2011

Best Productions of 2011

Sun, 1 Jan 2012 18:24:49 -0500

Toronto:

The following in alphabetical order were the best productions in Toronto in 2011. As usual. I have had to exclude works that have appeared recently on this list (which I used to compile for Eye Weekly when it existed) such as Volcano’s remount at Canadian Stage of Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God.

À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou by Michel Tremblay, Théâtre français de Toronto. Diana Leblanc directed a 40th anniversary production of Tremblay’s play that proved it to be not only one of Tremblay’s best plays but one of the greatest works of Canadian drama.

benu by d’bi.young anitafrika, Tarragon Theatre. For the first time ever charismatic artist d’bi.young anitafrika performed all three parts of her sankofa trilogy together. benu, the second part, emerged as the most poetic and emotionally complex play of a trilogy marked by outstanding vitality and insight.

Billy Elliot by Elton John and Lee Hall, Mirvish Productions. Mirvish brought us a Canadian edition of the first great musical of the 21st century that proved every bit the equal of the British edition and garnered well-deserved mid-show standing ovations. Cesar Corrales as Billy and Kate Hennig as his dance teacher Mrs. Wilkinson were unforgettable.

La Clemenza di Tito by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Opera Atelier. Toronto baroque opera company completed its “Mozart Six” with the first period production in North America of Mozart’s final opera. Director Marshall Pynkoski brushed away received notions that the portrayal of goodness on stage leads to dull drama with a with a thrilling production in such singers as Kresimir Špicer, Michael Maniaci and Measha Brueggergosman reached new heights as performers.

Eternal Hydra by Anton Piatigorsky, Crow’s Theatre with Factory Theatre. Chris Abraham’s remount of Piatigorsky’s intellectual but very funny play proved to be even stronger than the original and gave the unavoidable impression that the work must be considered part of the canon of great Canadian plays.

The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, Studio 180 with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Studio 180‘s revival of this 1985 play about the dawning of the AIDS crisis in New York City demonstrated that the play has not only not dated but become even more relevant in its passionate depiction of a despised community trying to persuade outsiders to help even as it struggles within with the new realities the disease has created.

One Thousand and One Nights, Pt. 1 by Tim Supple, Dash Arts and Luminato. The first part of Tim Supple’s adaptation of Shahrazad’s famous tales made dazzling theatre on a bare stage with his masterful international cast who depicting so clearly the book’s clever and highly theatrical technique of embedding one story inside another inside another.

Red by John Logan, Canadian Stage. Asking experimental director Kim Collier to direct this Broadway play about the meaning of art was a brainwave since Collier brought to Logan’s intellectual discussion between master artist Mark Rothko and his young assistant a visual component that made palpable the very subject under discussion.

The Ugly One by Marius von Mayenburg, Theatre Smash. Director Ashlie Corcoran gave Mayenburg’s absolutely brilliant comic satire about identity and lookism and stunning smart production that was a model of precision in every detail from acting to design.

When Harry Met Harry by Allan Girod, flaming locomotive productions. On of the thrills of the Toronto Fringe Festival in encountering a play that breaks new theatrical ground. That’s exactly what Australian Allan Girod’s play does. In plot and in performance it features audience participation but, quite remarkably, turned out not to be so much about Harry as about the very experience of audience participation itself.

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Stratford:

At the 2011 Stratford Shakespeare Festival the best three shows were:

Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber and TimRice. In what is really a pop music oratorio, director Des McAnuff emphasizes the underlying personal drama and so brought the whole work together in a way never seen as clearly and portrayed as slickly before. It’s no surprise the show is going to Broadway--it already seemed like a Broadway show at Stratford.

The Homecoming by Harold Pinter. Director Jennifer Tarver proved herself yet again a master of difficult modern texts by making the power struggles in this enigmatic play absolutely riveting and by drawing superb performances from the entire cast including Brian Dennehy, Cara Ricketts and newcomer Aaron Krohn.

The Grapes of Wrath by Frank Galati. Director Antoni Cimolino brought Galati’s award-winning adaption of the epic Steinbeck novel to the stage in a passionately executed production that painstakingly demonstrated how the Joad family’s journey to the Promised Land turns into a journey into living hell.

Yet again, Shakespeare did not fare well at the Festival and the “must-miss” show of the year was:

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare. This early revenge play by the Bard is often mistaken as just an Elizabethan indulgence in an orgy of mindless violence--and that’s exactly all that director Darko Tresnjak provided: hyped-up violence without any sense of the moral questions that revenge plays are meant to provoke.

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Niagara-on-the-Lake:

The Shaw Festival celebrated its 50th season in style with a slate of productions with an even higher level of over overall quality than the Festival is famous for. The three best shows were:

When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell. This massive yet intricate Australian play about a curse travelling through three generations until it is expunged received all too short a run at the end of the season. Director Peter Hinton made the complex workings of the play with its multitude of interrelated characters both clear and fascinating and its apocalyptic ending truly awe-inspiring. The Festival must stage this extraordinary production again so more people can revel in the Shaw ensemble in peak form.

My Fair Lady by Frederick Loewe and Alan J. Lerner. When will you ever see a production of this musical based on Shaw’s Pygmalion performed by a troupe equally at home in Shaw as in musicals? Probably never unless you saw this production directed with a heightened sense of symbolism by Molly Smith. I simply can’t imagine a finer production of this classic musical.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. Under director Eda Holmes we finally got see what an ensemble production of this Williams masterpiece is like instead of all the star-vehicle productions that distort its effect. The result with painfully intense performances from the entire cast was a revelation.

-plus-

The President by Ferenc Molnár, adapted by Morwyn Brebner. The unprecedented fourth five-out-of-five star production at the Shaw was its revival of its lunchtime hit from 2008 that was just as deliriously funny as it was before and showed Lorne Kennedy’s amazing performance has not diminished an iota.

This year the level at the Shaw was so high that there was no “must-miss” show. You really couldn’t go wrong with any of the offerings, all of which were entertaining and bursting with insight.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Peter Millard, Ric Reid (on table) and Jeff Meadows in When the Rain Stops Falling at the Shaw Festival. ©2011 David Cooper.

The Gypsy Princess

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:28:22 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Imre Kálmán, directed by Guillermo Silva-Marin
Toronto Operetta Theatre, Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto
December 28, 2011-January 8, 2012

“Loveliness is All Around Us”

For its New Year’s show, Toronto Operetta Theatre is presenting its third production of Imre Kálmán’s most popular operetta, The Gypsy Princess (or as it was known at its 1915 premiere in Vienna, Die Csárdásfürstin). There’s no wonder the work is such a favourite. It has one great tune after the next, with no lack of that typical Hungarian dance, the csárdás, and a plot that moves forward less because of artifice than because of the interplay of complex human emotions. The current TOT production has much to recommend it, particularly the stunning performance of Lara Ciekiewicz in the title role, but when I saw the December 30th presentation, halfway between the premiere and the big New Year’s Eve gala, the show still seemed a bit rough around the edges.

The story uses certain clichés of Viennese operetta plotting--a comic couple balancing a serious couple and difference in class as a bar to marriage--but librettists Leo Stein and Béla Jenbach have found a way to emphasize the human side of the conflicts so that characters and the community on stage seem much more real than is sometimes the case in operetta. For one thing, the title character Sylvia Varescu (Ciekiewicz) is a cabaret singer herself. Prince Edwin (Keith Klassen) is in love with her, but she doubts whether he has the courage to stand up to his parents’ disapproval of his marrying not just a commoner but, even worse, a stage artist. Meanwhile, her manager Count Bonifazius or “Boni” (Ian Simpson) is trying to get Sylvia started on a tour of America. Edwin doesn’t want her to leave so what can he do to stop her but propose? Boni, who has never taken Edwin’s passion seriously, doesn’t want to cancel the tour and so produces an announcement Edwin’s parents have prematurely had printed announcing his engagement to their choice for his bride, Countess Stasi (Elizabeth Beeler). The mood for everyone except Boni gets very dark before events work themselves out.

Ciekiewicz has a clear, strong voice and a delightfully pert personality ideal for Sylvia. She also can dance. This must be the first time I’ve ever seen a soprano hit her high note while doing the splits! She and Klassen’s Edwin have a chemistry on stage that makes the frequent tiffs and reconciliations of these two highly strung individuals seem quite natural. Klassen’s tenor has darkened over the years in a way that has allowed him an even greater range of expression. This plus the rapport between the two makes the slow minor key waltz “Where Are They Now?” an unexpected highlight of the second act.

As the traditional parallel comic couple, Boni and Stasi are not typical at all. Stasi, in a surprising notion for 1915, proposes an open marriage to Edwin as the solution to their problem in the “Swallow Duet”. Beeler’s scintillating presence lights up the whole second act. She gives Stasi a fascinating personality, a seeming outward nonchalance hiding deeper feelings underneath that makes you pay special attention to her every word.

As Boni, Simpson simply cannot match or the other leads. Though I have enjoyed other performances of his, his acting style is completely different from that of the others. He adopts the consciously artificial line delivery one often hears in musicals rather than the naturalistic style the others use here. Although he played Boni the last time the TOT staged Die Csárdásfürstin, he plays Boni as a stereotypical comic figure rather than the complex one the librettists have created. While he may be the main source of humour in the operetta, his motivation for ruining Edwin’s proposal to Sylvia are completely selfish. I’d like to see a bit more chagrin in him when he recognizes the effect of what he’s done. I’d also like to see some kind of change in him when changes from the devil-may-care rake of Act 1 who does not believe in love to a man hopelessly enslaved by it in Act 2.

In secondary roles, Stefan Fehr is excellent vocally and dramatically as Baron Ferencz or “Feri”, friend to Edwin and Boni. Mark Petacchi, though much too young for the role, gives a solid performance as Edwin’s father Prince Leopold. In contrast, Eugenia Dermentzis as Edwin’s mother Princess Anhilte indulges in a bit too much posturing and should give some hint of the hypocrisy of her opposing her son’s marriage to Sylvia.

As usual director and designer Guillermo Silva-Marin has managed with carefully selection of props, furniture and patterned lighting gobos to conjure up the exciting backstage of a theatre for Acts 1 and 3 and the contrasting formal world of Edwin’s parents in Act 2. Due to an evident enthusiasm for the music, conductor Derek bate uncharacteristically allowed the TOT Orchestra to play at too high a volume in the Act 1 so that most of the words went missing. By Act 2, however, the balance had been corrected and the words were clear. The choral singing was lovely throughout.

TOT has not staged Die Csárdásfürstin since 1997 so fans of Viennese operetta in general, and of Kálmán in particular, should not hesitate in seeing the show, especially with such a delightful singer as Ciekiewicz as Sylvia. The show is so full of good tunes that you’re certain leave with waltzes, galops or csárdások still dancing in your ears.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Lara Ciekiewicz and Keith Klassen. ©2011 Gilberto Prioste.

For tickets, visit www.torontooperetta.com.

Quidam

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:07:57 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Franco Dragone
Cirque du Soleil, Ricoh Coliseum, Toronto
December 20-30, 2011;
General Motors Centre, Oshawa, January 4-8, 2012;
WFCU Centre, Windsor, January 11-15, 2012

Quidam is the ninth show created by Cirque du Soleil. It premiered under the Grand Chapiteau, or big top, in Montreal in 1996, but has since been converted to an arena show for the 2009 international tour that has just now reached Toronto. The show is a reminder of what made the company famous--its presentation of circus acts as part of a unified narrative. Recent Cirque shows like OVO (2009) and Totem (2010) are more high-tech and feature more elaborate costumes and makeup, but in them the emphasis on technology and design tended to overwhelm an already weak storyline. In Quidam writer and director Franco Dragone strikes just the right balance and the arena format will now make one of Cirque du Soleil’s best-ever shows available to an even larger number of people than before.

One of the earliest Cirque du Soleil shows, Nouvelle Expérience (1987) showed what happened when a family accidentally is mistaken for circus artists and how it changed their lives. Quidam looks back at that idea from a different, more sophisticated angle. After a crowd warm-up with genial, lanky-limbed host John (Mark Ward), we meet the girl Zoé (Alessandra Gonzalez) and her parents. Zoé’s parents sit apart in huge chairs and are cut off--the father hidden in his newspaper, the mother staring forward glazed and unhappy--leaving Zoé frustrated and bored. The only hints that there is another side to the parents is the red dress of the Mother (Denise Wal) that contrasts with the uniformly grey surroundings and the white acrobat’s shoes of the Father (Patrick McGuire). Suddenly a headless man with a blue bowler hat appears at the door. He is the “quidam” or “nameless passer-by” of the Latin title. He gives the hat to Zoé. When she puts it on the everyday world around her rises and vanishes in a fantastically theatrical scene to be replaced by the world of the circus, or more correctly by her imagination as reflected in circus acts. John slips on the Father’s shows and becomes Zoé’s guide through this new world.

Quidam boasts a stronger sense of cohesion than many Cirque shows, both because the acts are thematically related and because the acts reflect stages in the healing of Zoé’s family. The first act is dominated by circles, loops and ropes announced in the thrilling form of Cory Sylvester’s act on the German Wheel. Since a performer normally manipulates this double-rimmed wheel in the positions depicted in Da Vinci’s famous sketch of “Vitruvian Man”, it is a fitting metaphor for a young person beginning to learn how she fits into the world. Unlike Vitruvian man, however, Sylvester does not remain inside the wheel but daringly thrusts his head and torso between the rims seeming to risk smashing himself against the floor just before he pulls in at the last moment.

Continuing the theme of the control of spinning worlds is the next act of four artists (Mangyi Wang, Shengnan Pan, Yaxuan Xu and Lu Zhou) with synchronized diabolos, those spools that look like two cones fixed tip to tip manipulated with a string attached to two handles. Synchronized throws and catches of the diabolos are impressive enough as are the ways the four can keep the devices spinning while passing the cords around their bodies. But what amazes is the ability to cast the diabolo with its string and handles into the air to be caught by another in increasing complex patterns.

Dragone hits the most emotional note in the show with Isabelle Vaudelle’s aerial contortion in silk. Contrary to most aerial silk acts, Vaudelle’s act suggests spiritual torment. She tries to seclude herself in a cocoon of the silk only to emerge in a series of painful-looking angular falls. The act concludes with Vaudelle seeming to commit suicide by hanging herself from the silk. It is no accident that the silks are red and that the Mother looks on anxiously from the back as if Vaudelle were acting out her innermost fears.

The theme of ropes changes from tragedy to comedy with the emergence of the entire company with jump ropes. Into their midst enter jump rope masters Norihisa Taguchi and Kata Banhegyi, who are able to more tricks with jump ropes than you ever imagined and who can skip rope with unbelievable rapidity. This sequence is beautifully built up reaching a climax when Taguchi is skipping rope inside a rope turned by two people skipping double dutch inside two other ropes. The scene concludes with the whole community of artists skipping rope in various combinations in joyful celebration of the ability to play. Much as the following sequence of aerial hoops is beautiful to watch, the jump rope sequence builds to such a high that it would have been better to have it conclude the first act.

The second act morphs in theme from the human body as a master of devices to that of the human body mastering itself. The change is announced with Anna Ostapenko’s stunning hand balancing act but is linked to the first act since not only do her hand perches revolve but the entire stage revolves as she performs.

This is followed by more ropes but this times as Spanish Webs performed as a group act. Like aerial silk, Spanish Web involves climbing ropes, entwining the body in them in various configurations leading to spectacular releases and drops. Here the five artists work in synchrony and, significantly, the woman playing the Mother is one of the artists.

The emotional high point of act two is undoubtedly the “Statue” performed by Alexandre Pestov and Natalia Pestova. Appearing nearly unclad the two slowly move from one exquisite position to the next, each dependent on the combined strength and balance of the two. You could hardly hope for a more profound image of the beauty created by harmony between male and female than you see in this act. Significantly, Dragone has both the Mother and the Father watch this act with a sense of longing.

A parallel to Vaudelle’s aerial contortion in silk of Act One is Christy Shelper’s wild Cloud Swing of Act Two. Again we have a rope, this time in the form of a giant loop that Shelper uses as if it were a trapeze. Entwining her ankles around the rope she seems to cast herself off the trapeze only to swing round and catch the ropes again. If Vaudelle’s act depicted despair and confinement, Shelper’s celebrates freedom and mastery.

The show concludes with a group performance of the ancient art of banquine where artists using only each other for aerial boosts, forming human pyramids. The sequence is such a wonderful blend of choreography and acrobatics, it’s hard to tell when one stops and the other begins. The sequence reaches a climax when a young girl is boosted high into the air to be caught like a bird by a man standing on the shoulders of another standing on the shoulders of a third. Not only is it absolutely thrilling but it seems to symbolize the finally freeing of Zoé, who has watched every act intently, and her parents from their doldrums through the wonderful revelation of the myriad possibilities of humankind.

The character who sums up the spirit of the show is one called The Target (Ardee Dionisio) because of the red spiral painted on his costume. As much dancer as acrobat, he whisks in and out through the show tying the various acts together. Special mention must be made of Voki Kalfayan, one of the best clowns in any Cirque show. Both his scenes are thematically linked to the action. In the first, a clowning classic, Kalfayan invites a woman from the audience for a date in his invisible car. In the second Kalfayan chooses three people from the audience to play actors and one as crew in a silent melodrama about a man who discovers his beloved in the arms of another. Kalfayan’s impeccable timing, fantastic ability at mime and most of all is ability to improvise using whatever accidents may happen made his scene absolutely hilarious.

Playing in an arena instead of in the Grand Chapiteau does mean a loss of intimacy. Everyone is farther from the stage than they would be in a big top. The sound and light control console is not in the back of the auditorium but in the front so that those in the centre stadium seats have to look over its distracting lights to see the stage. Though Franco Dragone has made this more conceptually rich and cohesive than many other Cirque du Soleil shows, he does have the one flaw of directing the action to face forward too often. While the audience is seated in 180˚ around the thrust stage, the action is best seen by those in the centre 100˚. A friend seated in the expensive seats in of the side sections reported that too many acts, especially in Act One, were performed downstage of the median line of the stage. The result is that in some acts--such as the diabolo girls, the master rope skippers and the invisible car sequence--the performers were all lined up and what they were doing was hidden.

These difficulties apart, the benefits of arena staging outweigh the disadvantages simply because it brings Cirque du Soleil to so many more communities. Since Quidam is one of the company’s all-time best works, you certainly won’t want to miss it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo (top): Ardee Dionisio as The Target. ©2011 Matt Beard.
Photo (middle): Alexandre Pestov and Natalia Pestova. ©2011 Matt Beard.

For tickets, visit www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/shows/quidam/default.aspx.

Hair

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:37:07 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music by Galt MacDermot, book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, directed by Diane Paulus
Mirvish Productions, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto
December 14-31, 2011

“Mystic Crystal Revelation”

If you’re too young to have seen Hair when it played at the Royal Alex back in 1970 or if you just want to celebrate the dawning of age of Aquarius in all its robust vitality, then hurry down to the Royal Alex where the love-in is happening all over again. The touring production of the 2009 Broadway revival reveals that this convention-shattering musical is no mere artifact of the 1960s but a celebration of youthful idealism that transcends its time period.

One might think that a musical about hippies and Vietnam War protests is too much an artifact of its own time. One might think that all the deliberate taboo-breaking--a mixed race cast, drug use, simulated sex of all kinds, nudity, coarse language--has now all been done so often that it would have no effect in 2011. The genius of Diane Paulus’ direction is that she has found a way to make it new in both form and content.

To revitalize Hair in terms of form, she stages the performance of the musical as a performance and inescapably emphasizes that the performance is happening now. First of all, Paulus moves the band from the pit to the stage so that they are always visible. Next after the opening song “Aquarius” establishes the time, place and mood, she immediately tears down the fourth wall by have first Berger and then the rest of the Tribe repeatedly rush into the auditorium and interact with the audience. If you’re sitting in the front or on the aisles expect a lot of hair mussing and perhaps a lap-dance or two.

Paulus make Berger not just the most charismatic of the Tribe of hippies but really their embodiment. As Steel Burkhardt plays him he’s the most outrageous and transgressive. By “Donna”, the second song in the show, he’s already stripped down to a fringed leather thong and flirted with both women and men in the audience. Burkhardt risks making him camp and quite often his pansexual Berger is just fishnet stockings and a corset away from becoming Dr. Frank N. Furter. Nevertheless, he embodies the Tribe’s boundless energy, their rejection of convention and their looniness, since the creators of Hair do include satire in their portrayal of youth culture.

To renew Hair in terms of content, Paulus’ looks closely at the underlying story and find complexities there that others have missed. One of the main difficulties of Hair is that the story is very slender and can easily get lost in the creators’ onslaught of very short songs, most lasting less than three minutes, none of which actually move the action the forward. The show can easily seem more like a ‘60s revue than an actual book musical. Yet, there is a story and Paulus’ greatest service to the musical is to tell it so clearly.

The show’s central character is Claude (Paris Remillard), a guy who is not happy with who he is and fakes a Manchester accent (as in his song “Manchester, England”) to give himself some caché. His vague goals in life are to become invisible and to work miracles, but the real option that presents itself is to join the army. The question that Act 1 turns on is “Will he burn his draft card along with the other members of the Tribe?” The question of Act 2 is “What will happen after he joins the army?” While burning a draft card links the story to the 1960s, Paulus emphasizes the more universal aspect of his decision, “Will he accept or reject the Tribe?” Claude doesn’t want the tedium of life as a dentist or lawyer, but he also doesn’t want to end up as a bum, he says addressing the remark directly to Berger.

The pregnant Jeanie (Aleque Reid) loves Claude, Claude loves the activist Sheila (Sara King), Sheila loves Berger and Berger loves both Claude and Sheila. By portraying Claude’s decision as accepting or rejecting his peers, Paulus uncovers a new dynamic in the musical that most people have never perceived. While the musical seems to be a celebration of the free lifestyle of the Tribe, the show’s central character is the one who chooses to reject that lifestyle. Presenting the performance as a performance thus reflects the ironic perspective on the action that Paulus finds within the action itself. The result is a more coherent and moving production than one might have thought possible. According to one friend, the present production is even more coherent and clearly presented than the 1970 version.

Paulus’ clarity of vision extends to the long dream sequence of Act 2 which is really a portrayal of the bad trip Claude is having from smoking an adulterated joint Berger gives him. Rather than allowing the dream to become a confused kaleidoscope of images, Paulus gives it a definite beginning, middle and end as Claude imagines leaving his friends, his first deployment in Vietnam and his death. Never have I seen this section make so much sense before or be so disturbing.

Claude’s song “What a Piece of Work is Man”, its lyrics taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, now does not seem like an attempt to show Shakespeare as a rebel but rather draws an apt parallel between Claude and the tragic hero. Both vacillate concerning how to act in a world where they feel they don’t belong and both accept rather than fight a fate that they know will likely result in death.

Remillard brings out all the doubt and sensitivity of Claude and even in an upbeat song like “I Got Life” suggests an underlying unhappiness. Sara King has the strongest voice and clearest diction of the cast and gives lovely performances of her two main songs “Easy To Be Hard” and “Good Morning Starshine”. Other standouts include Kaitlin Kiyan as Crissy, who captures just the right sense of whimsy in her one song “Frank Mills”. Will Blum and Liz Baltes play Claude’s worried parents. The roles are written as caricatures but both actors play them with as much sincerity as possible. They really cannot be made to seem fools since Claude does, after all, follow their wishes. Blum also is hilarious as (spoiler alert!) Margaret Mead and sings her song “My Conviction” so convincingly I really didn’t know she was a he. Baltes fooled me in a similar way when she played John Wilkes Booth. As proof that the Hair creators satirize as well as celebrate their subjects, you need look no further than the completely blissed-out Woof, well played by Ryan Link, who says he’s not gay but still loves Mick Jagger.

A major asset to Paulus’ conception of the musical is Karole Armitage’s choreography. She accomplishes the difficult task of making all the performers’ movements look completely spontaneous and improvised.

By the end Paulus has found a way to make the story resonate in a new way both within the musical and with the audience. The final song “Let The Sun Shine In” is often sung by the Tribe in reaction to Claude’s death as an angry challenge to the audience to stop wars like Vietnam that have taken his life. Costume designer Michael McDonald shows the deceased Claude in a military tunic sporting numerous decorations as if in the army Claude actually had found his vocation. Paulus stages the final song as if the Tribe is praying for enlightenment for themselves about the meaning of Claude’s death.

At the same time it is clear that this is a musical about ideals and the wish to acknowledge rather than prohibit any human activity that does not cause harm to others. Much of what the Tribe of 1967 wants has already happened, but the question the musical now poses is “Where has this kind of fervent idealism gone?” Apolitical youth happily caught up in consumer culture don’t seem to have it. Political parties have lost it. Is the ramshackle “Occupy” movement the closest we will get? The Tribe literally and metaphorically asks us to join them. In the theatre people leap out of their seats to dance on stage with the cast. Let’s hope that people can somehow find a way once they leave the theatre to cast off the habit of easy cynicism that inhibits compassionate action.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Paris Remillard and Steel Burkhardt (centre) with the cast of Hair. ©2010 Joan Marcus.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

Memphis

Fri, 9 Dec 2011 14:32:21 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music by David Bryan, lyrics by David Bryan and Joe DiPietro, book by Joe DiPietro, directed by Christopher Ashley
Dancap Productions, Toronto Centre for the Arts, Toronto
December 7-24, 2011

“Change Don’t Come Easy”

Dancap Productions has brought the tour of Memphis, the 2010 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, to Toronto for its only Canadian stop. Set against the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the segregated American South of the 1950s, the show has an inventive score by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, fantastic dancing choreographed by Canada’s own Sergio Trujillo and powerhouse performances from the entire cast. If you’re looking for a non-kiddie musical this holiday season, look no further.

Memphis is a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of a white, illiterate stockroom boy from nothing to stardom as a radio DJ and host of his own TV dance show. The character of Huey Calhoun is based partly on the crazy on-air personality of Dewey Phillips (1926-68), a DJ in Memphis, Tennessee, who was one of the first white DJs to play music by black performers on the radio. Huey’s career, however, has more in common with that of another pioneering DJ, Cleveland’s Alan Freed (1921-65), who is credited with the coining the term “rock and roll” for this new type of music in the early ‘50s.

The musical follows Huey (Bryan Fenkart) as he is simultaneously attracted to all genres of black music--blues, soul and gospel--and to Felicia (Felicia Boswell), a black singer at underground nightclub owned by her brother Delray (Quentin Earl Darrington). Huey’s relationship with Felicia serves as a physical embodiment of Huey’s love for music that he says captures his soul. It also has nothing to do with Huey’s historical models.

