mark Anthony the master politician since he is unable to convey two emotions at the same time. We see his anger at the conspirators before and after his famous speech, but where is it during the speech, not to mention the self-congratulatory sense he has of his own power?

The only two women in the play, Calphurnia and Portia, have the function of foreseeing danger for their husbands, Caesar and Brutus, which the men reject as female irrationality. The scenes are so similar a director ought to heighten their differences, but MacDonald stages them exactly the same way. Yanna McIntosh gives Calphurnia more gravitas than Cara Ricketts gives Portia, but that is the only difference. Ricketts ought to give some hint of Portia’s mental fragility, given Portia’s gruesome mode of suicide, but does not.

Few of the many Roman senators and soldiers make any impression. Two exceptions are Michael Spencer-Davis as Casca (incorrectly spelled as “Caska” in the programme) and Dion Johnstone as Octavius Caesar. Spencer-Davis, sounding like an aging dandy, makes the account of Caesar’s refusal of the coronet three times quite funny by using a snide tone of voice, thus providing a rare streak of humour in an otherwise earnest drama. MacDonald really should make more of Johnstone, who gives Octavius an appropriately aloof manner. It would be helpful if MacDonald allowed Johnstone to indicate that Octavius already has doubts about Mark Antony to foreshadow their future relationship in “Antony and Cleopatra”.

The main flaw in MacDonald’s pedestrian direction is that he is unable to generate any sense of urgency or tension in the action, rather odd given that the subject is a political assassination. In large part this is due to his clunky, deliberate pacing and an over-reliance on the more dissonant passages of Alfred Schnittke’s music to do the work for him. It doesn’t help that the fight scenes staged by Daniel Levinson are among the least convincing I’ve ever seen at Stratford. Mark Antony’s famous oration ought to be stirring, but we ought not to worry that the block of marble he is standing on hasn’t been secured to the stage. MacDonald follows what is now a cliché in directing this scene by having the mob spread out into the audience. Unfortunately, their shouting and chanting so close to our ears often drown out Mark Antony’s words from the stage.

MacDonald also does not pay close attention to flaws in Shakespeare’s text. In Act 4, scene 2, Brutus tells Cassius that Portia is dead. A few lines later Messala enters and tells Brutus the news from Rome that Portia is dead. The double report is a well-known error in the text of the play which was prepared from the prompt-books rather than Shakespeare’s manuscript. The best way to solve the problem is to omit Messala’s report. But MacDonald leaves it in and has Carlson react as if it’s common knowledge that the news from Rome is always out of date, an unwanted note of comedy in what should be a key demonstration of Brutus’ stoicism.

One admires the work of Wyn Davies and Carlson in valiantly giving their best, but ultimately their efforts alone cannot raise up a production sinking under the weight of murky ideas in design and direction.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive
Photo: Ben Carlson and Geraint Wyn Davies. ©David Hou.

Cyrano de Bergerac

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:56:42 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
written by Edmond Rostand, directed by Donna Feore
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
June 19-November 1, 2009

"Out by a Nose (or Two)"

“Cyrano de Bergerac” is one of those spectacles a theatre company should do well or not at all. The current Stratford production directed by Donna Feore and starring her husband Colm Feore is a shadow of the previous Stratford production in 1994 directed by Derek Goldby that also starred Colm Feore. The 1994 production itself was a shadow of Derek Goldby’s previous production of the play for the Shaw Festival in 1982 and 1983 starring Heath Lamberts, which still ranks as the best “Cyrano” Ontario has ever seen. The present “Cyrano” is marred by inept direction, dreary design and crucial miscasting of one of the main roles.

Despite its huge cast of 36, “Cyrano” sinks or swims on the basis of only three performances--those of the titular macrorhinous poet and swordsman; Roxane, the noblewoman he loves and who is attracted to Christian; and Christian, the handsome but aesthetically-challenged soldier whom Cyrano, thinking his own ugliness rules him out as a suitor, helps to woo Roxane. If we can’t be interested in the fates of these three, we won’t be interested in the play. Sadly, this is the case. Amanda Lisman, making her Stratford debut, is fatally miscast as Roxane. She may be pretty in a 21st-century way, but she has an extraordinarily narrow emotional and vocal range. She inflects all her lines exactly the same way no matter what their content and maintains an emotion only as long as the line lasts that expresses it. She also seems not to understand fully what all of her lines mean, making it impossible to believe her as a literary woman who thinks words are more important than deeds.

In contrast, Mike Shara as Christian gives the best performance of the evening. This is not Christian the male airhead of the 1994 production, but rather a man like Shakespeare’s Claudio of “Much Ado” who has devoted his life to action and understands words as commands not embellishments. Shara’s subtler approach helps make Roxane look less foolish in loving Christian and Cyrano less foolish in helping him. Here Christian’s realization that Cyrano’s own love is why Cyrano has written Roxane twice a day becomes the most moving moment in the play.

