Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✩✩✩
by Jennifer Brewin, Leah Cherniak, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alisa Palmer and Martha Ross,
directed by Alisa Palmer
Tarragon Theatre/Theatre Columbus, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
March 11-April 3, 2011
Attempting to recreate a moment of spontaneous fun seldom works. The effort of re-creation destroys the spontaneity. That’s is exactly what happens in More Fine Girls by Jennifer Brewin, Leah Cherniak, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alisa Palmer and Martha Ross, the sequel to the quintet’s fluffy but popular play The Attic, the Pearls and Three Fine Girls (1995). Proof that collaborating after such a long time is difficult came when Leah Cherniak bowed out of the production for “personal reasons” a week before the play was to open thus putting the kibosh on its prime goal of reuniting the original actors on stage.
The Attic found the three Fine sisters gathered to carry out their father’s funeral arrangements. More Fine Girls takes place 13 years later when Jelly (Severn Thompson replacing Cherniak) summons Jayne (Ann-Marie MacDonald) and JoJo (Martha Ross) to meet. When she fails to reveal why, the two older sisters assume the worst--health problems, difficulties with her daughter or boyfriend or even that she is going insane. Meanwhile, Jelly, a successful artist, is hard at work turning the old family home into a giant art installation about “the void,” primarily by affixing all the furniture to the ceiling and setting up camera feeds from inside the house to outer space. Jelly’s secret news does come out but it has no relevance to plot.
The elaborate, barely credible story is far from the simplicity of The Attic. The play seems more a collection of diverse jokes, skits and comic routines than a complete work. The three women seems more like good friends than sisters. While Ross and MacDonald ham it up in their roles, Thompson with her quiet, ethereal demeanour, seems to be in an entirely different, more serious play. Jayne has become a butch lesbian with a penchant for New Age therapy, but MacDonald never makes her believable even as a caricature. Of the three, Ross is the most consistently funny. JoJo’s struggle to find her buzzing cellphone in the depths of her purse or her close encounter with a Swiss ball are physical comedy at its finest. Otherwise, the pace is slack and the humour strictly hit-or-miss. A comedy about women dealing with middle-age would be a boon to Canadian drama since so few playwrights tackle the subject. More Fine Girls is too diffuse and self-consciously goofy to be that play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-03-14.
Photo: Ann-Marie MacDonald, Martha Ross and Severn Thompson. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2011-03-14
More Fine Girls