The show’s main difficulty is Joe DiPietro’s book which is repetitive and formulaic. Beginning with Huey’s entrance into Delray’s club, DiPietro establishes the following pattern: Huey’s ideas are mocked, someone finally gives him a chance, Huey takes pulls an outrageous stunt, everyone fears the worse but it turns out to be a success and Huey moves up the line to a higher position. Thus, Huey plays “race music”, as it was called, for the first time in a department store, creates an outcry among the management but sells more records than the department has ever sold. Similarly, he moves on to DJ and TV show host. The problem is that DiPietro’s use of the same formula lends predictability to a character who is supposed to be famous for his unpredictability.

A different problem creeps into the second act and a plot-line modelled on A Star is Born. Huey helps make Felicia a star by promoting her music on the radio, but her future as a singer lies in leaving Memphis as does their future together as a couple. We can see why Huey might sabotage his audition for a major network producer, but it’s hard to see why he would endanger the career of Felicia through an on-air stunt. Why the upshot of the stunt hurts him and not her is never clear.

Fortunately, David Bryan’s music is far more subtle than the book. He is great at recreating the sounds of jazz, blues, soul and gospel and especially good at showing how each of these genres gradually becomes part of rock and roll. In a clever scene, he juxtaposes the prayer of Huey’s Mama (Julie Johnson) “Make Me Stronger” with the similar song sung by a gospel choir. Gradually, Mama’s individual song becomes fully integrated into the choir’s chorus as she strives to overcome her prejudice. The song “Someday” that Bryan composes as Felicia’s hit song sounds like one of the Supremes’ tunes that got away. Meanwhile, for the music that expresses the characters’ emotions and is not meant to imitate period songs, Bryan uses more speech-based rhythms and more unusual chord progressions to distinguish the one from the other.

Sergio Trujillo follows Bryan’s model in creating a show where the dancing hardly ever stops. He, too, is a master at recreating period style and gestures--from Diana Ross-like gestures for Felicia when she sings her hit to reflections of all the various dances crazes of the early 1950s. Like Bryan, he distinguishes period dances from dance as expression by giving the latter a Bob Fosse-influenced angularity. The dancing itself is so exciting you could enjoy Memphis for that reason alone.

What really makes the show succeed, however, is its amazingly talented cast. Both Bryan Fenkart and Felicia Boswell were covers for the respective roles on Broadway, but seeing them on stage it’s impossible to think how anyone could portray their characters with more commitment and intensity. Fenkart sports a dopey tone of voice that perfectly suits an uneducated white guy in the South who is a bit of a clown. He sings his songs, no matter how passionate, with this tone and thus makes clear that country and western music also went into the mix that became rock and roll. Until the not-quite-credible climax of Act 2, he makes all of Huey’s stunts seem perfectly natural, with his wildly improvised beer commercial in Act 1 a particular highlight.

Boswell has a strong voice, not at all like Diana Ross, but she does make herself sound uncannily like her when she sings “Someday”. From the very beginning she has more poise that the live Raggedy Andy doll that is Huey. He may seem too wacky a guy for someone like her to love, but Boswell makes us see how she loves the rebelliousness in him and understands the lack of love that it springs from.

Darrington is excellent as Felicia’s protective brother Delray and impresses with his deeply resonant voice. The personably chubby Will Mann repeatedly surprises you with his athletic dance moves, and Rhett George’s heartfelt rendition of “Say a Prayer” brings Act 1 to a moving close. While DiPietro hasn’t really sorted out the conflicts within Huey’s Mama, Julie Johnson wows the audience with an all-stops-out delivery of “Change Don’t Come Easy” that proves that you don’t have to be black to sing gospel if you’ve got the voice and the lung-power to do it.

Director Christopher Ashley makes good use of David Gallo’s split-level set design. Especially effective are the scenes during Huey’s TV show where the images the TV cameras are recording are projected on a screen on the upper level so that we see both what is happening in the studio and what the audience at home are seeing. His pacing is snappy but he knows when to pause to allow the main characters’ emotions to resonate. DiPietro wants to give the show an upbeat ending uniting the main characters, and so it seems as long as you don’t think about it to closely. At the end Huey, whose pioneering work has been forgotten and whose beloved has moved on to greater fame, has very little to sing and shout about. It’s a pity that DiPietro or Ashley could not think of a way to present simultaneously both Felicia’s success and the inner turmoil Huey must feel.

Just this month a small church in Tomahawk, Kentucky, voted to ban interracial couples from church membership and worship activities. Though the ban was later overturned after a firestorm of criticism, the mere fact that a community would make such a decision shows that the suspicion, if not hatred, Huey and Felicia experienced as a couple has not died out even in the 21st century. Memphis points out the irony of a culture that comes to accept the music of a particular group but not the people themselves who make the music. For its still relevant message, for its depiction of the roots of rock and roll, for his imaginative score, fantastic dancing and passionate performances, Memphis is a show no lover of musicals will want to miss.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Felicia Boswell and Bryan Fenkart. ©2011 Paul Kolnik.

For tickets, visit www.dancaptickets.com.

Seussical

Wed, 7 Dec 2011 17:15:40 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, book by Lynn Ahrens & Stephen Flaherty, directed by Allen MacInnis
Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
November 10-December 30, 2011

“A Person’s a Person No Matter How Small”

In 2006 the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young people staged the Canadian premiere of Seussical that proved that Flaherty and Ahrens’ smaller-scale one-act version of their 2000 Broadway musical based on the stories of Dr. Seuss to be a great success. Now Allen MacInnis, the director of the 2006 staging, revisits the show in an entirely new production. I can’t say that the new production is superior to the old one, but the show is still an ideal entertainment for kids in junior kindergarten to Grade 6.

The main difference from the 2006 production is the design which now emphasizes that characters more as human beings than animals. This has both good and not so good effects. Judith Bowden’s costumes are not so good because they are visually uninteresting and sometimes hard to decipher. The bird Gertrude McFuzz is ashamed of having only one feather, but many will not realize that that one feather is represented by one pleat in her other wise ordinary shirt hanging down lower than the others. The Sour Kangaroo wears a bandana with the two ends sticking up as if they were ears but wears an apron with a pocket on either side. In one of these is a mini-kangaroo. How hard would it be to give her one pocket in front more like a real kangaroo? Only long after the show did I realize why the two Birdgirls were dressed in 1920s outfits with no hint of feathers or wings. They are “flappers”, get it? Most parents and certainly no children will understand the joke.

Phillip Clarkson’s design in 2006 gave Horton the Elephant a cap with long hanging earflaps to suggests his ears. Bowden, however, gives him heavy earmuffs that look like large earphones which would seem to muffle rather than ameliorate his ability to hear the tiny voices of the Whos. Clarkson’s Whos were adorable little bodies on a sheet behind which the actors stood to supply their heads. Here the Whos remain full-sized, dressed for some reason in yellow rainwear. Bowden’s set is also abstract with what look like giant cat climbing platforms standing in for the trees of the forest of Nool.

The possible upside to this kind of costuming is that it makes the behaviour of the characters more obvious. Only the monkeys’ gestural language gives any hint of their animal side. But with their uniform of black pants, vests and pork pie hats, it’s clear they are a gang and bully other around them, especially Horton. Mayzie, who looks like a woman in a tight red spangled dress with an outré headdress rather than a bird, speaks of getting pregnant by another bird and abandons her egg but she can’t have fun anymore no longer becomes just a kooky, funny character. It looks much more like what it is--a mother abandoning her child. When she lets Horton keep it because he hatched it, some unusually adult questions are raised about what makes a person a child’s parent--biology or love and care.

The only actor to return to the production is George Masswohl as Horton. Again he perfectly captures the innocence and earnestness of this loveable creature. His defence of microscopic Whos is the motto for the whole show--“A person’s a person no matter how small”--a thought that I would hope gives some comfort to some of the tinier kids in the audience.

Damien Atkins is a genial Cat in the Hat, the narrator of the action, who sometime participates in it in various disguises (such as Mayzie’s callous lover). Atkins makes the Cat an ambiguous figure with a sly edge. When he announces that something bad is going to happens he almost seems pleased.

In other roles, Jane Johanson is quite affecting as Gertrude McFuzz. It is great to see Johanson, long associated with the Shaw Festival as a choreographer, get a chance to act, sing and dance in a major part. Her shyness and awkwardness wins us over immediately and we hope just as she does that Horton will finally notice there is someone nearby who loves him. Sharron Matthews plays Mayzie not as an airhead, which might help excuse her bad behaviour, but as a kind of avian Mae West, who knows what she’s doing and knows it’s bad. Jennifer Villaverde is delightful as the little Who Jojo who first get Horton’s attention.

Last time the accompaniment tends to overpower the singing, but tis time under Diane Leah’s music direction the two are well balanced. Stage director and Artistic of Young People’s Theatre says he was interesting in staging Seussical again because it is linked to YPT’s season theme of the power of change. While the denizens of Nool do change their minds about Horton, what really stands out though Masswohl’s wonderfully warm performance is the importance of standing by your beliefs even when you are ridiculed by all around you. Equally important is his steadfastness in preserving life in all forms--whether it is Mayzie’s egg or the nearly invisible people of Whoville. Add jaunty music, clever lyrics and energetic performances and you have a show that you and both enjoy and discuss with your children over the holidays.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Natasha O’Brien, Damien Atkins (in background), George Masswohl, Sharron Matthews and Jennifer Villaverde. ©2011 Daniel Alexander.

For tickets, visit http://youngpeoplestheatre.ca.

Cinderella

Tue, 6 Dec 2011 20:07:17 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, directed by Heather Davies
Grand Theatre, London
December 2, 2011-January 7, 2012

“The Sweetest Sounds”

The Grand Theatre’s production of Cinderella is a delight from beginning to end. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the musical for television in 1957. Tom Briggs is credited with adapting the teleplay but the credit really belongs to director Heather Davies who has made it work so wonderfully. This gem of a musical is so well performed and presented that it makes an ideal holiday entertainment for young and old alike.

Rodgers and Hammerstein are best known for the five musicals they wrote from 1943 to 1959 that have become signal works of the golden age of the Broadway musical. Cinderella may be on a smaller scale than South Pacific or The Sound of Music, but it shows a sense of whimsy not found in their large-scale musicals. The main impediment in transferring a musical written for television to the stage is that television makes instantaneous and frequent changes of scene easy. Hammerstein used the advantages of the new medium but this made subsequent attempts to stage the piece more difficult, and Briggs’ adaptation still has far more scene changes than one would expect in a two-hour-long musical. Luckily, a director like Davies and her set designer Bill Layton have found ways not merely to meet the challenge of frequent scene changes but to make them part of the fun of the show.

The side curtains called “legs” are painted in a variety of styles that suggest the painted borders of old manuscripts. These stay in place while Layton uses a series of beautifully painted drops and shutters whose rising and falling and sliding in from the wings gives movement to every change as they combine and recombine for every setting. Layton has had these drops and shutters painted in folkloric motifs that suggest both the antiquity of the Cinderella story itself and the innocence of a child’s picture book. The palette of earth tones and pastels perfectly captures the cozy mood of the piece. The only strange discrepancy is that Gillian Gallow’s colourful costumes clearly locate the action in the 1950s while Layton has made the village that the characters visit entirely Art Nouveau.

Those used to the much-loved original cast recording will have to get used to the small, girl-like voice of Alessia Lupiano as Cinderella. It doesn’t have the richness of Julie Andrews’ voice but Lupiano conveys such sincerity and vulnerability that she wins you over almost at once. It seems quite natural that Cinderella as Lupiano plays her would have her own “little corner” to retreat to dream of a better, more exciting life.

As Prince Christopher, the Prince Charming of the piece, Kyle Golemba has understudied major roles at the Stratford Festival for several years, so it is good to see him shine on his own. He has a strong, fresh voice and gift for bringing out the meaning of every song. “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?” can often sound like the Prince is confused by love, whereas Golemba turns it into deeper inquiry into why he has fallen in love with someone he barely knows. The production uses the 1997 version of the musical that adds three songs by Rodgers from various sources. Not only does Golemba sing “The Sweetest Sounds” from No Strings (1962) and “Loneliness of the Evening” (cut from South Pacific) beautifully, but he uses them to portray the Prince as filled with greater yearning than is usually the case.

Susan Henley is hilarious as Cinderella’s Stepmother, but while she is mean and vain she also suggests a certain hopeless desperation in her efforts to urge her obviously deficient daughters to snare the Prince. Jenny Hall and Jennifer Stewart as Cinderella’s inaptly named stepsisters are both fine comediennes with Hall taking the cake as she huffs and puffs and turns red in the face trying to force on the inflexible glass slipper even when it’s obvious it will never fit.

Keith Savage and Robin Hutton make a fine King and Queen. The new version replaces the song “Your Majesties” with “Boys And Girls Like You And Me” that was cut from the telecast. This song makes it clear that the Prince’s parents want to see him married not just out of duty but to know he has the same kind of love they share. Steven Gallagher gets much more out of Lionel, the major-domo, than I’ve seen before. He makes him obsessed with dignity and propriety even though almost every situation he’s in, such as listing the full given names of the royals, undermines him at every turn.

Rebecca Poff is not the squat grandmotherly Fairy Godmother of the Disney movie but rather a tall, stylish woman who knows the ways of the world. She delivers “Impossible” and “There’s Music in You” with great panache. With the tree marking the grave of Cinderella’s mother in the background, Poff intimates, though ever so slightly, that this Fairy Godmother has perhaps come to help Cinderella for maternal motives.

With this, as with so many other touches, Davies helps to give the story more emotional depth. One great idea I’ve never seen in any treatment of the story is to show the Prince fall in love with Cinderella all over again while she’s in her rags surrounded by her relations ready to try on the slipper. This makes the glass slipper just a symbol of the larger fate that has decreed that these two people belong together.

Video designer Rory Leydier must be mentioned for creating the scene where the pumpkin grows (via projected animation) into a golden coach with four horses and footmen. This is such an impressive effect I’m sure youngsters in the audience will remember it for a long time to come.

This lovely, well considered production deserves to be a massive hit for the Grand. No musical currently on offer in Southern Ontario creates such a warm mood and none, of course, can boast an array of songs as memorable and lush as those by Rodgers and Hammerstein. If you don’t live in the London area, consider visiting just to see this show. You’ll be glad you did.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jenny Hall, Jennifer Stewart, Susan Henley and Alessia Lupiano.
©2011 Claus Andersen.

For tickets, visit www.grandtheatre.com.

The Wizard of Oz: The Wickedly Wacky Family Musical

Sat, 3 Dec 2011 01:47:23 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Lorna Wright & Nicholas Hune-Brown, directed by Tracey Flye
Ross Petty Productions, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
December 1, 2011-January 6, 2012

“G’day, Dorothy”

With The Wizard of Oz, Ross Petty adds a new children’s story to his arsenal of fractured fairy tales that makes up his annual pantos. As usual only the barest bones of L. Frank Baum’s story from 1900 are used and families should definitely not expect to hear one note of the songs by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg from the famous movie starring Judy Garland from 1939. Instead, in true panto style, an odd mélange of popular songs from the present and near past are substituted foe those sung at key moments in the film.

The show has a strong start and, with one of its starriest casts ever, looks to headed for panto greatest. Unfortunately, writers Lorna Wright and Nicholas Hune-Brown add so many digressions from and alterations to the main plot that what was an exciting, straightforward story becomes increasingly muddled.

The show begins with Splenda the Good Witch (an endearingly funny Jessica Holmes) summoned to a Harry Potter-style Council of Magic consisting of Dumbledore, the Easter Bunny a leprechaun and so on. They meet to choose someone to guide the Chosen One, Dorothy Gale, to Oz to prevent the Wicked Witch from world domination. Splenda volunteers and we are whisked off to Toronto, the graffiti-riddled stand-in for Kansas. There Dorothy (the ever-perky Elicia Mackenzie, formerly Maria in the Mirvish Sound of Music) practices her skateboarding amid the garbage bins and assorted denizens of the city. Strangest of these denizens is Dorothy’s own man-hungry Aunt Plumbum played hilariously for the third time in a row by Dan Chameroy. Costumed in tights, shorts, a fluffy top and white Afro wig, he looks more like the Chicken Lady than anything else. When Dorothy’s song of self-expression is not “Over the Rainbow” but Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”, we definitely know we’re not at MGM anymore.

Soon Splenda appears and conjures up a snowstorm that whirls Dorothy, Toto and Plumbum to the outback of Oz--as in Australia. There she is g’dayed by a gaggle of Aussies in oddly high-waisted get-ups and cork hats. Surveying the landscape and noting that there are bike-lanes, she exclaims in the show’s best line, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Toronto anymore”. Since the Toronto recycling bin she was in has squashed the Wicked Witch of the East, Dorothy puts on her ruby slippers and the munchkin equivalents celebrate with Men in Hats’ “Safety Dance”. Despite the good weather and bike-lanes, Dorothy still wants to go home so Splenda sets off to the Emerald City, which happens to look like a green version of the Sidney Opera House. But the Wicked Witch (Ross Petty, of course) must have the ruby slippers to achieve his/her evil goals.

So far so good, despite the use of Lipps Inc.’s annoying hit “Funkytown” for Dorothy’s travelling music. The energy level then dips significantly when Wright and Hune-Brown decide to tell us how the Tin Man can to be. Originally he a Donny (the likable Yvan Pedneault and former star of the Mirvish We Will Rock You), who is a wimpy miner and amateur magician. There is no need for Donny’s hobby since is ultimately leads to nothing in the story and there is no need for the Tin Man’s backstory to give Dorothy a love interest. She could simply fall in love with him as the Tin Man and have Splenda transform him into a real man, as happens anyway. To have Dorothy and Donny fall in love, then out of love, wastes far too much time and delays the entrance of Fig, the Scarecrow, played by the wonderfully rubbery-limbed Kyle Blair, and Napoleon the Cowardly Lion, in a part that really should be beefed up more for Steve Ross. The two have to enter together as if they were Tweedledee and Tweedledum. It would have been much better to follow the original storyline and have Dorothy meet each figure separately so that we get to know each better and so that each gets at least a few stage minutes where he is our main focus.

Surprisingly soon, the quartet meet the Wizard of Oz (Eddie Glen, who is also underused). Then in a completely departure from the book (and dramatic sense), the Wicked Witch and his evil minions who look rather like winged Smurfs kidnap the Wizard. This leads to a number of pointless digressions such as a competition between the Witch and Plumbum woo the Wizard all set to Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff”. Eventually, who has the ruby slippers and how they got them. Dorothy, not the Wizard delivers the good news about brains, courage and hearts to her companions, but the main point of the story is completely altered. In the original, Dorothy, who thought she wanted adventure realizes she just wants to go home. Here, Dorothy stays in Oz! Splenda says, “Home is where the heart is” referring to Donny. But is there some reason she can’t whisk the couple plus Toto and Plumbum back to Toronto? Isn’t it a bit disturbing to suggest to little kids that they have to leave Canada to be happy? One doesn’t except accuracy in a panto but one also doesn’t expect the moral of a story to be completely lost--especially when there’s such an easy way to salvage it.

If the show tends to drag in the middle of both acts it is more the fault of the writers than it is of the efficient Tracey Flye. With a set credited to David Boechler and costumes to Erika Connor, this is a wholly Canadian production unlike many of Petty’s previous pantos borrowed from anonymous British sources. It’s exceedingly odd, especially when merch for the show includes koala bears, that Connor makes absolutely no use of any of Australia’s multitude of strange wildlife in designing costumes for the Wicked Witch’s companions. The humour is strictly hit and miss with Splenda and Plumbum scoring the most hits and Petty the most misses. It’s too bad that after the initial scene in the outback, political humour wanes to be taken over by sexual innuendo. The visit of three selected little ones on stage to receive gifts is ill-timed since the departure of the three, who leave the Wicked Witch in charge onstage, is thus greeted with boos instead of applause. You can enjoy the performances of all the actors and there is much fun to be had--but there could easily be more of it if Wright and Hune-Brown would revise their script and be sure to let everyone have a chance to shine on stage.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Yvan Pedneault, Elicia Mackenzie, Kyle Blair and Steve Ross. ©2011 Ross Petty Productions.

For tickets, visit www.rosspetty.com.

word! sound! powah! (the sankofa trilogy, part 3)

Thu, 1 Dec 2011 12:19:56 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by d’bi.young anitafrika
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
November 4-December 4, 2011

“Return and Get It”

word! sound! powah! is the third part of d’bi.young’s sankofa trilogy about three generations of African-Jamaican women that began with the acclaimed bloot.claat and continued with benu. The first play focussed on mugdu, the mother of sekesu; the second on sekesu, the mother of benu; and now the third focusses on benu herself. The cyclical nature of the trilogy is reflected in its settings: the first in Jamaican, the second in Canada and the third with the Canadian-born benu studying in Jamaica.

benu is named for the Egyptian equivalent of the phoenix, but the surname of all three women also refers to a symbolic bird. The word “sankofa” in the -- language of Ghana means “return and get it” and the image of the sankofa bird of the Ashanti shows a bird with its head turned back over its tail holding the egg of the future in its beak. In w!s!p! benu has returned to Jamaica to study dub poetry and lives with mugdu of the first play. benu returns to get knowledge but also discovers the internal strife that led her mother to flee to Canada.

The play benu ended with the Bird Woman exiting into the audience to fly into the sun for rebirth. w!s!p! begins with d’bi.young entering from that same place to the stage as a priestess chanting “àṣẹ àṣẹ” (the energy of creation) to invoke communication with the spiritual world where we can perceive life as a cycle of birth, death and resurrection through the spirit of the wind. This spirit is Oya, who is also the spirit of change, transition and the passage from life to death. All that is chanted will come to pass in the course of the play.

The play’s action has three strands. The central strand finds benu being interrogated in a police station by the brutal Captain Brown. The 2012 elections in Jamaica have ended in the winner being assassinated and all who demonstrated on that day, including the Poets in Solidarity group which benu joined, have been rounded up to confess their involvement. A second strand involves a series of flashbacks showing how benu joined the Poets in Solidarity and featuring dub poetry from some of its most colourful characters. The third strand focusses on the empty rhetoric of the candidate for both the JLP and the PNP filled with platitudes but never addressing Jamaica’s real problems of poverty and unemployment.

When I last saw w!s!p! it was at the 2010 Toronto Fringe Festival and even though it was in a preliminary state and d’bi.young acted with the script in one hand, it still made a strong impression. A year and a half later now that the work is finished and having its world premiere at the Tarragon, I find that the balance between benu’s interrogation and the rest of the action has been lost. The satirical speeches of the politicians have been expanded but, more than that, the various poets of the Poets in Solidarity group have been given longer poems and sometimes two poems when one would suffice to convey a character’s personality and sociopolitical concerns. While it is great to get to know the member of poetry group better--the swaggering leader bobus, the streetwise single mother peaches, the historically-minded stamma and the blissed-out ex-student sage--the play would benefit if d’bi.young were to cut their contributions to one per person. In 2010 benu’s plight was foremost in my mind. Now I found I kept having to recall that her interrogation was the frame for the action and, in terms of the trilogy, its most important part.

d’bi.young is an incredibly magnetic performer because she is able to channel so much energy into her performances. Here with so much dub poetry, her own specialty, involved her performances are as much physical as they are verbal. w!s!p! encompasses the widest range of emotions, from outright comedy to sudden tragedy, and d’bi.young proves herself a master of all modes and expert at making instantaneous transitions from one to the other. Perhaps the most moving scene occurs when benu draws strength to endure her interrogation by recalling the rite of passage mugdu presides over in a forest to allow her to perceive all the ancestors that have preceded her and to realize she need fear nothing because they all exist to protect her no matter what may happen.

Toronto is the first stop in what is a world tour for the sankofa trilogy. It travels in mid-December to India and thence to the UK, South Africa, Europe Australia and the Caribbean. This is great news both for d’bi.young and for Canada. It is wonderful that a Canadian performer of such extraordinary talent and her work of depth and power will have such exposure. But is also wonderful that people everywhere she visits will have to banish their preconceptions of what a “Canadian” is like and what kinds of stories they have to tell. The good this will do for both the performer and her country is enormous.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: d’bi.young anitafrika as bobus. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.

benu (the sankofa trilogy, part 2)

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:24:26 -0500

✭✭✭✭✭
by d’bi.young anitafrika
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
November 29, December 1 & 3, 2011

“The Bird Woman”

With benu, the second part of d’bi.young’s sankofa trilogy, the setting moves from Jamaica to Canada. While blood.claat, the first part of the trilogy, focussed on menstruation as its theme and source of imagery, benu focusses on motherhood and motherlessness.

The hour-long play begins with d’bi.young crouched on a stool holding a large white cloth over her like a hood so that her face cannot be seen. It is a child playing a game? A woman cowering in fear? An ancient wise woman? Or is it some kind on unknown being? The answer, as the action demonstrates, is all four. The first incarnation we meet is sekesu sankofa, the daughter of mugdu sankofa of blood.claat. The fact that her mother lived in Canada was on of the facts that helped mugdu survive her ill treatment in Jamaica. Now we find sekesu waiting interminably in an emergency room in Toronto because she has been suffering tremendous headaches since the birth of her daughter benu. The play suggests that because doctors tried to induce birth in sekesu they gave her an epidural. In one in 100 cases the needle can puncture the dura causing cerebrospinal fluid to leak out. The consequence is a PDPH or post dural puncture headache which is severe and last days or weeks. From this point we shift backwards in time. In sekesu’s happy adolescence and pregnancy she was raised by her granny who ran a successful shop catering to the Jamaican community on Eglington. In the future the confused, emotional sekesu wanders the stage wondering where benu is. The question inherent in the play is how these three images of sekesu go together.

Alternating with sekesu’s story are sections of the creation myth told by her granny that sekesu loved to hear as a child. According to the story that d’bi.young acts out using only the white cloth as a prop, the Bird Woman, with the beak of a rooster, the head of a sparrow, the neck of a snake, the back of a tortoise and feathers of an eagle, nested in a sacred willow tree with a benben stone and laid an egg of myrrh. The Bird Woman arose from the ashes of her own mother and her destiny is to fly into the sun after she creates the earth and its inhabitants.