Most people would think the most emotional part of the play would be Cyrano’s death at the end, but Colm Feore’s performance prevents us becoming engaged in the character. First of all, Feore, fifteen years after his energetic Cyrano of 1994, seems like a ghost of his former self. His vocal range is narrower and he seems to exhaust his available breath at the end of every line. This is suitable for the play’s ending but not for the swaggering adventurer of the first four acts. Second, Feore’s favourite habits of cadence that he suppressed for Des McAnuff in this year’s “Macbeth”, Donna Feore allows to have full rein. The result is that he speaks all his lines in the same general rhythm with the same rises and falls no matter what the content. His Cyrano, in fact, sounds very much the same as his Fagin in “Oliver!” in 2006, also directed by his wife. Over time this lack of variety becomes monotonous. The final scene which should tug at our heart here seems tediously extended primarily because Feore’s self-indulgence quashes our emotion.

Adding to these woes are Donna Feore’s poor directorial choices. At the very start of the play, she has a Boy (Thomas Feore) in modern clothes enter and become dressed in 17th-century garb by actors who look rather like circus performers. This common-man-gets-drawn-into-world-of play theme was actually part of Cirque du Soleil’s “Nouvelle Expérience” in 1990. The problem is that she does nothing with this theme after introducing it and seems to forget about the boy entirely. Next the Festival stage is dominated by Santo Loquasto’s movable tower-like set that includes a two-storey staircase and arches suggesting a doorway. This is situated in the now-open space where the Festival’s balcony used to be and is turned about often for no particular reason. When Cyrano and Christian want to attract Roxane’s attention, they throw stones against her lit window in the side wall, but since the tower is not connected to the window, Roxane in answer climbs up the steps in front of the window to a free-standing balcony. In Ragueneau’s bakery, Feore places the prime display of goods behind the set piece so that hardly anyone can see them. During the siege of Arras, she leaves the tower on stage so that when Roxane brings on her cart of provisions it can barely squeeze into the space to the stage right side of the tower. Thus the surprise of the arrival of the cart is ruined as is the revelation of what is in it.

Especially annoying is Feore’s use of music to underscore nearly the entire play. For sword fights and battles she has had Leslie Arden compose bombastic John Williamsesque action movie music. For all beautiful or significant speeches, she employs chamber music with far too much use of glissandi on a chime tree to enforce an “Isn’t this magical!” feeling. In her notes, Dona Feore says, “This production is unique, as far as I know, in that we’ve kept several passages in French, thus allowing our audiences to hear Rostand in his original voice.” If Feore were really so concerned about Rostand’s words, why can’t she let them speak for themselves without all the musical underscoring? While retaining passages in the original does give the play more of a French flavour, those without French may find it annoying and those with French will search in vain for reasons why certain passages are or are not in French. The most glaring example is found in the set itself over which looms the words: “Mes regards dont c'était dont c'était les frémissantes fêtes, Ne baiseront au vol les gestes que vous faites; J'en revois un petit qui vous est familier ....” Throughout the play we wonder when these words, unremarkable in themselves, will have any relevance. We exit unenlightened. That is because these words mark the point when Roxane hears the aged Cyrano reading the last letter that Christian supposedly wrote her and realizes that Cyrano is the true author. The key moment is spoken in English in the play so that only if you have memorized the play in French will you know what the words emblazoned over the stage refer to. And even if you do, so what? There are far more significant passages to choose from that would encompass the whole of the action instead of a single moment.

“Cyrano” may really be the story of three people imbedded in a mass of spectacle but a good production will allow the 33 other actors involved to create a rich gallery of portraits against which Cyrano, Christian and Roxane act out their drama. Ms. Feore seems content merely to move all these actors about instead of encouraging them to bring their characters to life. In larger roles, Wayne Best as Cyrano’s confidant Le Bret is simply “the loyal friend” and no more. Steve Ross as Ragueneau the baker-poet is simple the “jolly fat man”. John Vickery is suitably pompous as Roxane’s villainous guardian the Comte de Guiche, but oddly turns up the pomposity when de Guiche is meant to be reconciled and sincere at the end.

In the huge number of minor roles only two actor distinguish their characters from the general blur. Douglas E. Hughes is delightfully quirky as the the old roué Lignière, who brings Christian to the theatre. Robert Persichini is very funny as the horribly old-fashioned actor Montfleury, whom Cyrano drives off the stage. Otherwise, it’s impossible to know who is who or to care.

The sense of background blur is not helped by the design. Loquasto has dressed everyone, noble or poor, except for the blue-clad cadets, in earth tones making it even more difficult to pick out individuals. Black does not appear until Act 5, but there his design contradicts the text. We are told emphatically that for fifteen years Cyrano has lived in squalor and has only one moth-eaten cloak to his name. Yet, when he visits Roxane for the last time his entire outfit looks brand new. Cyrano’s suffering is meant to enhance the pathos of the situation, but like so many other details in this production, goes unheeded. Lighting designer Alan Brodie makes very little of the numerous possibilities for contrast between interior and exterior light, times of day or times of year. An important change of light occurs only at the end when Roxane notices how dark it has become while Cyrano is “reading” Christian’s final letter.

All of these flaws combine to make “Cyrano” not the exciting, moving showpiece it should be, but instead a noisy, emotionally empty spectacle that is not even superficially attractive. Those who love the play will be sadly disappointed.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Amanda Lisman and Colm Feore. ©David Hou.