Those with a smattering of Egyptian mythology will find it fascinating that in modern Toronto a woman is telling her child a folktale whose origins can be traced back to ancient Egypt. There the sacred bird is male, burst from the heart of the sun-god Ra and came to rest on the benben stone, the most holy place on earth and prototype of all obelisks and pyramids. As the Egyptian equivalent of the phoenix, it was associated with time, resurrection and the sun. The key link between granny’s story and sekesu’s story--never mentioned in the play--is that the name of the sacred Egyptian bird is Bennu.

d’bi.young forces us to seek the connection ourselves. Knowing the myth, however, makes it clear that sekesu’s anguish lies both in missing the mother she never knew and in the daughter that somehow is no longer with her. Missing benu (or Bennu) is also a sign of sekesu’s alienation in Toronto from the spiritual sources of comfort her granny and her tales represented. At the same time, since Bennu is a phoenix, there is the hope that new live will survive sekesu’s mental combustion into ashes.

To communicate all the resonance of this story in only an hour, d’bi.young employed a more purely poetic language than in blood.claat. As in the earlier play she clearly distinguishes the many characters, male and female, black and white, with precise changes of voice and gesture. The transitions into and out of granny’s tale are especially breathtaking in their simplicity and power.

The many changes of mood are enhanced by the live music of Waleed Abdulhamid and Laurence Stevenson and by Michelle Ramsay’s subtle lighting of the symbolic willow tree set used for all three plays. d’bi.young brings an amazing intensity to her performances that no one should miss. Ideally, you should see the entire trilogy, but since each work is self-contained, you should do yourself a favour and this charismatic performer in at least one of these magical plays.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: d’bi.young anitafrika as sekesu. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.

Red

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:09:54 -0500

✭✭✭✭✭
by John Logan, directed by Kim Collier
Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
November 24-December 17, 2011

“The Red and the Black”

The Canadian Stage production of John Logan’s play Red is stimulating on every level--intellectually, dramatically and visually. This perfectly reflects a play whose subject matter is painting and the meaning of art in general. Add to this a magnificent performance by Jim Mezon as the painter Mark Rothko and Red is unmissable.

Writing plays about the creation of art is notoriously difficult and tend to be reductively biographical. Playwright John Logan--now better known as the screenwriter of such films as Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Hugo--has kept all talk of biography to a minimum. We hear only that Rothko (1903-70) was born to a Russian-Jewish family as Marcus Rothkowitz and emigrated from Russia to the U.S. when he was 11. We hear nothing of his family, his two wives or children. Logan keeps the focus of the play solely on art and the importance of art in Rothko’s life.

The setting is Rothko’s studio in New York City minutely recreated in all its chaos by designer David Boechler. The time is 1958-59 when Rothko was working on a his largest project ever: a set of murals to be hung in a space designated for them--the Four Seasons restaurant in the newly completed Seagram Building designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. The building proved widely influential in American architecture and is still there as is the restaurant.

Logan’s fiction is that Rothko (Jim Mezon) hires an assistant Ken (David Coomber), a painter just out of art school, to help him with this massive project. Although Rothko views Ken strictly as an employee and gofer, and not as an apprentice, Rothko’s nature is such that he pontificates at the slightest provocation. And Ken’s general ignorance of both life and art provide constant provocation. As time progresses with each of the play’s scenes the timid, awkward Ken increasing gains confidence to argue points with Rothko and assert that the master’s view of the world and his work has its own flaws and contradictions. In this way, Logan gives the highly intellectual discussions of art and philosophy dramatic thrust. Logan basically does for art history and abstract impressionism in Red what Michael Frayn did for quantum physics in Copenhagen. He’s discover how to make intellectual debate into thrilling, engaging theatre.

Key to the structure of Red is a notion from Nietzsche, a philosopher central to Rothko’s worldview. It is the duty of each new generation to overthrow the art of the previous generation, but to overthrow it, the new generation must first thoroughly understand it. Rothko boasts to Ken how he and other Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning trampled the previous movements of Cubism and Surrealism into the ground. To make his point, Logan condenses time in order to have Rothko attend the famous 1962 International Exhibition of the New Realists, or Pop Art, the movement that would replace Abstract Expressionism, and return in a fit of rage. “In a hundred years what museum will have Andy Warhol hanging on its walls?” he thunders. Of course, Ken can point out that Rothko has merely lived long enough to see the next generation destroy its fathers as Rothko said they should.

Pop Art represents everything that Rothko thinks art is not. Rothko tries through the interplay of fields of colour to communicate a spiritual experience to the viewer, particularly of life versus its extinction. Even in working on the Seagram murals he is aware of his greatest fear, that “One day the black will swallow the red”. What Rothko seeks, and thinks he has found in the Four Seasons, is a chapel where people can contemplate and be transformed by his art. Ultimately, just such a building, the Rothko Chapel (1971), would be constructed, though Rothko would not live to see it. Thus, for a man who painted while listening to classical music, the play closes with “In diesen heil'gen Hallen" (“Within these sacred halls”) from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Jim Mezon’s long experience at the Shaw Festival has given him the ability to give passion to the expression of ideas and to makes these ideas absolutely clear. In the numerous times when he lectures Ken, you feel you in the hands of an ideal teacher. Art is Rothko’s life and that is exactly what Mezon conveys. But he is also human and his irascibility, fury, patience and depression are also there. With his Rothko, Mezon has added yet another to his long list of triumphant performances.

As, director Kim Collier has chosen newcomer David Coomber. This might seems risky but it proves to be an inspired choice. Coomber is young enough to be devoid of any “actorly” habits. This makes him perfect for embodying the freshness and awkwardness of the young man face to face with a giant. But, just as ken has to assert his own identity versus Rothko, so does Coomber versus Mezon and this his does in a way that captures the sense of daring and rush of new ideas that come to ken when finally has the courage to see the great one’s flaws. It is an excellent, dynamic pairing.

The transitions between scenes are beautiful. Boechler’s set is placed at an angle and closed off for set changes by huge sliding doors. On these Collier has Brian Johnson project animated close-up surveys of Rothko’s paintings so that we literally see the colours live and vibrate as the artist repeatedly describes. For the Pop Art exhibition Collier has a group of screens descend whereon Johnson projects in rapid succession a series of now-familiar images from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and others, giving them the impact of sensory overload and deliberate crassness that viewers then, like Rothko, must have experienced.

This is a play that follows Horace’s dictum of old that art should educate as well as delight. You can’t help but look at things in a new way after seeing it. Yet, it is so emotionally involving the audience actually cheered when Rothko makes the key decision of the play. Luckily, Toronto is not the only city that will see this production. After its run here, is moves on to Vancouver January14 to February 4 and then to Edmonton February 11 to March 4. A fine work like this in such a fine production should be experienced by as many as possible.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jim Mezon and David Coomber. ©2011 Bruce Zinger.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.

Would You Say the Name of This Play? (nggrfg)

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:49:10 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Berend McKenzie, directed by Allen MacInnis & Tanisha Taitt
Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
November 22-December 3, 2011

“Names Can Be Sticks and Stones”

Would You Say the Name of This Play? (nggrfg) is Berend McKenzie’s autobiographical one-man show about growing up both black and gay. It is a brave show for him to have written and to perform and it is necessary viewing for teenaged audiences and their parents since the insulting terms abbreviated into the consonants at the end of the titles are all too common in today’s schools. Adolescents suffer under two contradictory forces--one is the urge to discover their own individuality, the other is peer pressure to conform. McKenzie’s play shows what happens when discoveries motivated by the first force make conformity impossible.

McKenzie does not tell his stories in chronological order. In fact, they are carefully arrange to cover Mckenzie’s life from age 7 to 34 in ways that force the audience to draw parallels between discrimination against gays and against blacks. The morning I attended, McKenzie had a tough audience of mostly non-white teenaged students keen to show their unwillingness to see a play, especially one about a gay male. The first time McKenzie playing his alter ego Buddy announced he was gay was met with loud laughter even though it was not meant to be funny. “This is exactly why McKenzie wrote this play”, I thought, “ And this is exactly the audience that needs to see it.”

Buddy’s first story involves his successful attempt at age 16 to get the coolest girl in school to attend a bush dance with him instead of the jock boyfriend she’s usually seen with. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong. Buddy is undeniably effeminate and his attempt to be macho dooms him to failure. Unfortunately, the still restless audience Buddy’s satirizing of himself did not mean he is a fool but has gained a greater level of self-awareness. The first time silence finally descended on the audience is when Buddy’s best friend Mike disowns him because of a sex act Buddy’s is supposed to have committed with another man at the party but was too drunk to remember. The result is that that he is now banned from the school.

Subsequent stories going back or forward in time fill in Buddy’s background and force us to change our assumptions about what he is like. In the first story Buddy’s merely mentions his parents and two sisters, so we assume that they are black. It emerges, however, that Buddy was adopted and both parents are white. He tries to get in touch with his birth parents--a black Trinidadian father and a white mother. The conversation with his birth father goes well until Buddy mentions he is gay. His birth mother would like to meet Buddy, but says the time is not right for her or her family.

By knowing more of Buddy’s past we see that despite our first impressions Buddy is lucky to be raised by supportive parents who had no racial bias in adopting him and raising him as their son. At the same time his mixed race background makes it hard for him to be cast when later becomes an actor since he’s either not white enough or black enough. Buddy shows us how hilariously bad he is when he has to audition for the role of a gangsta rapper--yet another case of his inability to fit into conventional stereotypes.

In a flashback to age 7, we find that what Buddy is good at is skipping rope. He holds off ever displaying is skill in public until he realizes he is much better than the girl universally acclaimed as the jump rope master at school. He beats her in a skip-off but the result is that after school the boys call him the n-word and a slave and beat him up with is own rope. Dead silence reigned in the audience during McKenzie’s enacting of this incident as later when Buddy’s father confronts Buddy’s main tormentor and his father at their house.

Thus in only 70 minutes, the audiences shifted from aggressive indifference and open derision of Buddy as gay to anger at Buddy’s treatment as black. What one hopes is that teenagers are able to confront their internal contradiction in viewing racism but not homophobia as equally demeaning.

McKenzie is a warm, funny, heart-on-his-sleeve performer. He’s completely engaging and differentiates the dozen or so characters he plays with precision as well as Buddy as he appears as different ages. Though the show is focussed on growing up with what society views as two strikes against you, the show involves many other topics--growing up as an adopted child, growing up as a mixed race child, petty crime as an unconscious reaction to stress, the frustration of learning with ADHD and the truth that prejudice against those who are different doesn’t end after high school. Berend McKenzie provides a fine example of someone who has had to come to terms with prejudice. His laying bare of his personal history with such humour and compassion should help any viewers who find themselves in a similar situation or know someone who is. At least it will bring the topic out into the open, not to be covered up again, for every school class who sees it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Berend McKenzie. ©2011 Daniel Alexander.

For tickets, visit http://youngpeoplestheatre.ca.

Hallaj

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 12:58:59 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Peter Farbridge & Soheil Parsa, directed by Soheil Parsa
Modern Times Stage Company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
November 18-December 4, 2011

“The Four Words”

For most people the only Sufi mystic they will know, if any, is Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-73) whose poetry has become popular the world over. Generally unknown outside of the Middle East is the Sufi mystic and poet who preceded and influenced Rumi named Mansur al-Hallaj (c. 858-922). Unlike Rumi, who was celebrated in his lifetime and was honoured after his death with the Green Tomb, which has since become a pilgrimage site, Hallaj was imprisoned for eleven years for his beliefs after which he was publicly mutilated and executed.

What made Hallaj such a threat to Abbasid Baghdad in the 10th century and Rumi a living saint in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm in the 13th would be fascinating to learn. The play Hallaj by Modern Times Stage Company’s co-artistic directors makes no such comparison, but we should be grateful that it makes known an important figure whose ideas about the unity of all religions many will find surprising.

The frame for the play imprisonment of Hallaj (Peter Farbridge) in a filthy cell in Baghdad. There his only interaction is with Nasr (John Ng), the Chief of Police, and with a fellow prisoner Abdul (Stewart Arnott) whose satiric view of life provides the show with some comic relief. These interactions trigger memories of the past and we see mostly in chronological order flashbacks of Hallaj’s past leading up to his present state. We see him join the a monastic Sufi order led by Junayd (Steven Bush), but then break from him because Hallaj feels that the insights of mysticism should directly benefit the suffering masses. We see him fall out with his best friend Sharif (Carlos González-Vio), who thinks Hallaj and his followers should use violence to oppose those who persecute them. “Use violence in the name of peace?” is the pertinent retort Hallaj makes that echoes with sad irony throughout history.

Hallaj’s speeches and writings get him in trouble with the authorities for many reasons. Though having gone on the Hajj himself, he does not see the purpose of it. For him religious belief itself is what is important, not the rituals that derive from it. His travels through India and Central Asia lead him to see that beneath their varying ceremonies, all religions ultimately have the same goal--unification with God. Although the unio mystica is a hallmark of the mysticism of most theistic religions, it is precisely this that caused Hallaj to be denounced as a heretic. In his trances he felt he achieved oneness with God and spoke the words “I am The Truth”. The difficulty is that “The Truth” is one of the 99 Names of Allah. The central crisis of the play is when Hallaj is given the chance to recant these four words. If he does, he will spend life in prison. If he does not he will be tortured and executed, but worse, so will his wife Jamil (Beatriz Pizano) and son before him.

Although such material would seem to provide riveting drama, for the most part it does not. The trouble is that the dramatic arc of most people accused of heresy or treason is very similar, whether it is Saint Genesius, Joan of Arc, Thomas à Beckett, Galileo or Sir Thomas More. The plays that make the greatest impression place the martyrdom of the central character in a larger context. Jean Rotrou in Le Véritable Saint Genest (1646) is intrigued by the paradox the parallel of the ecstasies of acting and religion when a pagan converts in the midst of acting to the faith he is supposed to be mocking. T.S. Eliot frames his Murder in the Cathedral (1935) as a secular version of a sacred ritual. Shaw in Saint Joan (1923), Brecht in Life of Galileo (1943) and Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons (1960) all focus on the politics of the period that must stamp out all dissension.

Hallaj, however, in attempting to uncover the universality of its subject, also loses the specificity that would make it distinctive. We know Hallaj only in the most generalized fashion and only a few of his key tenets. We know almost nothing of the regime that opposes him and whether there are motives beyond the speaking “four words” that necessitate such harsh punishment.

One can understand why Farbridge would want to star in the play he has written, but if truth be told he is not really the best candidate to embody a man like Hallaj. Hallaj is frequently called upon to register extreme emotion in reaction to horrific announcements concerning him, his friends and family that punctuate the action, but Farbridge falls back on the same expression and gestures every time. We hear that Hallaj has gained thousands of followers in his travels but Farbridge radiates earnestness and commitment but none of the charisma that would make this believable. The cast member who does have the requisite charisma is Carlos González-Vio, who possesses more stage presence through posture and voice than Farbridge ever achieves.

John Ng, Steven Bush and Beatriz Pizano all do well in their rather stereotypical roles as chief tormentor, aged master and long-suffering wife and Stewart Arnott is a breath of fresh air as the earthy prisoner next door. Bahareh Yaraghi makes Atiyah, the Caliph’s daughter such an intriguing figure we wish we knew more about her.

Those familiar with other productions from Modern Times such as Aurash will find that dialogue and physical movement are not integrated to the same extent. The are long sections of dialogue in the play that are not visually interesting except for the precise squares of light hat David DeGrow so precisely generates. When there are scenes of movement involving the whole troupe we feel that the company is closer to fulfilling its potential. Set designer Trevor Schwellnus has created a simple yet effective set with wood chips strewn over the otherwise empty playing area to represent both indoor and outdoor scenes and with a back wall with cracks in it tat when lit can look either like a river system or veins in the body. DeGrow has them glow green when the dialogue is life-enhancing, red when it is life-destroying.

While Hallaj may not be the most engrossing of Modern Times’s productions, I was grateful to learn the story it told which helps to show the diversity of Islamic thought that is far too often portrayed as monolithic in the West. Mansur al-Hallaj provides a point of reference everyone should know and we must thank Modern Times for helping yet again to expand our knowledge.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Beatriz Pizano, Stewart Arnott, Carlos González-Vio, Steven Bush and Bahareh Yaraghi. ©2011 John Lauener.

For tickets, visit www.buddiesinbadtimes.com.

The Test

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:11:49 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Lukas Bärfuss, translated by Birgit Schreyer Duarte, directed by Jason Byrne
The Company Theatre/Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
November 3-26, 2011

“Does Father Know Best?”

What would you do if a paternity test showed that you were not the father of your son? That is the question Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss uses to begin his comic but ultimately deeply disturbing dissection of the meaning of paternity and the modern family. Under Jason Byrne meticulous direction his 2007 play The Test (Die Probe) is acted with unfailing commitment by the Company Theatre and Canadian Stage in this its English language premiere.

The play begins with the rant of Peter Korach (Gordon Rand) to his father Simon (Eric Peterson) about the paternity test he has taken and the barely controllable hatred for his wife Agnes (Liisa Repo-Martell) and their son the revelation has unleashed. He fantasizes about torturing and murdering the two, but rather than expressing any worry, Simon merely calls him an idiot. Simon’s main concern is that he doesn’t want any scandal coming from his son to taint his current run for mayor against the incumbent who has won over Simon in five previous elections. While his wife Helle (Sonia Smits) is at her ashram in India, Simon’s de facto personal assistant, valet and campaign manager is Franzeck (Philip Riccio), a former alcoholic whom Simon picked off a park bench and trained to his present position in view of Peter’s complete lack of interest in politics in general or in his father in particular.

Very early on the play’s dominant themes take shape. Peter violently rejects the wife and son he had loved simply because a test proves he is not his son’s father. Simon rejects his son because Peter has no interest in carrying on his legacy. Simultaneously, Simon treats Franzeck, a complete stranger, as his son because Franzeck vows to carry on Simon’s legacy. What makes a family? What constitutes a legacy? Peter has the misfortune that his only two confidants are unsympathetic. Simon would like to cut Peter out of his life and the ambitious Franzeck, who encouraged Peter to take the test in the first place, would be to have Peter out of the way. Thus neither counsels forgiveness as an option. If Peter loves a child yesterday, must his love change because the child is not his? Or, is Bärfuss suggesting that the men in the play confuse love with possession? If a woman or a child is not wholly theirs they cannot love them.

In contrast, men might think of a legacy as something passed from father to son, but that is clearly not necessarily the case. If Franzeck acts more like a son than Peter, what should keep him from being treated more like a son? The many plot twists that follow only serve to lend even more irony to absolute definitions of “paternity”, “family” or “legacy”.

The play provides marvellously complex roles for all five cast members. Central is Simon himself. Peterson expertly mines both the comedy and viciousness inherent in this character. He waxes lyrical about his legacy even though his legacy at the start of the play only one of repeated failure both in politics and at home. He showers praise on Franzeck as if he were the ideal son, but yet hints that just as he made Franzeck what he is ha can also discard him. Peterson clearly enjoys walking the unusual knife-edge Bärfuss has created between buffoonery and menace.

Philip Riccio in a superbly controlled performance conveys all the contradictions seething inside Franzeck. On the one hand, Franzeck is so grateful to Simon for changing his life that he abases himself as a servant anticipating Simon’s every wish. On the other, he seeks to make his position permanent by undermining Simon’s relationships with the rest of his family. He thus is both withdrawn and audacious at the same time. A surpassing scene with Agnes, a direct parallel with one in Richard III, reveals how duplicitous he is. Yet, amid all this Riccio suggests an underlying sense of doom as if Franzeck, despite his conniving, never truly believes he will succeed.

As Agnes, Liisa Repo-Martell succeeds in following Peter’s condemnation of her with a performance of such passion that she completely overturns the negative impression Peter gave us. As Helle, Sonia Smits manages to combine flakiness and wisdom in one character. Amid talk of tongue-cleaning and karma, she also utters uncomfortable truths about her family that help explain why she has abandoned them.

In previous plays that Jason Byrne has directed for the Company Theatre, he has brought out a high degree of emotional tension. Here he takes a different tack in line with Bärfuss’s unusual dramatic style. Unlike Festen or A Whistle in the Dark, where unspoken anger festers until it violently breaks out, Bärfuss has his characters speak out their violent thoughts and dark accusations as if completely detached from them. This has the eerie effect of suggesting that the characters are so inured to their negative thoughts that they no longer arose any emotion. The prime exception is Agnes, whose emotional reaction to Peter’s coldness brings out the humanity in her that ought to lead to forgiveness.

The action plays out on John Thompson ultra-modern set, so clean and sleek in its lines that it both reflects the chilliness of the family’s relations and contrasts with the mess the family is in. Byrne has sound designer Richard Feren use two techniques that some made find off-putting. Instead of using a blackout to signal the start of each act, he has Feren crank up the volume of the music until audience conversation is impossible then suddenly drop it whereupon the dialogue on the lit stage begins. Second he has Feren provide background music, as if a radio or stereo were playing somewhere in Simon’s house, all the way through the action. It was quiet enough that I could hear the dialogue clearly, but I heard older people in the entire section around me complain that they couldn’t hear all the words. Since this Muzak served no useful purpose except to create a false sense of calm, it would be better to omit it.

The Test is a fascinating play. It concludes with the frightening image of the older generation so self-obsessed with creating a “legacy” that it has driven away anyone who could possible carry it on. Bärfuss, like his European contemporaries Tankred Dorst, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Marius von Mayenburg, Roland Schimmelpfennig and Yasmina Reza, all of whose work has been seen on Toronto stages recently, is adept at finding the absurd in everyday life and fashioning dramatic fables to make us aware of the contradictions in our own behaviour and thought. It’s stimulating to be exposed to these new developments in drama and I hope Toronto’s theatres continue to explore them.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Philip Riccio and Eric Peterson. ©2011 Guntar Kravis.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.

Ride the Cyclone

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:09:02 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music and lyrics by Brooke Maxwell & Jacob Richmond, book by Jacob Richmond, directed by Britt Small & Jacob Richmond
Atomic Vaudeville with Acting Up Stage, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
November 14-December 3, 2011

“Hold on to Your Heads!”

Ride the Cyclone is surely the most wildly inventive musical Toronto has seen in years. Many Canadian companies have aimed for quirkiness in their chamber musicals, but few have achieved it with such glorious panache as Victoria’s Atomic Vaudeville with their latest creation. Think of Glee crossed with Twin Peaks and you’ll get some idea of the tunefully macabre fun in store.

The musical’s unconventional subject is the death of the entire St. Cassian Chamber Choir from Uranium, Saskatchewan, who die in a freak roller coaster accident at a travelling fair. The narrator for the evening is Karnak (manipulated by James Insell), a mechanical fortune-telling machine, who had foreseen the tragedy but whose reprogramming for family audiences had banned him from revealing the truth to the victims. In fact, he encouraged them to ride the Cyclone. Out of remorse, he brings the choir back to life to stage one final concert to come to terms with their death.

Ocean Rosenberg (Rielle Braid), the bossy host of the show decides that each of the six members of the first-rate cast will tell their life story followed by a song. First up is Noel Gruber (Kholby Wardell) as the only gay guy in Uranium. His arty parent exposed him at an early age to French New Wave cinema and ever since then his dream has been to live the life as depicted by Jeanne Moreau and others of an abused, self-destructive French prostitute. But poor Noel--not only does he die a virgin but he dies never even having kissed a man. Wardell’s full-throttle torch song as his drag alter-ego is so full of flamboyant passion it stops the show within its first half hour.

After Noel comes Ocean and you wonder how she can live up to the high level he has set--but she does. Her half Jewish, half Catholic background set her up as a debater and politician and she leads the group in a joyfully strong-voiced gospel number ironically not about truth abut about how to “Play to Win”. With two uproarious show-stoppers in a row, you wonder how the show will keep up the pace.

Fortunately, the mood changes with Ukrainian immigrant Misha Bachinsky (Matthew Coulson) whose twin avocations are rap and ballet. After a brief sample of the former, the cast switches into a hilarious recreation of a Ukrainian folk wedding where Misha marries the girl of his dreams whom he has only every seen on the internet. This woman who may or may exist is represented by Chris Loran’s amusingly old-fashioned videography and the directors’ staging of the live actors’ interaction with the filmed bride is very clever.

Continuing the theme of fantasy, though on a more disturbing level are the scenes with the choir’s pathologically shy pianist Ricky Potts (Elliot Loran). Neglected by his parents, Ricky retreated early in life into the world of comic books which has now become more real to him that the outside world. According his song, “Space Age Bachelor Man”, sounding like David Bowie mixed with Queen, tells of his alter ego as the saviour of a planet inhabited by humanoids who have evolved from cats. Besides the fact that Loran has a body made of rubber and great rockstar pipes, the fantastic change from mumbling nerd to Lycra-clad superhero has to be seen to be believed.

This gives Jane Doe (Sarah Pelzer) a very hard act to follow. Having been decapitated in the accident, her head never found, no one knows who she is. Even she doesn’t know. Her song is therefore has the least content of the six. Even given the bizarre context of the action, I don’t see why the ghost of a human being should forget its own past. I think it would be quite intriguing to know what is was about Jane Doe’s life that made her the girl that no one ever knew. Unlike the other two female singers, Pelzer is a coloratura soprano and kept wishing that the music would let her show off the runs and trills that she is certainly capable of. A foray into opera would only make her character even eerier.

Last up is chubby Constance Blackwood (Kelly Hudson) the only one of the six who grew up expecting to live and die in Uranium. Her narrative about hopelessness turning to hatred is as disturbing as it is funny. She alone saw the accident as a release from fate and her powerful song “Sugar Cloud” is a sweet yet creepy exultation about leaving the world behind.

For all its hilarity a real pathos lurks within the show. It’s not simply that six young people perished in an accident, but, as their life-stories show, that the six were already dying from the fate from being born in a small town in the middle of nowhere without possibilities and weighed down by the fear that dreams of escape were just illusions. Riding the Cyclone provided the ultimate if unexpected escape. Is that why Karnak told them all to take the ride?

With a flawless cast, tight choreography, a clever eclectic score and its highly ambiguous satiric mood, this is a real one-of-a-kind musical that seems destined to become a cult hit both in Canada and beyond.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Elliott Loran, Rielle Braid, Sarah Pelzer, Matthew Coulson, Kelly Hudson and Kholby Wardell. ©2011 by Fairen Berchard.

For tickets, visit www.passemuraille.on.ca.

The Children’s Republic

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:57:48 -0500

✭✭✩✩✩
by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Alisa Palmer
Tarragon Theatre with Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
November 16-December 18, 2011

“This Republic Should be More Than a Polish Boy’s Town”

The story of Dr. Janusz Korczak (1878-1942) ought to make for powerful theatre. He was a much-loved children’s author, a pediatrician, a revolutionary champion of children as human beings and a signatory to the League of Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of the Child. In 1912 he set up his own orphanage in Warsaw designed as a children’s republic with its own parliament, court and newspaper. All of the staff and the approximately 192 resident children died in the gas chambers of Treblinka. The story has been told in numerous books and plays, even musicals and opera, but the best known treatment is probably Andrzej Wajda’s 1990 film called simply Korczak.

Faced with a wealth of historical material, playwright Hannah Moscovitch decides to ignore it to concentrate on day-to-day life inside Korczak’s orphanage in 1939 in Act 1 and in 1942 in Act 2. Unfortunately, what she finds there are the usual clichés of orphanage films and plays--children can’t get along with the new kid, the new kid has a secret he won’t reveal, rivalries and awkward love blooms between adolescents and so on. In particular Moscovitch focusses on the unfailing championing by Korczak (Peter Hutt) of a street youth Israel (Mark Correia) despite the increasing claims of vandalism that Korczak’s trusted associate Stefania Wilczyńska (Kelli Fox) reports. Meanwhile, Stefa favours admitting a recently violin prodigy Sara (Emma Burke-Kleinman) over Korczak’s objections.

This is hardly compelling theatre and, except for depicting Korczak’s infinite patience and kindness toward his charges, reveals in no way why Korczak’s ideas or his orphanage were so revolutionary. The style Moscovitch adopts is itself a major culprit in undermining our interest. She tells her story through innumerable short scenes that seem to stop just as they are about to get going. She has the characters both children and adults speak in clipped, elliptical phrases in conversations that go nowhere. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter can use this technique to suggest an atmosphere of ruin or menace to great for the characters to express. With Moscovitch it seems more like a frustrating game of putting off confrontations and revelations of secrets until it is dramatically convenient.

The most egregious omission in Moscovitch’s play is her failure to underline how Korczak and Stefa met their deaths. In August 1942 when the children were slated to be taken to Treblinka, Korczak, Stefa and others of the staff were repeatedly offered the opportunity for sanctuary by the Germans. Yet, Korczak, Stefa and all of the orphanage staff consistently refused because they saw their duty lay with the children and ultimately entered the gas chambers with them. Moscovitch depicts the departure of Korczak, Stefa and the children as a fait accompli and thus destroys the very nature of their heroism. Worse, she portrays Korczak as already dying of a lung infection as if deliberately to undermine his decision.

Director Alisa Palmer seems at a loss as to how to make the fragmentary dialogue and rapid scene changes come to life. Camellia Koo has designed a suitably gloomy set covered brown paper to represent fragility, perhaps.

The actors do their best with the material. Peter Hutt makes much use of dry wit to bring out Korczak’s humanity beneath his seemingly blissful lack of concern about anything. As Stefa, Kelli Fox is forced to play bad cop to Korczak good cop and to deal with the practicalities of running the orphanage. Her lines are so full of reporting miscellaneous data that the role is really a waste of her talents.

Though the institution may have nearly 200 inmates, we meet only four. The most secure and effective actor of these is Elliott Larson as Misha who brings far more complexity to the clichéd role of “sensitive boy” than one at first imagines. Emma Burke-Kleinman as Sara, the violin prodigy, impresses the audience with her playing but is given little else to do. Katie Frances Cohen as Mettye, the main representative of the orphanage’s female contingent, rushes her lines and frequently swallows her final words so that it’s often hard to catch what she’s saying. Moscovitch would like the street youth Israel to be the mysterious focus of our attention, but Mark Correia’s monosyllabic replies and theatrical shoulder-shrugging do nothing to elicit our interest. Only at the very end when he finally reveals the secret of his background is Correia given the chance fully to demonstrate his acting abilities.

It’s a very strange situation to go to a play about a famous person and come away with no clear view of his ideas or personal courage. Let’s hope that Moscovitch, who has written such fine plays in the past, will receive a commission more attuned to her talents.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Katie Frances Cohen Peter Hutt, Mark Correia, Elliot Larson and Kelli Fox.
©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.

Mary Poppins

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:56:52 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music and lyrics by Robert B. Sherman & Richard M. Sherman, book by Julian Fellowes,
directed by Richard Eyre
Disney and Cameron Mackintosh, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
November 12, 2011-January 8, 2012

“A Spoonful of Sugar”

Mirvish Productions has scored a coup by securing the touring production of Mary Poppins for a November to January time slot since the musical is an ideal family entertainment and with its theme of an unhappy family brought back to life by magic is perfect for the holidays. The musical’s main difficulty is episodic nature, but Julian Fellowes the writer of the book, now more famous as the screenwriter for Downton Abbey, has bracketed the miscellaneous escapades of Mary Poppins and her changes with the upstairs-downstairs humour of the Banks’ household along with its financial worries and given shape to the work.

The 2004 musical is based not simply on the 1964 Disney film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke but also on the original 1934 children’s novel by P.L. Travers that became the first of a series. Elements from the novel like the depiction of statues that come to life account for many of the differences between the movie and the musical. In the musical Bert (Nicolas Dromard), a jack-of-all-trades, becomes the narrator of the story. He shows us the house of George and Winifred Banks (Laird Macintosh and Elizabeth Broadhurst) where George’s insistence on “Precision and Order” has driven out any expression of emotion. He has forbidden Winifred to pursue her acting career (she was a suffragette in the movie) and it’s clear that the rebellion of the Banks’ children Jane and Michael is really the result of growing up in a loveless environment. Thus, in response to the children’s, not George’s, advertisement for a new nanny, Bert’s longtime friend, the magical nanny Mary Poppins ( Rachel Wallace) appears.

Fans of the 1964 film will be happy that such favourites as “Chim Chim Cher-ee”, “Jolly Holiday”, “A Spoonful of Sugar”, “Feed the Birds”, “Let’s Go Fly a Kite”, “Step in Time” and, of course, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, even though they most often occur in completely different contexts than in the film. Two songs I wish had been included are “Stay Awake” and “I Love to Laugh”. To these songs by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, new songs have been added by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. In general, these songs help fill out the characters of the Banks parents--”A Man Has Dreams” for George and “Being Mrs. Banks” for Winifred. Otherwise, they fit in well to the music hall feel of the piece such as “Practically Perfect” for Mary Poppins and “Anything Can Happen” as a general statement of Mary’s worldview.

The production design by Bob Crowley manages to be both charming and spectacular. In London the Banks’s lived in what seemed a large solid dollhouse that rose, sank and opened in various ways. For the touring production Crowley has improved upon this by creating a house that seems like a huge pop-up book and thus lends a sense of whimsy to the whole story. Since the story is set sometime late during the reign of Queen Victoria, Crowley has happily used this as an excuse to bring back the practice of old-fashioned painted drops to set scenes--the most amusing of these being the forced perspective drop representing the intimidating grandeur of the bank where George works.

Crowley has makes much of the contrast between the drab, greyish world of London in autumn and the wildly colourful world of the imagination. This is at its eye-popping best when Mary takes the children on a “Jolly Holiday” into one of the paintings of the park that Bert had made that comes to life around them. In this as in the other dance sequences Matthew Bourne’s precise, witty yet elegant choreography is a joy in itself. It draws, appropriate for the setting on ballet, music hall and ballroom to create one set of fresh, joyful dance sets after the next.

The show could easily become an empty spectacle without an excellent cast to humanize the characters. Canadian Nicolas Dromard is a truly engaging Bert, who makes us care about the story simply through the wistful tone of his narration. He has a fresh open voice and is a wonderfully acrobatic dancer who in many ways embodies the spirit of the show. Rachel Wallace preserves the slight chilliness in voice and formality in demeanour that Travers depicts, but she also gives us subtle glimpses of an underlying warmth for the Banks family and for Bert that really make is long to know more about her past history with him.

Of the Bankses, Canadian Laird Mackintosh as George has the longest dramatic arc to traverse and he does it superbly. He moves physically and vocally from the self-imposed restrictions of his early life to the joyous freedom his feels near the end. It’s just too bad the role requires such a long period of restriction since we know from his appearances at Stratford and Opera Atelier what a fine dancer he is. Canadian Blythe Wilson played Winifred at the opening of the show in Toronto, but was summoned back to Broadway to play the role there. Her substitute Elizabeth Broadhurst is warmly sympathetic as Winifred though she could show more clearly that Winifred chafes more under her husband’s strict regime. Q. Smith is excellent as Miss Andrew, Mary Poppins harsh replacement, whose tyrannous tactics lead George to be the emotionally stunted man he is. Janet McEwen sings the Bird Woman’s song beautifully cuts through the sentimentality that easily could surround her.

Richard Eyre and co-creator Cameron Macintosh have paced the production well beginning with simple magic tricks that Mary Poppins performs using her amazingly capacious carpetbag and escalating to such coups de théâtre as Bert’s dance around the proscenium in “Step in Time” and Mary’s spectacular final departure. One wishes that that scenes such as “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and “Step in Time” could appear less as set pieces and become more integrated into the action. One also wishes that the US production of the show could have kept the UK scene “Temper, Temper” where the Banks children’s toys sit in judgment on them and hold them responsible for their cruel actions. This was thought too frightening for American children in 2006 (under G.W. Bush), but I wonder if being held to account was rather more disturbing to the adults. This has been replaced, ironically, with a song called “Playing the Game”, which makes no real sense of the scene with the toys.

Despite these cavils, the show with its old fashioned story and up-to-date technology with please both young and old and will prove a great alternative to the theatrical Christmas “favourites” that have become so tedious.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Rachel Wallace and Nicolas Dromard. ©Disney/CML. Photo by Joan Marcus.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

Le Dieu du carnage

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:49:07 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Yasmina Reza, directed by Diana Leblanc
Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
October 21-November 5, 2011

“Les Enfants sauvages”

Le Dieu du carnage by Yasmina Reza is a wickedly funny satire. French playwright and novelist Reza was previously best known for her international hit comedy ‘Art’ (1994) that has so far had three professional productions in Toronto, two in English and one in French. Le Dieu du carnage (“God of Carnage” in English) from 2006 won the 2009 Olivier Award and the 2009 Tony Award for Best New Play and has been made into a film simply titled Carnage by Roman Polanski to be released in Canada on December 16 this year. Théâtre français de Toronto was the only Toronto theatre company granted permission to perform the play and it has given it a superb production. If you want to see it in its original format and language, now is the time to do it.

In ‘Art’ two friends fall out when one of them purchases an all-white painting, leaving someone who is friends with both to negotiate a peace between them. In Carnage two couples fall out over a playground attack by the son of one on the son of the other. Here, however, there is no one to mediate between the two sides and the attacks grow in ferocity until all energy is spent.

The point of Carnage is almost too obvious--namely, that civilization and all it produces, including art, is merely a thin veneer masking savage aggression and the primal instinct to dominate that still motivate human interactions. Michel and Véronique Houllié invite Alain and Annette Reille to their home to discuss the attack earlier that day of the Reilles’ 11-year-old son Ferdinand on the Houlliés’ 11-year-old son Bruno and to arrange for Ferdinand to apologize to Bruno. This would seem simple enough and all four characters admit that this is a reasonable thing to do. Even if you know nothing about the play, this initial set-up seems to anticipate the expected ending--that Alain will somehow assault Michel by evening’s end.

Reza knows this and takes her own pleasure in confounding the audience’s expectations. She deliberately delays the onset of aggression between the two couples by making the Reille’s unusually understanding of the Houllié’s point of view, with Alain even calling his own son a “savage”. When anger finally does break out it is not couple against couple, Annette versus her husband because his constant cellphone conversations keep interrupting the discussion. It certainly does not help that Alain, a lawyer who works for a big pharmaceuticals company, is advising those on the other end of the line to hush up a study that has uncovered dangerous side-effects to one their new drugs. Reza depicts Alain’s annoying cellphone use itself as a type of aggression since taking a call immediately demeans the people he is with. Annette sees the irony of the modern man carrying a cellphone in his holster instead of a pistol while men, like Alain, still admire a John Wayne as a model. Yet, in fact, the result is the same. Alain’s advised cover-up could deal out death to innocent people. It is perhaps no surprise that it Alain, who states outright that he believes in a “god of carnage”.

Meanwhile, the timid wholesaler Michel and his art-loving wife are not devoid of their own conflicts. While Véronique is working on a book about Darfur, Michel, much to Véronique dismay, has released their daughter’s pet hamster into the “wild” of the streets, and certain death, because he couldn’t stand the creature. The rift between the Reilles helps expose the rift between the Houlliés. By the end of the play’s 85 minutes, Reza depicts every possible variation of conflict--the women versus the men, couple versus couple, mixed couple versus mixed couple, women against each other, men against each other and each one of the four versus the other three. Reza thus explodes the simplistic ending we expect by revealing the beast in every one of the four just as she also makes us ask ourselves why we should long to see this descent into chaos.

Reza, who is also a musician, has structured the play very like a Rossini overture with its slow beginning and gradual but inevitable crescendo. It is much to director Diana Leblanc’s credit that she and her cast have captured this musical aspect of the play perfectly. The play is very well cast. Colombe Demers is ideal as Véronique, giving even her most conciliatory statements an edge that eventually turns into undisguised disgust. Olivier L’Écuyer is excellent as Véronique’s passive-aggressive husband who seems in such a cowardly manner to have taken his frustrations out on a poor rodent. Christian Laurin dominates the stage not merely because of his height and the depth of his voice but because of his imperious manner. Even when he agrees with the Houlliés we can hear disdain in his voice. Meanwhile, Tara Nicodemo is hilarious as Annette, who appears so chic and self-possessed but who so quickly descends into raving drunkenness after just a few glasses of rum.

Designer Glen Charles Landry has created a set that well reflects the cultural pretensions of Véronique along with the themes of the play. The room is basically all black and white so show that Véronique aspires to stylishness. Both the poorer Houlliés and the wealthy Reilles are clad entirely in black, white and grey. Colour is provided by Vérorique’s collection of art books, but what dominates are two blood-red sofas that clearly highlight the theme of carnage. This is echoed in the vase of red tulips that later plays an important role and in the tribal necklace Charles gives Véronique.

In comparing ‘Art’ with Le Dieu du carnage I have to say I prefer the former since the human and formal aspect of the play are in greater balance and it achieve emotional as well as intellectual resonance. The later play is very funny but the humour is very bitter and we ultimately feel distanced from all the characters, even if Reza’s point is that we are the same. Nevertheless, Le Dieu du carnage is a work meant for the theatre not for the screen. Movies can never replicate the 85-minute-long take that is live theatre much less the audience-actor interaction essential to comedy. Besides, Polanski’s film, though filmed in Paris, has been Americanized and is set in New York. With such a fine production from TfT in the original language (with English suritles), you should do yourself a favour and see the play now as it was meant to be seen.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Colombe Demers, Christian Laurin and Tara Nicodemo. ©2011 Marc Lemyre.

Name in Vain (Decalogue Two)

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:07:07 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by André Alexis, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre ExtraExtra Space, Toronto
October 19-30, 2011

“Saying Nothing”

André Alexis’s project of writing a play about each of the Ten Commandments gets off to an inauspicious start with Name in Vain (Decalogue Two). Set among a group of monks sworn to a strict vow of silence, the 70 minutes of the play has only two spoken words--the blasphemy of the title. Alexis admits that he has never written a play without words before and this is all too obvious since it is so boring.

The action consists of five monks of various ages working the four seasons on five rows of a vegetable plot symbolized by five clearly demarcated parallel lines of coloured sand along the length of the stage floor. Four of the monks (Richard McMillan, Eric Goulem, Walter Borden and Sergio Di Zio) work together in harmony but the fifth (Dean Gilmour), apparently simple-minded, can never pay full attention to the task at hand. Either he is too absorbed in feeling and smelling the weeds he is supposed to be picking or he stops all work when he hears the singing of a particular bird. One time he is so entranced he does not watch where he’s walking and knocks over one of plants of Monk 5 (Goulem) thus smudging his line of sand. In response, Monk 5 throws a stone, kills the bird and immediately falls to prayer for his sin. When Monk 4 (Gilmour) later tramples his row to an even greater extent, Monk 5 breaks the second commandment. Immediately after this Monk 1 (McMillan) accidentally hammers his thumb and restrains himself even from crying out though he is clearly in great pain. Since the personality of Monk 1 gradually changes from generous to brittle, Alexis seems to pose the question whether the release of anger through words, even if blasphemous, is not better than repressing an expression of anger and pain.

Alexis states in the programme, “If I wasn’t interested in using theatre to illuminate the ten commandments, I was interested using the ten commandments to examine theatre.” To that end he set Decalogue Two in the wordless environment of mime. Unfortunately, that choice complicates his examination since the blasphemy breaks not only the second commandment, but also the order’s vow of silence and the rule of mime. In the second two cases, any words, not specifically blasphemy would be a violation. If Alexis is really examining theatre, mime on any subject could have been chosen and the emphasis would then have more clearly been on theatre rather than the monastic setting.

Besides this conceptual problem is the practical problem. The set and actions are already minimal, but the play itself is not. Too much of the action is involved in generalized scene-setting or is completely extraneous to the story. What purpose does the bug-spraying scene serve? Why have Monk 5 do penance quite so many times? The presence of Dean Gilmour is a constant reminder that his own Theatre Smith-Gilmour, masters of mime, could dispense with the whole story in about 10-20 minutes by boiling it down to its essentials. As it is Alexis has not written the play, nor Rose directed it, to bring out any more than one personality trait per character. This gives the play the quality of a fable but also means that there is little point in detailing the naturalistic action of gardening to such an extent.

Inevitably some actors are more adept at mime than others. Gilmour, naturally, is the most practiced and expressive and commands our attention whenever he is on stage. Surprisingly, McMillan, too, though best known for speech and song, is excellent at conveying strong feelings silently.

The star of the show is really composer and sound designer John Gzowski, whose soundtrack of natural sounds--birds, bugs, weather and bells--vividly creates the world of the play from which the monks have deliberately banned their own contribution. Ultimately, Alexis spends far too long to accomplish too little. Fine as the ensemble work is, it is not complex enough to hold one’s interest. Can Alexis do for theatre what Krzysztof Kieślowski did for cinema in his masterpiece Dekalog (1898)? Name in Vain does not augur well, but we’ll have to see another instalment or two before we can judge.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Dean Gilmour, Eric Goulem, Sergio Di Zio, Walter Borden, Richard McMillan.
©2011 Erin Brubacher.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.

My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy!

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:10:57 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by Steve Solomon, directed by Andy Rogow
Philip Roger Roy, Dana Matthow & Bud Martin, Bathurst Street Theatre, Toronto
October 19, 2011-February 5, 2012

“Kosher Bologna”

“Does anybody here remember Woodstock? Was anybody here at Woodstock?” So asks actor Paul Kreppel playing author Steve Solomon in Solomon’s solo show My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy! This question like the subsequent one about remembering “mood rings” (invented in 1975) gives a pretty clear indication as to the show’s target audience. Amiable and innocuous, the humour in Therapy is definitely geriatric both in content and style.

The play is set in the waiting room of Steve’s therapist. He’s running late so Steve starts to tell us--Are we other clients waiting with him?--about his wacky family that has driven him seek help for his anger management problems. What follows is not Steve’s life story or any kind of narrative but rather a series of one-liners and one-two punch jokes about coping with parents and relatives in general, especially those who are advanced in years. To make things worse what he finds particularly funny are digestive problems, flatulence and incontinence

Steve’s father, Louie, may have been from a Russian-Jewish family that emigrated to the US, and Louie may have fought in World War II and brought home Steve’s mother Marie as his bride, but despite the title, nothing more specific about either parent or their relationship is revealed. Marie is just a stereotype of an Italian mother stirring pasta sauce, and Louie is just a stereotype of a Jewish father kvetching about his wife and son. One might have thought there was an interesting story here, but the ethnicity of Steve’s parents serves only to elicit a stream of generic jokes about Italians and Jews. We hear how Steve’s bubbe tries to explain what kosher is to Marie--veal parmigiana is a no go--but we never hear whether she actually does change her style of cooking or not. We hear that Marie and Louie argue about religion, but we never hear what the result is or how it affects Steve.

Solomon unfortunately is so fixated on keeping the show fluffy he always goes for a joke rather than looking even superficially at the topics he raises. The result is that the whole therapy premise makes no sense. His view is so generic that his family is no more weird for being half Italian and half Jewish than any other family. If having elderly parents with hearing aid problems were a criterion for therapy, then everyone lucky enough to have elderly parents would need it.

The action supposedly is set in the present but in fact is quite dated. Steve claims to be 55 in the play (Kreppel is 64) and Woodstock happened in 1969. Therefore, Steve was a rather unlikely 13 years old when he attended and met and married his first wife. It’s time for Solomon to revise the character’s age upwards, to omit the Woodstock reference altogether or to make clear that the setting for the play is not in the present. Steve tells us he’s just heard that the airlines are now charging for food. Well, that began in 2003. That along with the airport security jokes are way past stale.

You feel for actor Paul Kreppel assigned to make this would-be laugh-riot work. He has an engaging personality and is able to keep the 60 plus different voices distinct that the script requires, including the sounds of various animals. Still, someone should have notified Solomon that Toronto audiences will likely not find imitations of Indian music and Pakistani taxi drivers with broken English quite as hilarious as New Yorkers do. Since Therapy is so much more like a stand-up comedy routine than a play, it would be good if Kreppel were allowed to depart from the script more frequently.

Nevertheless, there must be an audience for this kind of pap. Therapy played almost two years on Broadway and has toured to more than 100 cities and is still touring. Its success spurred Solomon to write two sequels. Yet, here in such a culturally diverse city as Toronto, where multi-ethnic families are not unusual, a play like Therapy seems to come from another time and place--from a very old-fashioned mindset that still considers ethnic stereotypes funny and where “50-year-olds” make fun of seniors without acknowledging that it’s really the fear of their own future that troubles them.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Paul Kreppel as Steve. ©2007 broadwayworld.com.

For tickets, visit www.italianjewish.ca.

The Normal Heart

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:23:06 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Larry Kramer, directed by Joel Greenberg
Studio 180, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
October 16-November 6, 2011

“Normal is Outstanding”

The Normal Heart is a powerful, emotion-packed play that speaks as powerfully to audiences now as it did 25 years ago. In 1985 when Larry Kramer’s autobiographical play premiered, it spoke so clearly to the AIDS crisis of its time that no one then could have foreseen that it would outlast it. Yet, the recent award-winning revival of the play on Broadway and now the passionate revival by Studio 180 in Toronto prove that the work has a complexity and depth far beyond the one-issue play it was thought to be. Its subject now seems to be no less that the forging of the modern gay identity through the crucible of suffering of the AIDS epidemic. It also serves as a warning not to take present rights and freedoms for granted. They can always be taken away again.

The action is set in New York City in the period 1981-84 when young gay men started dying of an unknown and as yet unnamed disease. Kramer captures all too well the mystification among doctors and the paranoia in the gay community that a new disease should seemingly target previously healthy gay men. Doctor Emma Brookner (Sarah Orenstein) has a theory that the disease is sexually transmitted and suggests to gay writer and journalist Ned Weeks (Jonathan Wilson), Kramer’s alter-ego, that he warn the gay community that their culture of promiscuity may be killing them. The play’s first act details what makes this task nearly impossible for reasons both outside the gay community and within it. Audiences, both gay and straight, will feel their anger rekindled to see how hospitals, lawyers, the city and the media chose to ignore the epidemic because it was thought to be only a “gay disease”. AIDS revealed to the gay community depths of hatred toward gays that they had not thought possible, namely that those in authority were willing to do nothing about a fatal epidemic simply because its victims were gay. To help in what was otherwise a municipal health crisis tainted anyone who helped, including the mayor, as pro-gay.

What made the play so controversial when it first appeared is that Kramer also blames division within the gay community for the delays in treating the crisis seriously. The small group that Weeks/Kramer is able to form is willing to organize care for sufferers but unwilling to call for abstinence as Dr. Brookner demands. Coming only a decade after the Sexual Revolution when gay people felt free finally to engage in sex without guilt, many gay men had come to define themselves by their promiscuity in contrast to the ideal of heterosexual monogamy, however hypocritically practiced. Ned Weeks is thus attacked verbally and physically for being anti-gay. At the same time those who are wealthy or have good jobs--the very ones needed to raise funds and awareness--are unwilling to help for fear that coming out the closet would cost them their privileges. Weeks, who like Kramer is also Jewish, sees a parallel in the world reaction to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews. Entrenched antisemitism delayed governments in helping Jews emigrate and divisions within the American Jewish community delayed plans of action. Tendentious as this parallel is, it helps to reinforce the play’s much larger theme that rights for minority groups can always be rescinded and therefore must continually be fought for.

Ultimately, only the mounting death toll at home, news of heterosexual transmission in Africa and successful research on the virus in France shames New York and the US in general into action. By the end of 1983 the number of AIDS diagnoses reported in America had risen to 3,064 of whom 1,292 had died.

The Normal Heart is not merely a history lesson, important though that is for those with no direct experience of life in the last century. The play is also a heart-breaking human drama. Just as Kramer does not paint a simple portrait of good versus bad in the historical background, he gives us many-sided characters with strengths as well as flaws. Chief among these is Kramer’s stand-in Ned. He may be filled with righteous outrage but he also is a bad judge of when and where not to speak. Though his focus impels his group forward, his abrasive style also causes it to lose key opportunities. Jonathan Wilson is so perfect in the role you might have thought it was written for him. He’s able to show how Ned’s anger is fuelled from many sources of frustration--political as well as personal.

As Felix, the man patient enough to become Ned’s partner, Jeff Miller exudes the calm and good humour Ned needs in his life. Miller’s depiction of Felix’s decline once he is stricken with the disease, especially his attempt to get his estate in order, is heart-rending.

Ryan Kelly plays Mickey Marcus, a once confident man whose total meltdown in Act 2 when he just can’t handle the onslaught on bad news on all fronts is frighteningly convincing. It becomes a lament for a paradise lost, never to be regained. Paul Essiembre plays Bruce, a closeted bank vice-president, who makes understandable both the fear and the weakness behind his position. John Bourgeois, though he looks nothing at all like Wilson, is Ned’s brother Ben, who finally must admit that prejudice still lingers beneath his surface tolerance. Sarah Orenstein moves from dismay to rage as Dr. Brookner with no hope to offer her growing patient list and no funding to help her in her fight. Kramer portrays her as a woman who contracted polio just before there was a vaccine, thus making her an image of a possible future of people living with HIV. Jonathan Seinen makes a strong impression as Tommy, a man we at first disregard because of his effeminacy and Southern accent, but who turns out to be the one member of Ned’s group who never loses himself to anger.

Director Joel Greenberg has staged the play in the round that gives the action an increased immediacy besides creating the feeling that we are watching an arena where people are battling for our future. Kimberley Purtell’s ever-exact lighting is essential in distinguishing the numerous changes of location and mood.

The precision of the direction and the overwhelming intensity of the acting make this is a production that deserves the largest possible audience. Gay people need to know the struggles that led to those freedoms they have and need to know that maintaining those freedoms requires constant vigilance. They will be surprised to find gay marriage raised as an issue 25 years ago. Straight people need to feel the kinds of pain any minority suffers when it is stigmatized and treated as less than equal. Both groups should be outraged at how any public health crisis could be ignored for fear of political repercussions. Both groups will be drawn into a great play that details with such compassion the personal toll exacted on anyone who fights for positive change against a system built to resist it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Sarah Orenstein and Jonathan Wilson. ©2011 John Karastamatis.

For tickets, visit www.buddiesinbadtimes.com.

Ghosts

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 03:34:43 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Henrik Ibsen, adapted and directed by Morris Panych
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
October 14-November 18, 2011

“A Ghost of the Real Thing”

Soulpepper’s first-ever production of Henrik Ibsen’s classic Ghosts (1881) has a handsome design and an excellent cast. What it lacks is a director who can draw sufficiently complex performances from his actors. The production presents Ibsen’s parallel plot lines and related symbolism quite clearly, but, for a play dealing with such emotional topics as adultery, syphilis and euthanasia, the action is curiously uninvolving.

Because of its subject matter Ghosts was Ibsen’s most controversial play in his own lifetime. Some shallow-minded thinkers thought that the advent of penicillin rendered the play obsolete--that is until the arrival of AIDS made the notion of an inheritable sexually transmitted disease more relevant than ever. Yet, Ibsen’s plays have lasted not because he wrote about contemporary issues but because he treated them as metaphors for universal conflicts. The virtue of director Morris Panych’s production is that it does show us the universal in the particular in Ibsen’s play. The flaw is in how Panych tries to convey it.

The character who presents the greatest difficulties is Pastor Manders (Joseph Ziegler). His unyielding conservative Christian dogma has determined the past of the Alving family and led to the series of misfortunes they now suffer. He is a believer in a divinely ordained hierarchical system of fealty--mankind is subject to God’s will, parishioners to their pastor, women to men, wives to husbands and children to parents. When Mrs. Alving fled her abusive, sexually profligate husband, he forced her to return to him telling her it was her duty and her suffering God’s will. He chides her for having sent her son away from home when he was seven even though she did so to protect him from his father’s pernicious influence. The play is ultimately not a play “about syphilis” as people first characterized it as much as it is a play about the inadequacy and actual harm of using of a black-and-white dogma of any kind as a guide or a solace in confronting the real world.

Since Pastor Manders represents that dogma the obvious trap is that his narrow-mindedness too easily makes him seem a figure of fun. This is a trap that Panych, more used to directing comedy than tragedy, falls into headlong. We must not look on Manders as a humorous character because that negates our appreciation of the damage he has done and continues to do, all in God’s name, to the Alving family. Panych has Ziegler present Manders as weak, easily confused and foolish, whereas the play makes no sense if that is true. How could he have convinced so strong a woman as Mrs. Alving to return to her husband if he is so weak? How could he persuade her to do something so illogical as not to insure the orphanage she has built if he does not have a strong force of will? He must have held some attraction in the past or how could Mrs. Alving have once been in love with him? Manders’ restrictive views should be frightening, not funny.

It would appear that Panych wants his Mrs. Alving to be a pillar of quiet strength with a strong sense of irony, until the truth of her son Oswald’s illness breaks her down. To that end he has Nancy Palk play the role with supreme reserve, regarding Manders’ follies with benign indulgence. Palk does this very well and has never looked so poised and imperturbable. It’s just too bad that this play requires a much different approach. Her patronizing attitude to Manders elevates the humour, but that’s the opposite of how Manders should be approached. When she agrees to Manders’ self-serving request not to insure the orphanage she has built to honour her husband, we wonder how she could so calmly do something she knows is foolish. When she shows no reaction to the orphanage’s destruction, we know Panych has carried Mrs. Alving’s restrained stance too far.

Mrs. Alving is a far more complex character. We should see that faith and doubt are at war within her. Why would she give Pastor Manders so much control over her pet project unless she respected him and his views? The fact that she has allowed her own step-daughter to be raised as her maid hardly reflects an egalitarian spirit. The play more sensibly is seen as reflection of Greek tragedy where the central figure encounters an increasingly devastating series of revelations. The first of these should be Oswald’s flirtation with the maid Regine that echoes her husband’s more violent attack years ago. The next should be the destruction of the orphanage. Panych has Palk react to the first as if she fully understood its meaning and react not at all to the second. In fact, Mrs. Alving is as guilty of hubris as Manders. She thinks she has protected Oswald from harm from his father and she thinks she can make a lie true by dedicating a charitable institution to a sinner. Yet she finds she has power to do neither. The damage in which she is complicit has already been done. Panych basically gives Mrs. Alving no height of pride from which to fall and thus undermines the effect of the drama.

Feeling that Ibsen’s tragedy could use more comedy, Panych has Diego Matamoros overplay the character of Jakob Engstrand until he becomes a caricature of the perpetually drunken peasant who can still hoodwink the higher born. What Panych misses, as with Manders, is Engstrand’s malice. He is, after all, someone who seems willing to prostitute his own daughter.

The two who come off best in the production are Michelle Monteith as Regine and Gregory Prest as Oswald. While Monteith shows as much as she could that Regine chafes under her yoke of servitude, she does rise to a such high pitch of righteous anger when she discovers who she is that she should win a round of applause. Prest is excellent at presenting Oswald as increasingly feverish right from the beginning. He so carefully escalates the sense of Oswald’s inner suffering that the ending does not come as a surprise but as a logical conclusion to what has come before.

Ken MacDonald has created a beautiful set that, as so often with him, serves as a metaphor for the story. All the action takes place in a conservatory attached to the Alving’s home which, like Manders’ archaic views, represents a narrow confining space where the characters live. As it approaches the audience the veneer vanishes to reveal the structure underneath just as in the play truth that had been hidden gradually comes to light. Dana Osborne has designed beautiful period costumes for each of the characters, especially the elegant, richly brocaded gown for Mrs. Alving. Thomas Ryder Payne has developed a subtle but eerie soundscape of foghorns, sounding buoys and ringing church bells that combined create a perfect atmosphere of unease. Alan Brodie uses lighting to evoke the claustrophobia of constant rain outdoors. Panych does not ask Brodie for a bigger effect for the burning of the orphanage, an event he unaccountably wishes to play down.

Panych’s adaptation conveys the underlying structure of Ibsen’s play well enough that it can be recommended to anyone who has never seen the play on stage before. However, those who have--whether it be Stratford’s production in 2006 with Martha Henry and Peter Donaldson or Stagecraft’s in 1998 with Diane D’Aquila and Stephen Russell--will know that there much more depth to the characters than Panych is willing to bring out.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Gregory Prest and Nancy Palk. ©2011 Sian Richards.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.

HARDSELL 2.0

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:50:11 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Rick Miller & Daniel Brooks, directed by Rick Miller & Daniel Brooks
Wyrd Productions & Necessary Angel, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
October 13-23, 2011

“Still a Hard Sell”

Rick Miller’s HARDSELL 2.0 is a completely rethought and rewritten version of his 2009 show HARDSELL co-created with Daniel Brooks. The new show is still a stinging critique of the commodification of everything and the literally mind-numbing influence of advertising, but the emphasis on metatheatricality, likely from Daniel Brooks, has been tamped down and placed instead squarely on Miller as an arts worker, parent and human being trying to live a virtuous life. The previous version was laboured, arch and ultimately tedious. This version is an improvement and counters the first two criticisms with simple sincerity. As a piece of theatre it is still problematic and from the fairly ramshackle performance on opening night, it seems still to be a work in progress.

The earlier version of HARDSELL posited that Rick Miller (playing himself) had an evil twin named Archie (also Miller). Rick Miller represented an attempt to maintain idealism in a craven world whereas Archie represented pure cynicism. Since Archie’s cynicism extended even to the theatre itself and its audience, the play moved from being not simply unfunny to so unpleasant you wondered why you had bothered to go out.

HARDSELL 2.0 is a much more enjoyable experience. In his own words, Miller told director Daniel Brooks that he want to “take full control” of the play since the play itself is about the individual’s attempt to take back control in a world constantly being bought and sold by others. Now Miller is now listed as a co-director and co-designer. Unlike the clean beauty of Ben Chaisson and Beth Kates’s set for the earlier HARDSELL and their gorgeous projected images so at odds with the Archie’s negative world view, the set for HARDSELL 2.0 looks like the junk-filled chaos one might expect in a basement den. Though there are still innumerable projections, sound and lighting cues, the overall feel is low-tech and personal instead of high-tech and impersonal.

The show has a clear two-part structure. It’s now called a “lecture/performance” and that’s exactly what it is. The first half is an undisguised lecture by Miller directly to the audience. The second half is a variety act by the evil twin Archie. While this structure now allows Miller to make the motivations behind the show absolutely clear, it also means that in the space of only 90 minutes, Miller proceeds to say the same thing twice albeit in different modes of presentation.

In the first half Miller as himself delivers a lecture about the background of the show and its initial impetus--the fact that corporations, not people or governments, now control the world and dictate the agenda for what is done and thought. Miller feels sure that this complete undermining of democracy will lead to revolution. Miller deliberately want to lay himself bare. He shows how he has tried to live and work ethically but how he has had to make compromises. BMO his personal bank and sponsor claims to make an effort to be green, but as he demonstrates, its efforts are minimal and so are those of the other three major Canadian banks. He drives a hybrid but he still buys gas from a company known for having caused environmental damage. He has ceased making commercials, but he once hosted the TV series Just for Laughs, broadcast in the US by ABC, owned by Disney, whose practices and policies he despises. In this way, he details how an individual can try to behave as ethically as possible even though corporations and their philosophy of selfishness pervade every aspect of our lives. Corporate “sell” like a cancer “cell” has no other purpose but replication and domination.

With the close of this lecture, the show might as well end. It’s a fine, sincere speech, backed up with research and leavened with humour, that makes several important points clearly and carefully. Yet, Miller feels the need also to give us a performance and so changes, rather too laboriously, into the character of Archie, who still looks like a white-faced Cirque du Soleil clown with the voice and mannerisms of George Burns. Unlike Cirque du Soleil, however, the rambling vaudeville act that follows has no internal narrative. Miller simply uses he abundant talents of singing, dancing, physical comedy, impersonation and puppetry to iterate points Miller had already made in his lecture.

Archie’s acts are a mix of good and not so good. The best is Archie’s impersonation of Morgan Freeman using his measured, authoritative voice to advertise himself for use in voiceovers because of his measured, authoritative voice. The interview with a line-up of Barbie dolls is also funny but why one of them should be nuked in a microwave to no purpose is unclear. Not so good is Archie’s potty-humour parody of Joseph Campbell and his book Hero with a Thousand Feces [sic]. Following Archie’s performance, Miller steps forward again as himself to offer an epilogue urging the audience to avoid cynicism since it is just too easy and is unproductive and to try to maintain a sense of purpose and idealism not just for our own sake but to help guide the next generation.

No one can doubt the sincerity of Miller’s plea, but the divided evening of a lecture and performance, one of which obviates the need for the other, does not constitute a satisfying evening. It is inherently undramatic and repeats itself rather than builds thematically. There are two possible ways to combine the two sections and create dramatic tension. One way would be to have Miller present his lecture but have Archie attempt to undermine Miller’s message of idealism. Miller already gives signs of this by recurring to Archie’s voice during the lecture whenever a cynical point was made. Miller has shown he can play over 50 characters in MacHomer without change of makeup or costume, why not present a psychomachia between Miller and Archie in the same way. Unlike the original HARDSELL, this time Miller could still win, but at least there would be a struggle between the two responses--cynical and idealistic--to the unfriendly world we inhabit.

The second method would be to take a page from the Colbert Report or Wallace Shawn’s play Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985) and only present Archie’s view of the world but in such a way that opposite point of view of the author/performer is so clearly implied that it need not spoken outright. This would require that Archie’s vaudeville act manifest some sort of narrative or thematic structure. Miller was able to make the disparate elements of Bigger Than Jesus work together using the Catholic mass as a guide. No doubt he could find some appropriate subterranean structure for Archie’s performance.

In its present state HARDSELL 2.0 would likely have a good reception on college campuses or anywhere that it could preach to the converted. To find a wider, more lasting success, Miller will have to take the show to the next, more integrated level in HARDSELL 3.0. Patrons should know that as a demonstration of the strength of his beliefs, all proceeds from HARDSELL 2.0 will go to the “Because I Am a Girl” campaign (http://becauseiamagirl.ca) that helps girls and women in the developing world to claim a brighter future.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Rick Miller. ©2011 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.

Those Who Can’t Do...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:22:16 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Erin Fleck, directed by Shari Hollett
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
October 11-29, 2011

“Sex and the 14-Year-Old”

Erin Fleck’s solo play Those Who Can’t Do... concerns an important question--how should parents and teachers deal with the fact that teenagers barely into their teens are having sex. Problems with the writing, acting and direction, however, tend to undermine the play’s overall effectiveness.

The play focusses on Lillian Campbell, a 27-year-old teacher who specializes in English and Ancient Civilizations, but who is enlisted by her school principal to teach the course on “Health”. The course, to be taught only to the 14-year-old girls of the school, is really about sex education, and Lillian is dismayed to find that the class textbook from 1999 recommends only abstinence as the way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But what does she do when she finds that for her pupils abstinence is not an option?

The actions breaks down into three plots. The main plot concerns Lillian’s efforts to meet the educational needs of her students without taking on the role of friend or parent. This is difficult since many of her students find that she is the only one who will listen to their problems. Meanwhile, Lillian privately tries to cope with her feelings of inadequacy in teaching the subject since she herself remained a virgin until age 24. Flashbacks to her past try to reveal why this was so has why Lillian has never had a boyfriend.

The other two plot concern Lillian’s students. On the only hand, there is Nora and her 16-year-old boyfriend who are in a loving, sexually active relationship that they have to hide from their parents for fear of their reaction. Though the couple’s families are not feuding, frequent reference to Romeo and Juliet reinforce the idea that all-consuming love at that age is not a novelty. On the other hand, there is Taylor, who is part of a sex scandal (based on a real incident) that rocks the school. She along with eight other girls in Lillian’s class is the founder of the Fellatio Club who regularly service boys on the senior hockey team. When one of the boys takes photos of Taylor in action and posts them on the internet, the parents blame the school for not doing enough to prevent such a thing.

As a writer, Fleck is excellent at exposing the impossible position that teachers face caught between rules imposed from from on high about maintaining a distance from students and parents who have left the role of parenting, including discussions about sex, to the schools. Lillian’s principal informs her that in any dispute, “The parents are always right”. Where Fleck tends to fails is in not creating distinct enough voices for the ten characters she plays. Many speak in exactly the same multi-clause sentences that Lillian uses.

As an actor, this is also where Fleck falls down. Very little distinguishes how Fleck plays Sharon, Lillian’s principal, from Lillian, Lillian’s mother or, surprisingly, from Nora. Fleck uses greater changes of posture and voice to distinguish the three male characters--the coach of the hockey team, Taylor’s father and Nora’s boyfriend--but with one exception the female characters are far too similar. That exception is Taylor, whose two long speeches are the most riveting in the play. In the first she chillingly exults in the status and power the Fellatio Club gives her. In the second she wonders, rather too late, why everyone calls her a slut. With Taylor, Fleck gives us a fascinating insight into motivation and later a strange feeling of sympathy for a youngster we might otherwise too easily condemn.

The play’s most obvious strength is its well-observed comedy of an unprepared teacher awkwardly teaching a difficult class, but even with the Nora and Taylor subplots, Fleck never develops a sense of dramatic tension or urgency. This is partly due to director Shari Hollett’s over-deliberate pacing. Having each new character sign in on the blackboard after erasing the previous character’s name may keep up the school theme but it repeatedly stops the action dead. Hollett should encourage Fleck to switch from character to character without the name-writing. Other solo-show performers can make new characters clear through context, voice and gesture--and so should Fleck. Transforming from one to the other without the blackboard stint would shorten the 80-minute running time, make the show punchier and more theatrical and would force Fleck to make greater use of her acting skills.

Those Who Can’t Do... performs a useful service in encouraging parents and teachers to understand teen sexuality and not to retreat from teens at the time when they need the most support. Yet to have greater impact, it needs to be more theatrical, more engaging and performed with greater verve.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Erin Fleck. ©2011 Aviva Armour-Ostroff.

For tickets, visit www.passemuraille.on.ca.

Sex, Religion & Other Hang-ups

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 02:15:26 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by James Gangl, directed by Chris Gibbs
Gangland Productions, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
October 6-22, 2011

“Priapus versus Saint Lucy”

Autobiographical solo shows are a dime a dozen at fringe festivals. So how did James Gangl’s Sex, Religion & Other Hang-ups win Patron’s Pick at this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival play and NOW Magazine’s awards for Outstanding Performance and Outstanding Production? The answer is that Gangl and his play are so funny, endearing and truthful all at once.

Gangl’s premise is that since he is looking for a girlfriend he wants all potential candidates to know via this show what he is really like. He’s been told he has an “ordinary guy walk” and a “weathered look”. And he is an ordinary guy since he has a strong sexual drive. On the other hand, he also has had a strong Catholic upbringing. He went to mass every day, went to confessional even with nothing to confess, turned people’s use of profanity into blessings and knows all the saints and their attributes, including Saint Lucy, who tore out her own eyes rather than lose her virginity.

In 2005 when he was 26, Gangl had two main desires--to be a “real” card-carrying actor and to lose his virginity to the right girl. The stories of both desires are intimately connected. His first paying job as an actor is as Guy #1 in a 30-second Coor’s Light commercial about four friends snowboarding down a double diamond slope at Mont Tremblant. The guys later meet up with three snowbunnies in a bar. It transpires that Gangl falls hard for his ideal, Bunny #3, an underwear model with a masters in sociology. (Who knew what intrigues lay behind such fast-forwardable TV froth?) The tale of their on-off relationship and how Gangl’s religious scruples repeatedly sabotage his physical desires is truly hilarious.

Gangl’s delivery is so completely natural that you feel as if he is just blurting out his story spontaneously. His great ad libs, direct address to audience members and commentary on his own story reinforce that impression. Yet, the piece is so tightly structured, with various points underscored with lighting cues and other effects, that Gangl’s apparent rambling is really an art that hides art. It’s no surprise that the show is directed by Chris Gibbs since Gibbs’s shows have a similar quality, though the two are different. While Gibbs improvises on a clearly set text, Gangl’s periodic reminders that the show is planned, like the useful paintbrush in his back pocket to remove debris, shock us into realizing that he actually has a set text. In Gangl as in Gibbs, the tension between what seems spontaneous and what is not lifts the genre of the solo show above the ordinary into the metatheatrical dimension. With Gangl this works perfectly since too much self-consciousness is precisely his theme.

Gangl himself is an immediately likable, sympathetic performer. His confession of such intimate personal details with such self-deprecating humour instantly puts us on his side and gives his mantra “I will not be vulnerable again” several layers of irony. Even if the depths of Roman Catholicism are foreign to you, anyone can relate to situations where the reins of self-consciousness have restrained natural impulses to everlasting regret. It’s a show filled with laughter from start to finish and is sure to have a long life beyond this remount. Let’s hope Gangl likes touring because there are lots of people out there--maybe even that ideal girlfriend--who are going to like Gangl.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: James Gangl. ©2011 Kevin Thom.

For tickets, visit http://sexhangup.com.

The Ugly One

Wed, 5 Oct 2011 12:15:57 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade, directed by Ashlie Corcoran
Theatre Smash, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
October 4-16, 2011

“Pretty Amazing”

You’d better rush out to give The Ugly One a good look. It’s a brilliant comedy given a stunningly smart production by Theatre Smash. It’s only an hour long, but playwright Marius von Mayenburg packs more mind-boggling twists and turns into that hour than you find in plays twice or three times as long.

The story concerns Lette (David Jansen), who has invented the “C2K connector”. When his boss Scheffler (Hardee T. Lineham) decides to send Lette’s assistant Karlmann (Jesse Aaron Dwyre) to a trade fair to market the device, Lette is outraged until he finds out the reason. Scheffler thinks that Lette’s face is “unacceptable” and will inhibit sales. Abashed, lette goes home to his wife Fanny (Naomi Wright) only to discover that she, too, has always thought him “unspeakably ugly” although she knows he’s a beautiful person. Lette seeks help from a plastic surgeon also called Scheffler (Hardee T. Lineham), who reconstructs Lette’s face from scratch. The result is that Lette now has become incredibly handsome. Sales of the C2K connector skyrocket and potential major clients, like a wealthy, decadent 73-year-old woman and plastic surgery addict, also called Fanny (Naomi Wright), predicate a deal on having sex with him. So would her gay son, also called Karlmann (Jesse Aaron Dwyre), but mother’s needs come first. Things soon get out of hand when Scheffler the doctor begins giving Lette’s new face to anyone who will pay for it.

Not only is The Ugly One (Der Häßliche in the original German) a pitch-black but very funny satire on lookism but it also raises questions concerning the conscious and unconscious roles that image plays in society and the effects they have on identity. Mayenburg goes further by imbedding this theme into the very structure of the play. Each of the four actors plays at least two different characters who happen to have the same name. David Jansen technically plays only the one character Lette, but Lette becomes such a different person after his surgery that he may as well have become a different character. The question whether he is the same person he was now that he looks completely different is the main source of his anxiety.

What really sets this play from 2007 apart is its innovative dramaturgy. We’ve all seen plays where characters double roles and the two roles, whether in Shakespeare or Caryl Churchill, are distinguished by a change of costume, accent or both. Here there is no change. One scene instantaneously flips into the next sometimes with, sometimes without, a lighting cue to signal the change. Lette’s argument with his boss suddenly flips into an argument with bis doctor. Lette can be embracing Fanny the old woman suddenly to be embracing his own wife. The technique takes doubling to its ultimate limit and the effect is dazzling. Mayenburg’s writing is so clear as is Ashlie Corcoran’s direction and the cast’s amazingly precise performances that we are never in doubt about who is speaking to whom. It is this technique plus the absence of scene changes that allows Mayenburg to put much material into so short a time.

Needless to say, there is no mask to convey Lette’s ugliness or beauty, merely the way that the other characters react to him. Similarly, the situation and the manner of address distinguish the doctor from the boss, the wife from the wealthy client and the colleague from the son. The dramaturgy thus poses the play’s central question of how much of our identity is determined internally and how much by the way others regard us.

Camellia Koo’s set consists of one large table with mirrors at each end. This splits the audience into two sections facing each other, i.e. mirroring each other. Jason Hand’s meticulous lighting is crucial in establishing changes of location. Corcoran’s direction is impeccable. Especially hilarious is the scene of Lette’s facial reconstruction staged using office supplies. The cast work absolutely as a team but Jansen must be singled out for portraying so empathetically Lette’s journey from humiliation to overconfidence to existential doubt.

In a plot with one jaw-dropping moment after the next, the conclusion is a real zinger. If you have only on hour to spend in the theatre this year, spend it here.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Jesse Aaron Dwyre and David Jansen; Naomi Wright, Hardee Lineham and David Jansen. ©2011 James Heaslip.

For tickets, visit https://tickets.tarragontheatre.com.

Another Africa

Tue, 4 Oct 2011 02:39:01 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Deborah Asiimwe, Binyavanga Wainaina & Roland Schimmelpfennig, directed by Weyni Mengesha, Ross Manson & Liesl Tommy
Volcano Theatre/Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
September 29-October 22, 2011

“Not All Black and White”

Composed as it is of two of the best plays of 2010, Another Africa is a must-see for anyone who loves theatre. Those who missed the plays’ premiere at Luminato last year must make sure not to miss them this year. Those who did see them last year will want to see them again. Not only are the two plays absorbing in themselves but combined they make up an exciting, thought-provoking double bill.

The two plays of Another Africa premiered along with a third play under the title The Africa Trilogy. This triple bill commissioned and performed by Volcano Theatre had its own internal logic. Shine Your Eye by Kenyan playwright Binyavanga Wainaina, that began the trilogy, was set in Nigeria and had an all-black cast. Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig that followed it was set in an unnamed First-World country and had an all-white cast. GLO by African-American Christina Anderson that concluded the trilogy has settings in both Africa and New York and a mixed cast of black and white. The problem was that of the three GLO was the lest interesting thematically and the least innovative theatrically. Dropping the play has made for a punchier, more satisfying evening.

Another Africa begins with a short prologue called The Stranger by Ugandan playwright by Deborah Asiimwe directed by Weyni Mengesha featuring the entire cast, black and white. It is basically a joyous choral welcome to the theatre and an invitation to open the mind to the images and ideas to be presented. The precision of the choral speaking is impressive and by uniting the casts of the two plays, the piece underscores the unity of purpose behind the whole evening.

Shine Your Eye and Peggy Pickit then follow in that order and resonate with each other to create a fascinating diptych. The first concerns the effect of the First World on the Third and the second the effects of the Third on the First. In each contact with the other world causes a character or characters no longer to feel at home in their country of origin.

Shine Your Eye focusses on a young Kenyan woman Gbene Beka (Dienye Waboso), a computer expert and hacker, who goes to work for a Nigerian e-mail scam in Lagos. She leaves her home because there people can only think of her as the daughter of a martyred political hero and assume that she will devote her life to carrying on her father’s work. Meanwhile, she has met Doreen (Ordena Stephens-Thompson), a friend in Toronto, over the internet with whom she has daily video chats. Beka, who is smarter than all her co-workers, wants to be appreciated for herself and her skills, but as the play progresses she finds herself faced with a dilemma. Doreen, a lesbian who works in ethical funds, wants to sponsor Beka to come to live with her in Toronto though not necessarily in a relationship. At the same time, Beka’s boss (Lucky Onyekachi Ejim) wants her to accompany him on a trip to negotiate the first oil well in Nigeria to be owned by Nigerians. He feels her status as the daughter of a hero will help clinch the deal. Beka’s escape from Kenya to Lagos thus proves to be no escape.

Wainaina has written the play in colloquial language that has the sound of poetry with the “Chorus” of Beka’s co-workers frequently breaking into song and dance. Director Ross Manson seamlessly integrates movement, projections, animation and live video into the production to emphasize the tension between the bright contemporary veneer of Lagos with the ancient tribal ways that underlie it.

Dienye Waboso is bright and sympathetic as Beka, a young woman trying to cope with the heavy mantle of history that weighs on her shoulders. Ejim is authoritative and imposing as Beka’s boss, while Stephens-Thompson, replacing Karen Robinson of the 2010 production, makes Doreen seems a bit less flaky and therefore a more difficult person to refuse. Muoi Nene is back as the ebullient Naijaboy, leading the chorus of Milton Barnes and Araya Mengesha in rhythmic song and hip-hop-like dance moves. Shine Your Eye gives us a glimpse of a world in transition and the challenge to an intelligent women to find what place, if any, she can have in it.

The world of Peggy Pickit, though far removed from that in Shine Your Eye in distance, wealth and political stability, is also in transition, though on a more personal level. Playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig takes the familiar 20th-century dramatic subject of a party gone wrong and turns it into a savage critique of the naïveté and even the hypocrisy of First World attitudes towards the Third World. Frank and Liz (Tony Nappo and Kristen Thomson, replacing Jane Spidell of 2010) are hosting a dinner party for their friends Martin and Carol (Tom Barnett replacing Trey Lyford of 2010 and Maev Beaty) on their return from six years of medical work in Africa. The relationships within both couples have deteriorated as has the relationship of each couple to the other. Martin and Carol have experienced a kind of horror in Africa that Western do-gooders like Frank and Liz ensconced in their comfortable ordinary lives cannot possibly imagine. Life in Africa, that Martin and Carol call both “wonderful and horrific”, was spent in the midst of death, disease and the carnage of war. They did what they could to help within the confines of their medical compound, but could do nothing to alter the political and economic causes of the devastated lives they saw. The experience has made them feel like strangers in their home country and unable to relate to the happiness born of ignorance of Frank and Liz.

Meanwhile, Frank and Liz now regard their former friends with suspicion. Frank and Liz have filled out in the six years but Martin and Carol both look too thin, prematurely aged and unwell. Though the word is never mentioned, it’s quite clear that Frank and Liz fear that Martin and Carol both have AIDS. When they learn that Martin and Carol both had affairs in Africa and now refuse to have blood tests, they treat their former friends as if they had brought some of the fearful abyss of Africa right into their comfy home.

Schimmelpfennig focusses the two couples’ anxieties on an exchange of gifts. Martin and Carol gives their hosts a human figure carved of wood that Liz, to their chagrin immediately names “Annie”, the name of the child Frank and Liz have sponsored in Africa. In return, Liz gives her guests a little plastic doll for the real Annie named Peggy Pickit, part of a fad that has arisen in the past six years. Besides the difference between mass-manufacturing and handicraft, marketing ploys and ancient images, the synthetic and the natural, the two dolls represent the opposite poles from which the two couples regard each other. South African director Liesl Tommy has put a video camera in the African doll that broadcasts what it sees on the “mirror” at the back of the set. It is absolutely cringe-making to see Kristin Thomson’s Liz enact several babytalk dialogues between Peggy Pickit and “Annie” that unintentionally reveal her own insecurities about herself and her values.

The content alone is fascinating but Schimmelpfennig also uses a dramaturgical technique I have never seen outside this play. Frequently the action pauses in mid-sentence or mid-gesture to allow one of the four characters to reflect on that evening’s happenings in the past tense. Instead of a freeze that simply restarts, Schimmelpfennig has the action jump backwards before the last remark or gesture and then play forward again through that point until the next pause.

On the one hand, Schimmelpfennig has invented his own type of Brechtian alienation effect so that we are always conscious that we are watching a play. On the other hand, this technique underscores each of the various points when one of the characters’ actions trips a warning signal in the mind of the commenting character. It is through these comments that we come to see how differently the two couples view each other. As Brecht would want, we simultaneously look at the action in the present and the past so that as the content becomes increasing emotional our viewpoint becomes increasing rational.

The technique demands perfect precision in timing and movement that is simply amazing to watch. All four actors give outstanding performances. Nappo gives us a man whose hearty jollity thinly veils his boorishness. Beaty is an apprehensive woman who already seems on the verge of a breakdown when she first enters. Barnett’s Martin tries to drink himself into silence to cope with the evening’s embarrassments, only to blurt out intimate personal accusations as he becomes inebriated. Thomson gives quite a different performance as Liz than did Jane Spence in 2010. Spence seemed brittle as if Liz had just finished having a row with Frank and were trying to hold herself together. Thomson makes Liz seem a basically happy if shallow person who can’t cope with the increasingly disturbing revelations she hears. Both approaches are valid and only point to the richness of the play.

Together the two plays create a fantastic evening of theatre and ideas. Why does the play from an exploited country bubble with positive energy and why does the play from an exploiting country crumble with dark humour into paralyzing angst are only two of the many questions you may ponder long after you leave the theatre. The two plays were must-sees last year. Now in their new, more congenial format, they invite you even more forcefully to shine your eye on the new face of drama in both the developed and developing worlds.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (Top) Dienye Waboso (centre) and the cast of Shine Your Eye. (Middle) Maev Beaty, Tony Nappo, Kristen Thomson and Tom Barnett. ©2011 John Lauener.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.

Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure

Mon, 3 Oct 2011 14:39:40 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Steven Dietz, directed by Ted Dykstra
Theatre Aquarius, Dofasco Centre, Hamilton
September 23-October 8, 2011

“Sherlock in Love”

The main reason to see Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure is to enjoy two outstanding performances--Geordie Johnson in the title role and Ashley Wright as his trusted companion Dr. Watson. Otherwise, the show is just a bit of fluff--an homage to the famous sleuth that is more concerned to fit in every cliché about him than in exploring the character or in generating dramatic tension.

Steven Dietz’s play from 2006 claims it is based on William Gillette’s famous 1899 play Sherlock Holmes that helped increase the public demand for more Holmes stories after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had killed off the detective in 1893. Some will remember that the Shaw Festival revived Gillette’s play in 1994 with Jim Mezon as Holmes, Robert Benson as Watson and Michael Ball as Moriarty,

Dietz, however, only uses the skeleton of Gillette’s play that he fleshes out with his own attempt to link the stories “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891) and “The Final Problem” (1893). Unlike Gillette’s play, Holmes’s arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty appears throughout the action which concludes with Holmes’s struggle with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls that leads to their presumed deaths. Like Gillette, Dietz is not content with Doyle’s depiction of a celibate Holmes and decides to have him fall in love. In Gillette, his avowal of love for his client Alice Faulkner concludes the drama. In Dietz, his avowal of love for an intended victim, Irene Adler, occupies one scene in Act 2.

Act 1 that focusses completely “A Scandal in Bohemia” is the more satisfying. The King of Bohemia (Richard Clarkin) comes to see Holmes in order to retrieve a compromising photograph of himself and his former lover, the opera singer Irene Adler (Daniela Vlaskalic) before it can be used to upset his forthcoming marriage to a Scandinavian princess. It transpires that Irene is not the one who wants to blackmail the King, but Irene’s new husband James Larrabee (Murray Furrow) and his sister Madge (Shauna Black), who are member of the criminal organization led by Professor Moriarty (Mark Caven).

The story of the photograph ought to be over when Holmes finds it, but for obscure reasons the photograph winds up again in the hands of the Larrabees who then uses it to lure Holmes into the gas chamber trap taken from Gillette’s play. While the set-up for the trap is elaborate, Holmes’s avoidance of danger is so easy as to be disappointing.

The role of Irene Adler also should end in Act 1, but Dietz has her insist that she has unfinished business with the King and must accompany Holmes and Watson to the Continent. This makes no sense because she earlier claimed that she would not blackmail the King with the photo and Holmes has already praised her for this reason. Dietz’s contrivance, of course, is to get Irene to Reichenbach Falls to witness with Watson the events there. He also uses her presence for quite an awkwardly written scene where Holmes attempt to confess his love for the singer by giving her treatises on arcane subjects. If Holmes were to fall in love, it seems far more likely that he would announce it to a woman simply as a matter of fact rather than embarrassing himself as Dietz imagines.

Geordie Johnson makes for a very dashing Holmes. He has that quality of Jeremy Brett in the famed Granada television series of seeming to be thinking several steps ahead of what he is actually telling those around him. He communicates Holmes’s intensity and quicksilver temperament perfectly. Ashley Wright is a wonderfully warm Dr. Watson. It’s difficult to make an ordinary good-hearted person interesting on stage, but Wright accomplishes this through the concern he has for Holmes as a friend and through the urgency he lends his role as narrator.

Of the other characters the most impressive is Mark Caven, who plays Moriarty as a kind of Nosferatu-like being--gaunt but physically powerful with an unusually deep voice. As is true of fictional master criminals in general, one wonders why a man said to be Holmes’s intellectual equal employs such oafish people to carry out his plans. Murray Furrow makes Larrabee into such a clown it’s hard to see how someone as brilliant as Irene would ever consent to marry him. Shauna Black’s talents are pretty much wasted in the underwritten role of Madge whose main characteristic is smoking electronic cigarettes. Ron Pederson, however, hits the right note as the safecracker Sid Prince by managing to seem both comic and competent at once.

Daniela Vlaskalic manages to appear as forceful and perceptive as she is described, so much so we wonder why, Holmes excepted, she has such bad taste in men. Richard Clarkin is quite terrible as the King of Bohemia. Neither he nor director Ted Dykstra has kept in mind that Irene once thought him worthy of her love when they were young. Therefore he cannot be as aged and idiotic as Clarkin plays him. And he should really settle on an accent from at least one European country rather than taking us on a Cook’s tour in every sentence.

Designer Patrick Clark has dealt with the challenge of so many locations through clever means, both flying in decorated flats and using parallel sliding trucks to great effect, making the scene changes almost more exciting than the play. His costumes, particularly for Irene are beautifully detailed. All his work is enhanced by Louise Guinand’s lighting that is the prime factor in establishing atmosphere and mood.

Ted Dykstra’s direction is efficient but not as detailed or imaginative as it could be. Anyone unhappy with the decision to turn Holmes and Watson into action heroes in the recent movie, will be happy to see these iconic figures much more faithfully embodied in Johnson and Wright and they will certain approve of Caven as the mysterious Moriarty. It’s a pity the play is not better, but if one does come along, or indeed a new series, I’d certainly want to see these three in it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Geordie Johnson as Sherlock Holmes. ©2011 Roy Timm.

For tickets, visit www.theatreaquarius.org.

Rigoletto

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:36:29 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Christopher Alden
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
September 29-October-22, 2011

“Ah! la maledizione!”

First thoughts: For the Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, Michael Levine has created a gorgeous set and costumes that drew immediate applause. Yet, though Levine and director Christopher Alden have moved the action from the 16th to the 19th century, this Rigoletto is still a modern production. As the opera progresses, the extraordinarily detailed realism of the first scene gives way to progressively less naturalistic staging. The enormous wood-panelled room with the deeply coffered ceiling looks like the lounge of a posh gentlemen’s club, but, like the single room in Alden’s Der fliegende Holländer for the COC, this space serves as the setting for the entire opera.

It rapidly becomes apparent that what we see on stage is Rigoletto’s memory, or perhaps his recurring nightmare, of the events that led to his daughter Gilda’s death. Rigoletto’s idée fixe that Monterone’s curse is to blame is a way of avoiding the truth. Alden makes clear that not just the lascivious Duke but his entire corrupt “gentlemen’s club” of followers and all who aid and abet them, including Rigoletto, share responsibility for the tragedy. Alden and Levine set up a plush Victorian façade only to reveal the ugliness it conceals.

The three young leads on opening night were all making their COC debuts. Most impressive is Hawaiian Quinn Kelsey in the title role. The strength of his warm, rich baritone, his passionate delivery and fine acting are sure to secure him a bright future. Russian Ekaterina Sadovnikova makes a very convincing Gilda, with a coloratura secure and beautiful even in its highest reaches. Dimitri Pittas has a steely tenor that perfectly suits the cold-hearted Duke. These three play in alternation with Lester Lynch, Simone Osborne and David Lomelí, respectively. Johannes Debus led the COC Orchestra in a fiery account of the score. First-timers will need to read the synopsis to understand the action, but those who already know the work will find that Alden and Levine have brought to the fore the criticism of social and sexual hierarchies implicit in the story.

Addendum: Christopher Alden’s new production for the COC is based on his 2000 production for the Chicago Lyric Opera. On October 19, 2011, the Editor of Opera News pointed out to me that that production was so controversial the CLO refused to revive it*. This information cooled my view of Alden’s work. Is Alden incapable of imagining a new production specifically for the COC? Why should Toronto become the dumping ground for productions rejected by other companies?

©Christopher Hoile

*See John von Rhein, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-01-23/features/0601230029_1_rigoletto-verdi-lyric-opera.

Note: My full review of Rigoletto will appear in the December 2011 issue of Opera News online.
Photo: Ekaterina Sadovnikova and Quinn Kelsey. ©2011 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.

Chess

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:31:19 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
music by Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus, book and lyrics by Tim Rice, directed by Craig Revel Horwood
Michael Harrison & Mirvish Productions,
Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
September 28-October 30, 2011

“Gambit Accepted”

Chess is one of those strange musicals much loved on disc but seldom seen. The fact that Mirvish Productions has brought a production of Chess to Toronto will be reason enough for fans to flock to it. As the last stop on a tour that began in Newcastle, UK, in 2010, it has arrived here completely intact with its British cast. The score has often been acclaimed as one of the best of the 20th century. It is Tim Rice’s book that has been the problem and it has been altered virtually every time the musical has been presented. The current production does not solve all the musical’s problems and adds in some of its own, but it does give a glimpse of what the ideal Chess might be like.

As directed by Craig Revel Horwood, the current Chess hews most closely to the West End version that premiered in 1986 rather than the heavily revised Broadway version of 1988. Act 1 focusses on a fictional 1979 World Chess Championship match in Merano, Italy, between the American Freddie Trumper (James Fox) defending his title and the Russian Anatoly Sergievsky (Tam Mutu). During the course of the tournament Freddie’s second and lover Florence (Shona White) falls in love with Anatoly and Freddie loses his title. Act 2 is set the following year in Bangkok where Anatoly, who has defected to the UK, must defend his title against another Russian player. Behind the scenes manipulation by CIA agent and television presenter Walter De Courcey (James Graeme) and KGB agent and the Russian’s second Alexander Molokov (Steve Varnom), involve bringing Svetlana (Rebecca Lock), the wife Anatoly left in Russia, to Bangkok and promising freedom for Florence’s father whom she thought dead.

As a simple summary shows, there is just too much plot. In Act 2 when the problems posed in Act 1 ought to be developed, Rice introduces new characters and new plot points. The show already has the obvious symbolism of chess as a game between East and West and the plot as the manipulation of people as if they were chess pieces. In terms of structure the musical has two narrators--the Arbiter (David Erik), who makes pronouncements about chess and walks about looking ominous, and Walter De Courcey, who updates us on times and places through his new broadcasts. Horwood’s version also lays on a heavy and unnecessary satire of the media for not only fanning but initiating fiery news stories. The weight of the symbolic/satiric framework and the fact that the central characters have little chance to make their own decisions means that we don’t get to know the characters well enough to become involved in their fate.

Faced with these problems a director should try to bring the human side of the drama as much to the fore as possible. Instead of doing this, Horwood adds on yet another layer of abstraction by having the cast play the orchestral accompaniment as John Doyle did in his famous revival of Sweeney Todd in 2004. A key scene is thus made slightly ridiculous when Anatoly is torn between Svetlana playing the clarinet and Florence banging sticks.

The challenge of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’ near-operatic score is to create visuals that adequately reflect it. Here, the design of Christopher Woods mingles good and bad ideas. As a touring production it has been built to fit the smallest of the British venues which is clearly much smaller that the stage opening of the Princess of Wales Theatre. The action thus appears unnecessarily cramped in the middle of the stage. Adding to this, Woods has given the set a square raised dais in the centre. Obviously, this stage-within-a-stage is meant to reflect a chessboard, but having the central portion of the stage raised also inhibits movement. Only six people across can stand on it and fewer across can dance there. The most complex dancing is forced into the narrow strip between the dais and the proscenium.

Woods has cleverly dressed the chorus/orchestra as chess pieces, black versus white, that Horwood as director uses to amplify the interpersonal conflicts on stage. As choreographer, however, Horwood never takes full advantage of the costuming. On the one hand, Woods’s set prevents it, on the other Horwood allows the chorus simply to look on at the various chess matches for far too long when he could have them acting out the moves on stage. In general, Horwood’s choreography never rises to the level of inventiveness of the music, so that “One Night in Bangkok”, which ought to start off Act 2 with a bang, is a rather sad affair of the semiclad chorus half-heartedly feigning sexual abandon.

As Freddie, James Fox has the high, strangled cat kind of voice most often heard in heavy metal bands. Luckily, when he’s not straining for volume, he can be very effective as in “Pity the Child” in which he accompanies himself on the guitar. As Florence, Shona White is a belter who sounds remarkably like Cindi Lauper but with a wider range. Her emotional performance of “Nobody’s on Nobody’s Side” stops the show and for that moment at least gathers the musical’s potential into one powerful statement. White comes through again and again with each of her numbers though her duet with Anatoly, “You and I”, is spoiled by Horwood’s attempt to make the essentially reflective song into a playful romp.

Good as White is in her Broadway approach, the nature of Andersson and Ulvaeus’ music really requires voices of a more operatic quality. In that realm Tam Mutu as Anatoly and Rebecca Lock as his wife shine brilliantly. Mutu has a rich, strong baritone that makes “Anthem” into a truly stirring conclusion to Act 1. He also possesses the most natural acting style of the cast that insures our empathy with his character. Lock’s clear soprano make’s “Someone Else’s Story” into a fine introduction to a character who really appears too late in the action, and her duet with Florence, “I Know Him So Well”, is one of the show’s highlights. The chorus proves amazingly adept at its double duties as singers and musicians.

The upside of Horwood’s production is that all of its various flaws can be remedied, suggesting that Chess is not as hopelessly unstageworthy as some people think. What the principals need is more stage time to develop their characters and their relationships. Horwood could afford to take a page out of Des McAnuff’s direction of Jesus Christ Superstar at Stratford this year and explore the characters more fully through silent interactions during music in which they are not involved. Why not introduce Svetlana silently in Act 1 to prepare for her arrival in Act 2?

Opportunities to see a full production of Chess on stage are so rare that no fan of musicals will want to miss this chance. The score drawing on influences from Haydn to Prokofiev to rock puts the vast majority of modern musicals in the shade. Musically, Horwood’s production is nearly flawless. Dramatically, the flaws in Rice’s book are still too evident. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to see Horwood’s production as showing the way forward to a solution.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Original UK production with David Erik (centre). ©2010 Keith Pattinson.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

The Maids

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:42:42 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Jean Genet, translated by Martin Crimp,
directed by Brendan Healy
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
September 22-October 9, 2011

“Maids to Order”

Buddies in Bad Times has opened its 20011/12 season with Jean Genet’s The Maids (Les Bonnes) from 1947, one of the central texts of queer drama and of 20th-century drama in general. Healy guides a top-notch cast through his elegant, stylized approach to the play, one totally in keeping with its theme of ritual.

The play was inspired by a real murder case in Paris in 1933 in which two sisters who worked as maids murdered their employer and her daughter. Such a crime had a special resonance in France that had seen one of the world’s most famous rebellions of the poor against the rich. While the critique of social inequality inherent in the subject still informs the play, Genet’s focus is trained on the fantasy world of the two sisters as produced by a life of servitude and disdain.

Though the two sisters Solange (Diane D’Aquila) and Claire (Ron Kennell) are ideal maids by day, every night when their mistress, Madame (Maria Ricossa), is away, they rehearse the day’s events with Claire playing Madame and Solange playing Claire. Murdering Madame is always the conclusion. Their nightly “ceremony”, as they call it, has gained some urgency since they wrote anonymous letters to the police implicating Madame’s boyfriend in a theft he did not commit. They know that’s only a matter of time before the police trace the handwriting to them. There is also the danger that in playing their game the maids will get too caught up in their roles as victim and killer.

Genet’s intention was that the three women would be played by three adolescent boys, thus adding a further layer of role-playing to the action. Director Brendan Healy makes a nod in this direction by casting Ron Kennell as Claire. Doing this, in fact, makes the play even richer than Genet’s idea since we don’t know whether he is addressed as feminine by Solange and Madame because he is a gay, effeminate male or whether Healy is using a male Claire as a distancing device. Since designer Julie Fox has given Claire trousers instead of a skirt for his maid’s outfit, Healy likely seeks both effects.

The performances are uniformly excellent. It is great to see Kennell finally given a major role after years of subsidiary parts at Stratford. You might think that there is no one less likely to be cast as feminine, but Kennell’s change in tone of voice and repertoire of gestures makes him surprisingly believable. Diane D’Aquila is unusual in having a background in both naturalistic and non-naturalistic acting styles. She neatly pitches her performance more towards the first when she is playing Solange and more toward the second when she is playing Claire in the “ceremony”. We might have thought that Claire’s impersonation of Madame was extravagant, but when Maria Ricossa appears, we see at once how deadly accurate he was. In a play about role-playing, Ricossa perfectly captures Madame’s penchant for self-dramatization. In the mirrored world of the play, Claire is imitating a woman who is nothing but a collection of dramatic poses. Ricossa also conveys beautifully how fundamentally insulting Madame’s unconsciously patronizing attitude to her servants really is.

Fox’s starkly symmetrical all-pink set reflects the multiple symmetries in Genet’s plot and the over-the-top femininity of Madame. Kimberley Purtell’s lighting is, as usual, exquisite.

If there is a flaw in the production it is when Healy allows Claire, whom we suppose to be dead, to rise from Madame’s bed and stand by Solange during her final soliloquy. By so doing, Healy emphasizes the play-as-play which is already implicit in Genet’s heightened language. However, he also destroys Genet’s carefully construct scenario where the maids confuse reality and illusion. Healy’s ploy prevents us from asking the question central to the conclusion whether Solange and Claire have acted consciously or unconsciously in their actions.

This error aside, this production of The Maids is one of the best you are ever likely to see, since Healy makes clear that the maids can imagine a revolution of servant against master but cannot see past master and servant as a social structure. As Genet suggests, a real revolution demands envisioning another structure altogether.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Ron Kennell and Maria Ricossa. ©2011 Jeremy Mimnagh.

For tickets, visit www.buddiesinbadtimes.com.

His Greatness

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:55:33 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Daniel MacIvor, directed by Ed Roy
independent Artists Repertory Theatre, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
September 22-October 23, 2011

“Blow Out Your Candles, Laura”

Daniel MacIvor’s 2007 play, His Greatness, only now having its Toronto premiere, marks a major change in style for MacIvor and will intrigue his many fans for that very reason. In conception and execution it is deliberately old-fashioned and, unlike any previous MacIvor play, features an historical character. Its subtitle is, “A potentially true story about the playwright Tennessee Williams”.

The background to the play involves Tennessee Williams’ stay in Vancouver as a Writer in Residence at the University of British Columbia in 1980. MacIvor sets the play in the hotel room where Williams is staying at a time just before and after the Vancouver premiere of his revision of his play The Red Devil Battery Sign that had opened in Boston in 1975 to scathing reviews. There, a man known only as “Assistant” (Daniel MacIvor), who has been Williams’ personal secretary-cum-nurse-cum valet for fifteen years, tries to rouse the “Playwright” (Richard Donat) from yet another alcohol-induced stupor to face the day. One of the Assistant’s duties is to procure a Young Man (Greg Gale) to escort the Playwright to the premiere and to entertain him afterwards.

One enters the Factory Studio Theatre to discover one of the most expensive-looking naturalistic sets ever seen there. Kimberley Purtell, also the lighting designer, has created a remarkable facsimile of an upscale yet slightly worn hotel room somewhere not unlike the Hotel Vancouver. Though known for her expressionistic light for other directors, here Purtell notes with exquisite precision the progress of the daylight penetrating the room through a large window and the effect of the various small lamps inside the room.

Such detailed naturalism is, of course, quite unnecessary in MacIvor’s other plays, many of which require only a bare stage. MacIvor’s purpose is to write a play about Williams in the style of one of Williams’ own plays. The play begins and concludes with the Assistant directly addressing the audience--first to set the time and place of the action, then to tell us what happens after the events of the play.

The relation of the action to Williams’ The Glass Menagerie is confirmed when we hear the assistant’s first words to the sleeping Playwright, “Rise and shine! Rise and Shine!” Those the words Amanda Wingfield uses to wake her son Tom. The near-plotlessness of MacIvor’s play gains resonance through the strange ways it reflects Williams’ first big success. The Assistant is like the practical sides of both Tom and Amanda, determined to keep the household running smoothly despite the recalcitrance of its main inhabitant. The Playwright is like the genteel southern belle still inside Amanda and like asocial Laura, drifting farther away from contact with the outside world. As in The Glass Menagerie, the Assistant has to procure a perverse equivalent to the Gentleman Caller for his helpless Laura. Unlike Jim, this Young Man is hardly clean living, but both have hopes of one day breaking into mass media--Jim into television, the Young Man into porn. The Glass Menagerie also provides a template for understanding the ending of MacIvor’s play.

Donat gives a magnificent performance as the Playwright. He does have a special insight into the character and the situation since he played the male lead, King Del Rey, in the 1980 premiere of Williams’ play and rehearsed in his presence. He presents the Playwright as a wreck of man--grand and grandiloquent when he has get himself together, otherwise by turns childish, cowardly, effeminate, belligerent, fearful, foolish, charming. Donat blends all these quicksilver changes into a unified Falstaffian personality.

As the Young Man, Gale gives us a kind of worldly innocent. He may know all about sex and drugs but of large swaths of human life he’s completely ignorant. The fact that he’s 28 pretending to be 21 shows an underlying sense of insecurity since he realizes he’s reaching his best by date in the hustling market without a backup plan for what to do next. Gale communicates the Young Man’s attempts to cover up his fear with touchingly transparent bravado. His Newfoundland accent shows he’s as out of place in BC as the Playwright and assistant. He gives the Young Man’s late bid to usurp the Assistant’s place just the right degree of menace, just enough to collapse when the Assistant explains the rigors of the job.

MacIvor has strangely written himself the least interesting role. For someone who has widened so much what can be considered a gay play, it’s amusing to see MacIvor take on the caricatured part of the prissy, nannyish minder. We see how the relationship between the Assistant and the Playwright must have begun, but it is less clear why precisely now this relationship is going to end. MacIvor acts as if the Assistant has become totally inured to the steady stream of insults thrown his way by the Playwright, and when the Young man suggests various scenarios for what might happen that night, the Assistant assures him he’s seen it all before. What does not come out either in the play or in MacIvor’s performance is that the Assistant, who says he has seen worse than this, is actually reaching a breaking point. We assume, incorrectly, that he has becomes used to thankless service and maintains a routine for its own sake.

Unlike MacIvor’s other plays, His Greatness does not burst with mounting tension. Rather it is an elegiac study of three men at the end of an age. At first you think the title refers to the Playwright, but MacIvor also applies it ironically to the other two men. The play’s abundant humour makes the action all seem rather more pleasant than it actually is. Only after the play is over does the real sadness of the three men begin to haunt you and you see them as three lonely individuals each finding his own way of confronting despair. When that happens, you realize, “Why, yes, of course, this is a play by Daniel MacIvor.”

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Daniel MacIvor and Richard Donat. ©2011 Seán Baker.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.

Private Lives

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 02:59:41 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Noel Coward, directed by Richard Eyre
Theatre Royal Bath/Mirvish Productions, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto
September 25-October 30, 2011

“Shadow Boxing”

Mirvish Productions is current presenting a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives that began at the Theatre Royal Bath and was a hit in the West End and on tour throughout the UK. The production starred Kim Cattrall and Matthew MacFadyen as the sparring ex-spouses. For the Toronto production MacFadyen, who has numerous credits with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the experimental Cheek by Jowl, has been replaced with Canadian Paul Gross, who hasn’t acted on stage since his Hamlet at Stratford in 2000. It’s a terrible mistake and ruins what could have been a near-ideal production.

Coward’s 1930 comedy opens on adjacent balconies at a hotel on the Riviera. It so chances that Elyot (Gross) and Amanda (Cattrall), now divorced from each other for five years, have each remarried and decided to spend their honeymoons at the same hotel. Elyot has married Sybil (Anna Madeley), a younger more conventionally feminine woman, while Amanda and married Victor (Simon Paisley-Day), an older more conventionally masculine man. Discovering themselves side-by-side again, they rekindle their love and decide to abandon their spouses for a shameless new life together in Paris. With the symmetry of its plotting and the epigrammaticism of its dialogue the play is nearly as consciously artificial as Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

To act this kind of play requires a cast who can make the witticisms of the dialogue sound as spontaneous as possible. Famed British director Richard Eyre is able to elicit such natural performances from the entire cast--except from Gross. It isn’t merely that he can’t make Coward’s wit sound natural--he can’t even make his line delivery natural. He seems never to make eye-contact with anyone he is speaking to. He looks rather as if he were reading his lines off imaginary placards next to the actors’ faces instead of creating a coherent character from whom these lines emanate of their own accord. In posture and gesture, he seems constantly to be posing and admiring himself rather than interacting with anyone else on stage. The negative result is that in his exchanges with Cattrall, when sparks of alternating love and hate ought to be flying, nothing happens. Cattrall might as well be speaking to a brick wall. When Gross first appears with Madeley as Sybil, it’s hard to believe the two even know each other much less that they’re married. In contrast, there is so much more interaction between Cattrall and Paisley-Day that his Victor, not Gross’s Elyot, comes off as the more fully rounded character.

Were it not for this major flaw, the production is imaginatively conceived and beautifully executed. Cattrall may be better know for her television role in Sex and the City, but she is thoroughly at home on stage. In fact, hers the most vivacious. intriguingly complex Amanda of the last three I’ve seen. The establishes Amanda’s mercurial nature at once and thus immediately explains that someone like her would marry a stodgy fellow like Victor in hopes of more stability. Yet, stability is not really in her nature and the very fluidity of her line delivery and her gestural language shows that she is roiling with a wider variety of moods than any one man could handle. Her performance is a triumph.

The secondary couple is also excellent. Elyot may have wanted in Sybil an easier-to-manage woman than Amanda, but Madeley humorously reveals that with this simplicity comes an intransigence and lack of imagination far below Elyot’s intellectual level. Meanwhile, Paisley-Day is probably the most sympathetic Victor I’ve seen. He may be a dull old-fogey, but Paisley-Day shows that in loving Amanda he is capable of recognizing beauty even if it is too volatile for him to keep. He has great comic timing and can wring more humour out of his silences than Gross can from his lines. Caroline Lena Olsson does a fine job of avoiding caricature in the small part of Amanda’s grumpy French-speaking maid.

Designer Rob Howell’s costumes are a delight and perfectly capture the changes of mood of his characters--from the slinky felinity of Amanda’s honeymoon evening gown to the decisiveness of her smart blue suit at the end. His set for Amanda’s Paris apartment is a hoot, a swirling Art Deco crossed with Dr. Seuss, that whimsically reflects the kind of fantasy environment most suitable for two such free-spirited characters.

With Cattrall wielding all her arsenal of femininity and wit as Amanda, it’s a shame that the producers could not find an actor better suited to be her sparring partner. Canadians may like Paul Gross because of his television and film work, but if this Private Lives is to succeed on Broadway, Gross will have to be replaced with someone who can do better than mechanically utter lines and lurch about the stage. There’s no battle of the sexes when you have the quintessence of womanhood in one corner and a poseur in the other.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross. ©2011 Hugo Glendinning.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

Iphigénie en Tauride

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:59:15 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Christoph Willibald Gluck, directed by Robert Carsen
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
September 22-October 15, 2011

“Black on Black”

There can be very few cities to have seen two different stagings of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride within the last three years, but Toronto, luckily, is one of them. Opera Atelier gave the 1779 opera its Toronto professional premiere in 2003 and remounted the work in 2009. Now the Canadian Opera Company, that staged its very first Gluck just earlier this year with Orfeo ed Euridice, has launched its new season with Robert Carsen’s production from 2006 owned by several companies. The production features gorgeous singing from the principals and the chorus. Visually, however, it’s stultifying.

Carsen’s production employs a concept that I have seen far too often and have never found satisfying--namely, to present an opera or play deliberately in a visual impoverished, or in this case, oppressive setting, with the sole goal of setting up a visual transformation at the very end. We had an example of this technique just earlier this year in the COC’s Ariadne auf Naxos, when the entire opera-within-the-opera was played on a tatty, cobbled-together set, only to be whisked away in the final moments to reveal a star-strewn vista. The problem is that director Neil Armfield in the case of Ariadne auf Naxos and Carsen in the case of Iphigénie have sacrificed visual interest during the entire course of the opera for a single theatrical effect at the end. Such a sacrifice is not worth it. It is unfair to the audience and to the opera.

Tobias Hoheisel’s design for Carsen’s Iphigénie is particularly stark. The set consists of the floor and three sides of a black box. In this modern dress productions, all the women, including Iphigénie, are barefoot and wear identical black, plain, one-piece dresses. All the men wear black--long-sleeved shirt, trousers, belt--and are barefoot when meant to be vulnerable or socks and shoes when not. Oreste and Pylade, the foreigners, are not distinguished in dress from the others. Thoas wear a large black coat to show his authority but his men wear identical black coats when accompanying him. Needless to say, watching a production entirely in black on black for the majority of two hours is extraordinarily tedious. The design necessarily forces us to focus on the performers’ faces and hands, but even then Carsen has the principals sing facing away from the audience at key moments.

The meaning of the box is clear. Iphigénie, her brother Oreste and his friend Pylade find their lives still constrained by the curse on the house of Atreus. Oreste believes that Iphigénie has been sacrificed by her father Agamemnon at Aulis, not knowing that Diana substituted a simulacrum for her and whisked the girl to safety in Taurus. Now Thoas, ruler of Tauris has had a dream that he will be killed by a foreigner and so commands any new arrivals be sacrificed. Of course, Oreste and Pylade are the first foreigners to arrive after the decree.

The meaning of all the black is clear. Gluck wanted to reform opera to bring it back to the simplicity of the Greeks and the opera is a tragedy, albeit with a happy ending. Yet, even the Greeks were never as stark as this. They plays took place in the daylight and they and used colourful three-sided periaktoi to indicate change of place. Aside from the shadowplay created by lighting designers Carsen and Peter Van Praet or the various writhings of the dancers, there is little reason to look at the stage since its monochromaticity enhances neither narrative nor character.

Carsen has placed the singing chorus in the pit and uses a chorus of dancers on stage to generally confusing effect. When they lie on the ground it’s unclear whether they are asleep or dead. The priestesses can suddenly turn into the Furies who pursue Oreste as can the prone populace into snakes. At the end when the people are supposed to be rejoicing, Iphigénie is surrounded by seemingly dead bodies and Oreste and Pylade who ought to be celebrating with her and each other rush away from her in opposite directions. It does not make sense.

Fortunately, the singing of Susan Graham in the title role is magnificent. Not only is her voice warm and radiant but she has a beautiful sense of line and breathtaking command of dynamics. Russell Braun in fine voice throws himself into the role of Oreste with even more intensity than usual, giving the most naturalistically detailed performance on stage. As Pylade, Joseph Kaiser appearing at last again in Toronto after achieving fame elsewhere, has a wonderfully passionate, multihued voice ideal for the character. Carsen does not go as far as Opera Atelier in depicting Oreste and Pylade’s true passionate relationship and thus places Pylade too often in the situation of trying to get close to Oreste, who repeatedly casts him off. Thoas is Mark S. Doss, who wields a sepulchral bass and a vibrato that tends to obscure his diction.

Conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, last on the podium for Nixon in China, leads the COC Orchestra in traversal of the score with a very narrow dynamic range, as if the work were all forte and fortissimo. He does attempt to lighten the orchestral texture but he is not as successful at this as Harry Bickett was in Orfeo, and in general the sound remains overly heavy.

If one has to compare the OA and COC productions there is simply no doubt that the OA production is far superior in storytelling and in eliciting a wider range of detailed acting from its performers that makes their changing emotional states much clearer. While it wonderful to see such performers as Graham, Braun and Kaiser in such fine form on stage they may as well be performing the opera in concert given the clothes they wear and the box they stand in. One feels that they, like their characters, are trapped by an oppressive regime that inhibits rather than supports full enjoyment of their gifts.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in The WholeNote Blog, 2011-09-24.
Photo: Susan Graham as Iphigénie. ©2011 John Currid.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.

In the Next Room or the vibrator play

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 03:37:37 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre & The Manitoba Theatre Centre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
September 21-October 23, 2011

“Low Voltage”

The Tarragon Theatre has opened its 41st season with a handsome production of an insubstantial play. The way the title for Sarah Ruhl’s play In the Next Room or the vibrator play spells out the play’s subject typifies the whole play’s self-satisfied attitude by saying “Look how we can talk about naughty things that the benighted Victorians could not.” It’s a play that can’t decide if it should be an overt sex farce or a poetic examination of male-female relations in a male-dominated society--and so winds up as neither.

The subject of the play is hysteria, deriving from the Greek ὑστέρα for uterus, since from ancient times into the 20th century it was in that anatomical region that the problem of emotional excess was believed to originate. It was accordingly thought of as a woman’s disease and from ancient times the treatment was massage of the female genitalia to cause “paroxysms” of release. Unsurprisingly, since the patient felt much better afterwards, the treatment was thought to work and reinforced the correctness the of disease’s origins.

Ruhl sets her play in a spa town in New York in the 1880s just after the advent of electricity. Time-consuming manual “pelvic massage”, as it was called, has now been replaced with the much more fast-acting electric vibrator. Dr. Givings (David Storch) is in the forefront in using this technology in the surgery he has in his own home. The first patient we meet is Sabrina Daldry (Melody A. Johnson), who complaints of listlessness, nervousness and sighting ghosts in the drapes. Dr. Givings immediately diagnoses as hysteria. Though fearful at first, Mrs. Daldry’s first treatment is so successful in calming her and restoring a rosy glow to her cheeks that she soon becomes enthusiastic about her daily sessions.

Meanwhile, Dr. Givings’ wife Catherine (Trish Lindström) has just had a baby and can’t supply enough milk for it. The Daldry’s black housekeeper Elizabeth (Marci T. House) has just lost a baby and so becomes a wetnurse for the Givingses. This leaves Catherine with nothing to do but wonder what all those ecstatic sounds are that emanate from the next room and, when she sees it, what the machine is that her husband has and how to use it.

As might be expected the vast majority of the play’s humour derives from the use of the electric vibrator--a wonderful large Dr. Seuss-like floor model (a triumph for Head of Props Lokki Ma) that plugs into the lamp overhead. The fun comes from the contrast between the completely dispassionate expression of Dr. Givings and the surprised pleasure of the patient--both, apparently, entirely ignorant that this medical procedure has involved erotic pleasure. The problem with this is that the play is nothing but the repetition of the same joke. As a variation, Ruhl introduces the artist Leo Irving (Jonathan Watton), a patient with a rare case of male hysteria, who takes the extraordinarily unlikely step for the period of agreeing with Givings’ diagnosis and submitting to his treatment. (Though he’s thoroughly heterosexual, at the time admitting to “male hysteria” was tantamount to admitting homosexuality.) Ruhl has patients become involved with the Givings household in various farfetched ways that one might accept if she were willing to frame her play as a farce but she veers from this because she also wants to depict Catherine’s loneliness seriously.

Director Richard Rose’s stop-and-start pacing only emphasizes Ruhl’s unsuccessful mixture of tones. He also seems unable to help the actors fill out Ruhl’s two-dimensional characters. Lindström, who has given many excellent performances elsewhere, here displays pointlessly frenetic activity instead of gradating her character’s reactions. Storch gives so little sign of any emotion stirring under his businesslike façade as to make his turnabout by the play’s ending unbelievable. Johnson is very good at depicting Mrs. Daldry’s varying levels of therapeutic enjoyment, but can’t seem to give her character life outside the surgery. Ross McMillan does little with the unvaried cliché of male chauvinism that Ruhl has given him, while Elizabeth Saunders does as much as she can with the thankless role of the nurse Annie, who does little for most of the play but dress and undress the doctor’s examining table.

On the other hand, Watton is able to make the rather fantastical artist at least partially believable and, unlike the others, to attract our interest in his actions. As one might expect from a political correct author, Ruhl is unwilling to have humour extend to a black woman present in a serving position so that Elizabeth becomes the only stable, morally-centred character in the play. House plays her with earnestness and dignity suggesting that Ruhl might have written a far more engaging work if she could have forgotten about vibrators and focussed solely on the complex relation between a wetnurse recovering from the death of her baby and a flighty new mother.

David Boechler has created a beautiful set divided exactly in half as two rooms, including wittily dividing a single pouf into two distinct styles. Ruhl’s use of a divided set offers all sorts of theatrical possibilities--such as interlocking dialogues as in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros or juxtaposing parallel or contrasting scenes--but she makes no use of them, simply switching attention from one room to the other and back. For Ruhl the divided set is a visual symbol, and nothing more, of the clichéd view that Victorians kept procreation and sexual pleasure in separate compartments. With an attractive design and a cast with lots of potential, all that is missing is a fine play. Ignorant, repressed Victorians are such an easy target. If only Ruhl could imagine how people 100 years hence will view our practices, she might be less smug.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Trish Lindström, David Storch, Elizabeth Saunders (standing) and Melody A. Johnson (on table). ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.

Totem

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 16:49:14 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Robert Lepage
Cirque du Soleil, Grand Chapiteau, Port Lands, Toronto
August 11-October 9, 2011

“So, this one didn’t really have a story”. “If it did, I couldn’t figure it out”. “Just lots of cool stuff”. “Yeah”. This conversation between a young couple leaving the Grand Chapiteau after Cirque du Soleil’s latest show Totem pretty well summed up my feelings. Though written and directed by the famed Robert Lepage, this show has one of the weakest narratives of any Cirque show in recent memory. Cirque du Soleil became famous not merely by doing away with animal acts but by setting the human acts in some sort of narrative structure. With Totem the story is such a mishmash it is really better just to concentrate on the “cool stuff”.

According to the press information, “TOTEM traces the fascinating journey of the human species from its original amphibian state to its ultimate desire to fly. The characters evolve on a stage evoking a giant turtle, the symbol of origin for many ancient civilizations. Inspired by many founding myths, TOTEM illustrates, through a visual and acrobatic language, the evolutionary progress of species. Somewhere between science and legend TOTEM explores the ties that bind Man to other species, his dreams and his infinite potential”.

That may sound very fine, but it’s almost impossible to see these ideas implemented in any consistent fashion. The show begins when a a cloth whisks away from a huge structure of bones meant to suggest the carapace of a giant turtle. Into this structure an acrobat known as the Crystal Man (Joseph David Putignano), looking like a human mirror ball descends and starts the lizard-like gymnasts below into action. Thus, apparently according to Lepage, life did not evolve from single-celled organisms in the sea but rather from the effect of disco on amphibians. Oh well, that’s fine since the amphibians launch into such an exciting routine using the two horizontal bars that are part of the carapace with the hidden trampoline beneath. At times there are two gymnasts per bar, all four crossing in mid-air from one bar to the next. It’s too bad the carapace prevents a full views of their movements.

This is immediately followed by an intricate hoop dance performed by Nakotah Raymond Larance, suggesting we have jumped a few millennia forward from the beginnings of life to human civilization. Next we leap to the present to a beach in front of the upstage bank of reeds that hide the orchestra. Here the show’s main clown, Pippo Crotti--one of the most annoying and least funny clowns in any Cirque show--encounters two hunks with fauxhawks and boomboxes (Yann Arnaud and Gael Ouisse) getting ready to deepen their tans. Crotti’s one-joke humour is that, shrimpy and pasty white as he is, he is so macho (and Italian) that he doesn’t notice the obvious difference between himself and the beefy guys on stage.

The gymnastic trio ring act that follows with Arnaud, Ouisse and Alevtyna Titarenko, picks up the image of the hoops and the idea of flying that precede it, but as far as the story of evolution goes, the narrative seems to have concluded after only three acts. The performers of the final Russian bar act enter with lit space helmets on and a view of the earth in the distance as if seen from the moon. Their weird makeup, colourful bodysuits, strange ear coverings and ability to function without the helmets might suggest some further evolution of man, but what happens between the rings trio and the Russian bar is too confused even to be called a narrative.

Popping up without purpose throughout the show after the rings trio are various apes (the simian lead played by Putignano); a red-faced character and devil sticks manipulator called the Tracker (Ante Ursic), who unlike any tracker I’ve seen wears a red frock coat and top hat that lights up when he removes it; a character called the Scientist (Greg Kennedy); and a welcome reappearance of the Amerindian hoop dancer Larance along with various unwelcome reappearances of Signor Crotti.

Undermining the sense of structure beside the weak storyline is the ordering of the acts. The highlights of show are not the big group performances that close the first and second acts. The most effective performance in the show is the wonderful fixed trapeze duo by Louis-David Simoneau and Rosalie Ducharme. Unlike all the other acts, these two use their considerable gymnastic gifts to tell their own story. Their interplay begins when Ducharme has to share the same trapeze with Simoneau. He is first put out then pleased with the idea and begins to make advances toward Ducharme, while she fends him off until finally succumbing to his charms. This leads to an intricately choreographed series of lifts, falls and catches that seem to be a natural expression of the performers’ acting. It’s so well conceived and performed you’d immediately like to see it all over again.

Perhaps the most unusual act consists of five Chinese girls on unicycles who kick bowls, sometimes sets of bowls, with their free feet into stacks balanced on top of their heads. The precision and speed they use in this odd performance is amazing and builds to a climax that is at once, satisfying, humorous and incredible.

As for a traditional circus act performed to perfection, I’d single out the foot juggling sisters Marina and Svetlana Tsodikova. You may have seen antipodists juggling square carpets before but the Tsodikova sisters take this to another level cycling the carpets from hands to feet and tossing theme back and forth between them. The climax sees the one lift the other with her feet while both are still juggling.

American Greg Kennedy, a former engineer, is already well-known in juggling circles for his significant innovations in the art of juggling. He gives us a taste of his abilities when he propels hemispherical bowls of different sizes around himself so that we notice how their orbits and speeds correspond to their size. His invention and masterpiece is a display of conical surface juggling. In his guise as the Scientist he enters the base of an eight-foot tall inverted plexiglass cone. Inside he rolls balls that can change colour by radio control at various speeds and trajectories around the cone’s interior. The balls whizz around his body in ever changing patterns eventually making Kennedy look like he has become the nucleus of an atom surrounded by orbiting electrons.

The other acts though all well-performed can’t compete in terms of imagination with these four. One clown, the Ukrainian Mykhaylo Usov, does perform a genuinely funny, old school pantomime routine about fishing in Act 1, but in Act 2 he is teamed with Signor Crotti for a simulation of waterskiing, Usov steering the boat, which has little to do with clowning and more to do with showing off the show’s main technical innovation, the “scorpion bridge”, that usually extends from the upstage pod as a standard ramp for entrances but can also curl itself up like a scorpion’s tail to open a space beneath it. Usov’s speedboat is just the tip of the “bridge” and all the ups and downs are merely mechanical manipulation.

Those attending Totem because they love the work of Robert Lepage will be disappointed. The show manifests so little of his style, you would never know Lepage was involved. Only in the interactions of performers with the videos projected on the surface of the upstage pod is their any hint of his current preoccupations. Even then, he uses this technique too seldom and its effects can best be seen only by those sitting farther back in the auditorium.

Cirque du Soleil currently has twenty productions either touring or in fixed locations around the world, with a new one to open this month and another to open in October. They can’t all be equally imaginative or exciting. Of the shows recently to visit Toronto, I would rank Totem behind both Koozå (2007) and Ovo (2009), with Koozå being one of the best in a long while. While it may not be top-drawer Cirque show, I would have hated to miss the Chinese unicyclists, the Tsodikova sisters, Greg Kennedy and especially Simoneau and Ducharme.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo (top): Nakotah Raymond Larance. ©2010 Daniel Desmarais.
Photo (middle): Rosalie Ducharme and Louis-David Simoneau. ©2010 Daniel Auclair.

For tickets, visit www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/shows/totem/tickets.aspx.

MacHomer

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:46:36 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Rick Miller, directed by Sean Lynch
Wyrd Productions, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
September 13-25, 2011

As many people must already know, Rick Miller’s MacHomer, a solo show he has been touring around the world since 1994, consists of his performing Shakespeare’s Macbeth using the voices of the characters of the long-running animated television series The Simpsons. Now I must admit that I have never seen a single episode of The Simpsons. I do know who some of the characters are just because it’s hard not to encounter them and their names when a show has been on television continuously since 1989. Knowing that I was going to the review the show, I thought I ought to rent the first few seasons of the series to prepare. But then I thought, first, that boning up for a few hours would still not put me in the position of a loyal fan and, second, that my very lack of knowledge could actually be a benefit. If a show is truly good it should appeal to audience whether it knows about the subject or not. You didn’t have to be an expert in quantum physics to enjoy Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, so why should you have to be an expert in The Simpsons to enjoy MacHomer?

As it turns out, knowing The Simpsons is not really necessary to enjoying MacHomer. Rick Miller uses over fifty voices in the show, many of them not related to the series at all. Knowing the show would help you judge the accuracy of his imitations, but that is all. In fact, every time a new character in introduced his picture and name are displayed on a screen behind Miller. What is abundantly clear is that Miller is an astoundingly talented performer, able to project a greater number of distinct voices in only 75 minutes than any other solo performer I’ve seen.

The show is amazing on purely a technical level. Behind Miller is an animated background, beautifully designed in flat TV cartoon style by Miller and Craig Francis Designs, and in front is a video camera hidden in the TV set-cum-cauldron. The interaction of live action with the background, live video and Beth Kates’ dramatic lighting cues is flawless--except when Miller’s microphone shorted causing an unintended intermission that disturbed no one. Often the visual jokes trump anything that is being said as when MacHomer’s medieval castle is shown to have two nuclear reactors in it as its keeps.

What is necessary to enjoy the show is a good knowledge of Shakespeare’s play. The combination of constantly changing funny voices and accents with Shakespeare’s words and Miller’s interpolations means that rather little of the text is clear. If you don’t know the play, you won’t understand what is happening, and if you don’t know Shakespeare, you won’t get Miller’s jokes about Shakespeare’s vocabulary or Miller’s allusions to other the Bard’s plays like Romeo and Juliet, King Lear or Hamlet.

MacHomer doesn’t give you any insight into Macbeth or into The Simpsons. Miller repeats the old canard that Shakespeare was the popular culture of his day, neglecting the fact that all the plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries were subsidized by aristocratic patrons whereas popular culture is purely commercial. Any tragedy would become comic if the main character were played as an idiot and everyone spoke in silly voices. Interestingly, Miller has to work far too hard to make two passages humorous--Macduff’s learning of the death of his family and MacHomer’s learning of the death of his wife. In the first even the silly voice can’t detract from the power of Shakespeare’s words and in the second Miller resorts to distractions, like a survey of other television sitcom couples, to force profound comments into comedy.

MacHomer is primarily a vehicle for Miller’s multiple talents and it can certainly be appreciated as just that. Miller’s impressions of Sean Connery, George W. Bush and Obama drew more laughter than did the Simpsons characters. For an encore, Miller presents Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” as performed by “twenty-five of the most annoying voices in popular music”. These include Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Aerosmith and numerous other heavy metal bands, along with Elvis Costello, Barry White, Leonard Cohen, Julio Iglesias and Andrea Boccelli. As in MacHomer, the constantly changing voices and vocal styles make the words almost unintelligible. In both you can’t fail to appreciate Miller’s vocal dexterity, but in both the parade of impersonations conveys nothing.

At first the inclusion of MacHomer in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s 60th season next year seemed outrageous. Now having seen it, I find it is actually appropriate. For at least two decades the Festival has been forcing one outlandish concept on Shakespeare’s plays after another with little thought whether the concept in any way enlightens the play. Think of Richard Rose’s low-class New York state Taming of the Shrew in 1997, Leon Rubin’s bungee-jumping rainforest Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2004 or Des McAnuff’s faux-Magrittean As You Like It last year or his current Twelfth Night that is more about imitating popular music styles than the text. To have Macbeth performed by the Simpsons makes just as much sense as any of these and at least features a fantastic central performance.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Rick Miller. ©2011 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.

Pains of Youth

Fri, 9 Sep 2011 11:36:30 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Ferdinand Bruckner, adapted by Martin Crimp, directed by Richie Wilcox
WORKhouse Theatre, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto
September 7-17, 2011

Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth still has the power to shock 85 years after it was written. With its discussions of suicide, depression, sadomasochism, homosexual incest, drug abuse, prostitution and euthanizing the terminally ill along with its depictions of overt lesbianism and psychosexual control of other people, this play from 1926, like those of Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), impels us to re-evaluate our self-satisfied notion that we are more knowledgeable about the darker side of human behaviour than people of the past. There are many places in the world today this play could not be staged because of its content. Luckily, Toronto is not one of those places. Luckily, too, there are young companies like WORKhouse Theatre brave enough to take up the challenge even if the results are variable.

The play concerns the interactions of a group of medical students who inhabit the same boarding house in Vienna. Marie simply wants to prepare for a party to celebrate taking her final exam, but there are many distractions. Petrell, the poet she thought loved her, has switched his attention to the grasping Irene. Meanwhile, the neurotic aristocrat Désirée is intent on seducing Marie primarily to dispel her boredom. Disturbing to everyone but Désirée is the project of the handsome sociopath Freder, her former lover, to bend the innocent maid Lucy to his will. Marie begins the play as a hopeful, moral person. The tragedy is that she is not strong enough to fend off the decadence of the world around her.

Bruckner’s medical students are intelligent and rational enough to diagnose physical illness in others but are blind to the spiritual illness that infects them. The fact that Freder is the most powerful of the group shows that Bruckner had chilling foresight into the disaster that could rise in the midst of a spiritual vacuum.

The WORKhouse Theatre’s production is an equal balance of plusses and minuses. On the plus side director Richie Wilcox and his cast clearly know what the play is about and are aware of its implications. On the minus side the cast is not always able to bring this vision effectively to the stage. The acting area as it is configured at the Unit 102 Theatre is tiny--only about 11’ by 11’--with space for only 37 seats. This kind of intimacy requires a level of highly detailed acting beyond what is needed in a much larger space. Yet, that is just what most of the cast is unable to provide on a consistent basis.

The most thoroughly successful performance comes from Sarah Illiatovich-Goldman as Lucy. She is the only one who is able to portray the multiple layers of her character simultaneously. She shows that Lucy is constrained by a social position lower than that of the students. Yet, she also shows underneath this the thrill of the possibility of breaking out from this servility that Freder’s supposed love offers her, even though she is innocent enough not to see that his “love” is just another form of servility. Illiatovich-Goldman makes clear both the tragedy of Lucy’s degradation and the inevitability of it given her relationship with Freder.

Mark Paci is truly creepy as Freder rather as if he were channelling the young Jack Nicholson. His habit of moving his tongue towards his teeth between phrases reinforces the Bruckner’s explicit characterization of him as a social vampire. Though Paci is excellent at projecting subconversational levels of speech and negotiating Freder’s sudden switches from passivity to violence, his performance stays the same throughout the action even though Freder’s health is supposed to be declining to the point where we think his death is immanent.

Carrie Hage is assigned the extraordinarily difficult character of Désirée, a character as mentally deranged as Freder. Where his mania expresses itself in a sick desire to control other people, Désirée’s manifests itself in a longing for death, or, what she thinks is closest to it--sex. Early on she states that everyone should commit suicide at age seventeen because there is nothing worth living for after that age. In her boredom, she longs for a return to childhood and innocence, but experience has barred her from that. What is next best for her is total oblivion. Hage only occasionally captures the weird mixture of Désirée’s desires and instead tends to present them sequentially rather than simultaneously. When she does hit on the right balance, the effect is chilling, but all her moments on stage should do that.

As the central character, Danielle Bossin-Hardy is excellent in Act 1 in showing how Marie rigidly repels the advances of Désirée and Freder and rightly denounces Petrell for deceiving her. Yet, she shows no change of tone or demeanour when Marie eventually gives in to the temptations around her and becomes as morbidly thanatophilic as Désirée.

John-Riley O’Handley is suitably weak and pathetic as Petrell, Lauren Commeford harpyish as Irene and Jonah Hundert oddly passive as Alt, the group’s hanger-on. Yet, their characterizations all tend to strike only one note.

Set designer Kaitlyn Hickey has surrounded the two sides of the stage with a semitransparent curtain. Through this Wilcox allows us to see the other housemates when they are not on stage and has them repeat significant words of the onstage dialogue. Bruckner makes clear that the students’ boarding house is like a fishbowl and characters frequently worry whether they are being overheard. Wilcox’s direction heightens this atmosphere but then he contradicts it by often having the actors shout out their anger when the situation would really demand a more repressed response. Wilcox has the clever notion of having us see the balloons that Marie has strung up for her party but them having them pop one by one as the disappointments of her life wear her down.

Theatre Voce’s production of Pains of Youth in 2001 was generally superior to the present production because the acting was so much more consistent. Yet, productions of this play or those of Bruckner’s German-language contemporaries, hardly come around often so if you’re curious to see how topics we think of as modern were treated in the past, this play will be quite an eye-opener. WORKhouse Theatre shows a lot of potential and I look forward to seeing how it will develop in the future.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Danielle Bossin-Hardy, Carrie Hage, Mark Paci, Sarah Illiatovich and John-Riley O’Handley. ©2011 Fahad Khan.

For tickets, visit www.workhousetheatre.com.

The Price

Thu, 8 Sep 2011 14:23:00 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Arthur Miller, directed by Diana Leblanc
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
September 2-October 22, 2011

Soulpepper is currently presenting an excellent production of Arthur Miller’s 1968 drama The Price. While the play may not be as famous as Death of a Salesman (1949) or The Crucible (1953), in its own slow, garrulous way it is every bit as disturbing. Where in the earlier two plays Miller shows us a tragedy as it unfolds, in The Price a tragedy has occurred in the past and continues to ruin people’s lives in the present.

The situation will be painfully familiar to any viewers who have outlived their parents. The New York brownstone where Victor Franz and his brother Walter grew up is about to be torn down and the brothers, who haven’t spoken in sixteen years, must finally decide what to do with all the family possessions that have accumulated in the attic, a chaos of clutter artfully designed by Phillip Silver. By selecting a name out of the phonebook, Victor has chosen a 90-year-old appraiser to assess the value of the attic’s contents. When, despite expectations, Walter shows up all the rancour that led to the brothers’ estrangement comes to the fore.

The play is structured in the form of three dialogues between Victor and the other three characters--with his wife Esther and the appraiser Gregor Solomon in Act 1 and with Walter in Act 2. From the first dialogue we learn that Esther views the sale of the family possessions as a chance for her and Victor finally to live a life of their own choosing. He sacrificed the career he dreamed of in science to care for his father who was ruined in the stock market crash of 1929. Victor’s mother died shortly after the crash and left Victor’s father believing he had no friends in the world. Instead of finishing university, Victor became a policeman, a job he has always loathed, to earn enough money to keep his father going.

In Victor’s view, Walter, who escaped the situation to become a successful doctor, contributed only a pittance to their father’s welfare and let Victor bear the entire emotional and financial burden himself.

The second dialogue with Solomon a first seems to be a long comic interlude. While Victor simply wants to conduct a business transaction, Solomon likes to get to know his clients. For an extraordinarily long time he evades Victor’s question about the price by relating personal anecdotes and indulging in numerous eccentric diversions. As director Diana Leblanc makes clear at the very end, Solomon is a symbolic stand-in for the Franz brothers’ father. The opposing feelings that Victor and Walter have towards Solomon reflect the views they had toward their own father. We enjoy seeing how Solomon gradually breaks down Victor’s frosty reaction to him until Victor even admits the old man is “lovable”, but, as we discover later, Victor’s comic capitulation to Solomon mirrors his own tragic capitulation to his father in the past.

Miller uses the third dialogue to overturn completely what we thought we knew. Walter presents an entirely different vision of the past. At first we think he is merely self-serving and trying to escape being cast as the villain. Gradually, however, he presents a compelling case that not only is Victor’s view of the past a lie but, worse, that Victor actually knows it is a lie.

When Christopher Newton directed the play for Theatre Aquarius in 2008, he emphasized the ambiguity of the text so that the audience was left with the conundrum of which brother’s version of the truth was the right one. Leblanc, however, takes a much darker view of the play and emphasizes that the failure of the brothers to reconcile is tragic. In his memoir Timebends, Miller writes, “Despite my wishes I could not tamper with something the play and life seemed to be telling me: that we were doomed to perpetuate our illusions because the truth was too costly to face.” This is exactly the quietly devastating impression Leblanc’s production gives us.

It’s great to see Michael Hanrahan take on a lead role at Soulpepper that gives his acting ability full expression. He shows that the ironically named Victor as a man already beaten down by time before he is even fifty. The tedium of his work has drained any enthusiasm for what he should do after his retirement. Yet, beneath the dulled surface, Hanrahan lets us glimpse sparks of what Victor used to be--his joy at discovering an old radio he built, sentimentality when discussing his mother, disgust at the lack of a social safety net in the United States. While we sympathize with Victor, Hanrahan shows that Walter’s version of the past is all-too-plausible since Victor desperately needs to believe his own vision of his great sacrifice to avoid seeing that it might have been totally meaningless.

Stuart Hughes’s Walter first appears slick and unlikeable and seems to confirm the negative impression Victor and Esther have given of him for the entire first half of the play. While we never warm to him, Hughes does lend Walter enough authority that despite our wariness we do begin to lend credence to what he says and to question Victor’s version of the past. Hughes’ performance is not as layered as Hanrahan’s but it is still no mean trick to get an audience to believe the words of someone they’ve been led not to trust.

Jane Spence presents Esther as a woman full of contradictions. She is unhappy with the life she has led and would like to blame Victor for it but also realizes that it was her choice to marry him. She upbraids Victor for being too kind-hearted but crucially at the end comes to see that that very quality is what attracted her to him. Her change from backing the practicality of Walter to the emotionalism of Victor recapitulates her inner thoughts when she first met and fell in love with him.

As Solomon, David Fox gives one of his best ever performances in a career of great performances. It is really worth the price of admission just to see him. He steers clear of all the possibilities for presenting Solomon as a Jewish stereotype and instead gives us a complex portrait of an aged man and survivor of multiple political upheavals. Throughout all his delays in getting around to telling Victor the price he will pay for the attic contents, Fox leaves us in doubt whether Solomon is merely eccentric and easily distracted or whether these are all calculated tactics so refined over the years that they now are second nature to him. Fox derives humour from closely observed human behaviour. The sight of Solomon eating a hard-boiled egg and searching for the fallen bits of shell on his clothing is hilarious just because it’s to true to life.

While the title of the play may refer most obviously to the price that Solomon will pay the Franz brothers for their furniture, it clearly also refers to the price Victor, Esther and Walter have all paid for their past decisions. Walter thinks we can choose what we become, but how can that be true when we can’t always know what we are buying into. Leblanc has so carefully calculated the ending that the audience should try to hold its applause until the dark goes absolutely dark. She has Silver, also the lighting designer, gradually fade out at the very end until there is only a pinspot left shining David Fox’s open mouth as Solomon sits in Victor’s father’s chair listing to recorded laughter. Is this the rictus of death or a horrid sign of the older generation celebrating yet again its destruction of the younger. While the play may meander to its conclusion, this final image sums up the demonic aspect in The Price that Leblanc has uncovers that makes the play so unsettling.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Michael Hanrahan and Stuart Hughes. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.

White Biting Dog

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:44:17 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by Judith Thompson, directed by Nancy Palk
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
August 18-October 21, 2011

The great service revivals provide is in helping determine whether plays written in the past still speak to us today. This is especially useful for Canadian drama where many plays are proclaimed masterpieces without ever having seen a second production. Soulpepper’s revival of David French’s Leaving Home (1972) in 2007 proved that that play still retained its power as did the Théâtre français de Toronto’s revival this year of Michel Tremblay’s À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou (1971). On the other hand, Factory Theatre’s revival of Beyond Mozambique (1974) in 2008 proved that play quite inferior to George F. Walker’s later work and Soulpepper’s revival of Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas (1993) this year showed that what may have been thought a biting satire had lost its sting. Viewing Soulpepper’s current revival of Judith Thompson’s White Biting Dog (1984) makes one wonder how such an absolute mess of a play could ever have won the Governor General’s Award.

Thompson has stated that her style is “magic realism and naturalism”, which, since these are opposites, suggests a certain amount of confusion. Naturalism shows in a detailed cause-and-effect manner how characters’ fates have been determined by their heredity and environment. Magic realism, as Maggie A. Bowers has said, “relies upon the presentation of real, imagined or magical elements as if they were real. It relies upon realism, but only so that it can stretch what is acceptable as real to its limits”. Since White Biting Dog shows no interest in consistency of character, plot or cause-and-effect, it can hardly be called naturalistic. Yet, for those same reasons it does not build up any basis of realism to stretch. Even works of fantasy have to be internally consistent to be effective, but even that is not the case here.

The action begins when Cape Race (Mike Ross), a divorced former lawyer, is on the point of throwing himself off the Bloor Street Viaduct when he hears the voice of a white dog who tells him he can only save himself if he saves his dying father. Coincidentally, though Cape thinks providentially, a young woman named Pony (Michaela Washburn) walks by singing a song about the same white dog, now dead, that she used to own. Since she is both a psychic and a former paramedic, Cape enlists her help in accomplishing his “mission”. Glidden (Joseph Ziegler), Cape’s father has been dying since his wife Lomia (Fiona Reid) left him. He has been throwing peat moss on himself and dreaming of Gravenhurst, where his family is buried (note the pun), ever since. When Pony goes into a trance she discovers that the only way Cape can save Glidden is if he can get Lomia to move back in with him. Since Cape hates Lomia he believes this is impossible. But again, coincidentally (or providentially), Lomia and her boy-toy Pascal (Gregory Prest) ask to move in because their apartment has just been burnt down by a meth addict.

As far as magic realism goes, the set-up even with its various bizarreries, is perfectly fine. How Thompson develops this set-up, however, is not. It’s obvious that Cape must overcome his hatred of his mother to save his father and himself, but lying to Glidden about Lomia’s change of feelings makes no sense and is simply a ploy by Thompson to prolong the action. How Cape’s prolonged French kissing of Lomia fits into this is a mystery. Another mystery is how Cape guesses based on no evidence that Pascal has made fun of Lomia all around town. Has he become psychic too? Further events reveal, contrary to what has gone before, that Pascal, who has been sexually satisfying Lomia several times a day, is actually gay and that Cape, who has supposedly fallen deeply in love with Pony, enjoys sodomizing Pascal rather too much. Worse are the endings (there is a false ending) that show the white dog’s prophesy and Pony’s psychic revelations are untrue. The whole pretense to magic realism turns out to be false. And worst of all, is Thompson’s transformation of Pony into an old-fashioned Christ figure, except that the sins she supposedly takes upon herself are unknown and her sacrifice saves no one.

Like Thompson’s constant straining for outré metaphors, the play boils down to a series of effects without substance. We can’t care about the characters since their personalities can switch anytime without notice and we can’t care about the story since it, too, zigzags pointlessly at the author’s whim.

The cast could hardly be bettered, but since the play makes no sense realistically or symbolically, it is a tribute to first-time director Nancy Palk, long associated with Thompson’s work, that she has inspired them to become so fully engaged in their performances. Though Cape’s behaviour becomes so erratic as to become incomprehensible, Mike Ross acts with passionate intensity as if that alone will guide us through his personality reversals. Michaela Washburn is truly delightful in portraying Pony’s unworldly innocence (rather an anomaly in a paramedic) but can’t make us understand why Pony thinks her relationship with Cape is “evil” even though they love each other. Her ludicrous speech about gorging herself on dead dachshund puppies comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere, suggesting that it is simply more of Thompson’s pleasure in outrageous for its own sake.

In contrast, Glidden and Lomia are the two most believable characters in the play. Though Glidden is merely a collection of quirks--peat moss, penchant for toast, telling of lame jokes--Joseph Ziegler imbues him with the touching personality of a man who hopes against hope. Fiona Reid, otherwise known for her portrayals of highly intelligent women, revels in the chance to play the aging nymphomaniac airhead that is Lomia. Since Thompson deigns to allow this character to change and become more self-aware, Reid has more to work with than the rest of the cast and unsurprisingly makes Lomia the most fascinating figure in the play.

Thompson is content to make Pascal a clichéd young gigolo for most of the play, giving actor Gregory Prest little to do. In Act 2 she suddenly gives him a full emotional breakdown on stage and Prest, finally, the chance to display his impressive acting skill. It’s a pity Thompson immediately has him exit and gives Cape no opportunity to interact with the broken young man.

It’s odd that designer Christina Poddubiuk, renowned for her fine work such as On the Rocks as the Shaw Festival this year, should come up with such an unattractive set. Virtually the entire play is supposed to be set in a house in Rosedale, but Poddubiuk has allowed the initial scene on the viaduct to influence the entire design so that Glidden seems to be living in a bi-level loft in one of the city’s new cheaply built condos. Palk keeps the geography of the set clear through Act 1, but in Act 2 it starts to become unclear where events are occurring, even whether they are inside or outside the house.

Palk has had sound designer Richard Feren allow a low electric hum to run throughout the play that changes to loud static at scene changes. She hopes by this means to reflect the electricity she imagines in the characters’ interactions, but since Thompson has rarely created any in her text, the effect comes across, as does the whole play, as meaninglessly portentous.

The handing out of annual awards does not take into account the fact that great works are not produced in equal quantity every year. White Biting Dog may have been the best English-language play of 1984, but that has little weight if 1984 produced an unremarkable crop of drama. It was certainly not Soulpepper’s intention, but this revival of Thompson’s play with a cast who give it their all only demonstrates that it really is not “the great Toronto play” that people have claimed it is.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Fiona Reid and Mike Ross. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.

Exit the King

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 16:04:35 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Neil Armfield & Geoffrey Rush, directed by Albert Schultz
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
August 16-September 9, 2011

Soulpepper’s current production of Exit the King is quite peculiar--the first act never comes together but the second act works beautifully. Why is there such a disparity?

First of all, Eugène Ionesco wrote the 1962 play (called Le Roi se meurt in the original French) in two contrasting styles. In Act 1, King Berenger the First, who has reigned for over 200 years, is told he has only until the end of the play to live. As in Shakespeare, the state of the kingdom mirrors that of the king and as he has gone into decline so has his kingdom been beset by innumerable calamities. Berenger’s increasingly ludicrous protestations against the news of his immanent demise and the comically bizarre descriptions of his country’s devastation are written in Ionesco’s absurdist style familiar from such plays as The Chairs (1952). Act 2, however, when Berenger comes to accept his fate, is written in a serious, highly poetic style as death is depicted as a release from the pain and madness that is life.

A director confronted with such a play has to be equally successful in conveying both styles in order to emphasize the contrast between them that Ionesco has deliberately created. Director Albert Schultz is clearly more attuned to the poetic style of the Act 2 than he is to the absurdist style of Act 1. Oliver Dennis, who plays Berenger, showed what a great physical and verbal comedian he is just earlier this year as the Old Actor in The Fantasticks. Yet, though the role of Berenger has far more physical humour than that of the Old Actor, Schultz is far less inventive than directed Joseph Ziegler was. For a play that sees Berenger constantly falling down and trying to get up and other characters paralyzed then unparalyzed in their movements, Schultz is content with simply repetition when a sense of whimsy is needed.

The speech delivery in Act 1 also should be ramped up to a more hyperbolic level. William Webster is altogether too dour as the Doctor even though he has to describe such disasters as the collision of Mars and Saturn. Karen Rae as Berenger’s emotional second wife Queen Marie seems not to know how to bring out the humour in her character. Derek Boyes makes for a very jolly Guard, but he is directed to be far too emotionally invested in the action rather than serving as a comic reporter on it.

Anyone who has seen her before will know that Trish Lindström is can be very funny. But here in the plum role as Juliette, the King’s only servant and nurse, her timing, like everyone else’s, is off and, like Boyes, she has not been given clear enough direction about how emotionally engaged or not her character should be. For someone who says in Act 2 how much she dislikes her job, none of this is evident, as it should be, in Act 1.

This leaves Brenda Robins as Berenger’s first wife, Queen Marguerite, to guide us through the action as the voice of reason. In Act 2 her real love for Berenger shows through as she leads him step by step to give up all earthly things, including the concept of self, and leads him soothingly into death. In this act, too, Dennis’s well-known mastery shines as the once-ridiculous figure he was in Act 1 takes on humility and confronts and embraces a force more powerful than that of any human being. Act 1 cries out for a Monty Pythonesque sense of risible pomposity but is only awkward and boring. In Act 2, however, Schultz does rise to the challenge of Ionesco’s text and brings out a poetry of worldly and personal renunciation not far removed from that in the Upanishads.

Ionesco conceives of Berenger, a favourite character of his who appears in two previous plays, as an innocent horrified by the realities of the world. The play is very much his own version of the medieval Everyman, who also makes a fool of himself when confronted by Death. But Ionesco has also added to this the theatrum mundi trope so famously expounded by Macbeth who sees that man is nothing but “a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more”. For that reason Berenger is told he has only until the end of the play to live.

To emphasize the notion of life as a play, designer Lorenzo Savoini has created outlandishly off-kilter set that deliberately looks like a set and does not fill the entire stage. As Berenger dies its artifice becomes even more apparent. Along the front of the proscenium he has placed a row of old-fashioned footlights. Schultz does have characters occasionally address and gesture to the audience, but in general he relies too much on the set itself rather than his direction to bring out the metatheatrical nature of the text. Savoini’s costumes are all suitably faux-medieval except for the humorous French maid’s costume he gives Juliette and the modern satin gown he gives Queen Marie that simply seems out of place. Steven Hawkins’ lighting is delightful, often more in tune with the nature of the text than Schultz’s direction. In Act 1 he casts a sickly yellow-green over the cast’s faces when they learn of the country’s disasters and he beautifully controls the gradual, symbolic fading out of the light in Act 2.

Schultz uses the translation of director Neil Armfield and actor Geoffrey Rush, who won a Tony Award for his Berenger in 2009. That production was noted for the hilarious slapstick of its Act 1, something Schultz has ignored. Yet, even if Schultz’s first act doesn’t work, don’t give up on the production. His beautifully sensitive Act 2 is almost worth seeing on its own.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Oliver Dennis as King Berenger the First. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.

The Misanthrope

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:59:39 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Molière, translated by Richard Wilbur,
directed by David Grindley
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
August 12-October 29, 2011

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s new production of Molière’s The Misanthrope is a breath of fresh air after a season of misguided, over-produced Shakespeare on the Festival Theatre stage this year. As directed by David Grindley, the productions emphasizes acting and language as opposed to the special effects, assorted gimmicks and impositions of bizarre concepts that have marred the Festival’s productions of Shakespeare this year and so often in the past decade. The positive result is the wonderful experience of an audience closely paying attention, hanging on every word, and delighting in the nuances of Molière’s play and the wit of Richard Wilbur’s classic translation.

The misanthrope of the title is Alceste, whose belief in always telling the truth, clashes with the world of flattery and insincerity he lives in. All that prevents him from abandoning mankind to live on some desert island his love for Célimène, a woman, who to his annoyance loves to keep as many male admirers about her as possible. Alceste’s plain speaking involves him in one lawsuit after another while Célimène’s flirtations raise the ire of the prudish Arsinoé, who plots Célimène’s downfall.

In John Lee Beatty’s set design the original shape of the Festival stage is exposed for the first time this year instead of being covered over in all sorts of ways to make the area larger and more rectangular. Seeing the shape as Tanya Moiseiwitsch conceived it reminds one how brilliant he design is and how grotesque the various floor overlays have been that have concealed it. If Beatty’s design errs it is in providing side doors in Directoire style, more than a century beyond the Louis XIV style suitable for a play written and set in 1666. Also the chair seat-sized floral pattern of the gilded balustrade for his stairway that arches up and over the central entrance is too large in scale for the rest of the stage design and not in keeping with period design for a private home.

Robin Fraser Paye’s pastel costumes are beautifully in keeping with the period except for the glitter on the jabots of Clitandre and Acaste. He has created such a gorgeous peach-coloured gown for Célimène, it’s a pity he felt the need to have her change out of it for a less interesting gown for the final act, especially when the action does not require it.

In 1981, the last time the Festival stage The Misanthrope, Brain Bedford played Alceste directed by Jean Gascon. Bedford was to have directed this production, but the success of his The Importance of Being Earnest in New York caused him to pass the reins to David Grindley. Bedford also was to have played the role of the foppish poet Oronte and Tim MacDonald the role of Acaste, but illness forced Bedford, and seemingly MacDonald also, to drop out of their roles.

As originally conceived, Bedford must have recognized Ben Carlson, whom he directed in Ernest, as his successor in the title role. This is exactly what he proves to be. Carlson in well on the way to becoming one of Canada’s greatest actors. He mastered the enormously complex prose of George Bernard Shaw in is many seasons at the Shaw Festival. He has shown he can speak Shakespearean verse with a clarity none of his contemporaries can match. And now, he proves that he make that highly artificial form of rhyming couplets sound perfectly natural as well as clear. Bedford, as everyone knows, has always had a bag of stage tricks that audiences have grown to love. Carlson does not and his performance is all the stronger for it. Besides that, he is willing to invest Alceste with real emotion that gives his character greater depth. Unlike Bedford who always kept an emotional distance, Carlson weeps more than once at the prospect of ever losing Célimène with the result that Molière’s satirical comedy reveals itself more clearly as the personal tragedy of the main character. It is a brilliant performance.

As Célimène, Sara Topham is appropriately vivacious. Her need constantly to be admired by many men may be a fault, but, unlike in some productions, she makes clear that Célimène really does love Alceste. The two are alike in that society provides them with an unending material for satirical portraits, but while society disgust Alceste, Célimène revels in it. We side with Célimène in regarding the various tests Alceste puts her to as unfair.

Juan Chioran is excellent as Philinte, Alceste’s best friend and the raisonneur of the play. He shows a proficiency with rhymed couplets on par with Carlson and lends verve to a character who often can seem pedantic. Kelli Fox is outstanding as Arsinoé. She, too, is admirably adept at speaking couplets and at pointed emphasis with lines. She is delightfully malevolent in couching her criticism of Célimène’s supposed immorality in the politest terms.

Steve Ross and Trent Pardy are well paired as Célimène’s admirers, Clitandre and Acaste, who seek Célimène’s attentions primarily to stroke their own vanity. As Célimène’s third would-be beau, Oronte, Peter Hutt can’t really be said to fill Brian Bedford’s shoes. His harsh, naturally cynical tone prevents his buffoonery from being as comic as it should be. Another disappointment is Martha Farrell as Éliante, Célimène’s modest, truth-speaking cousin, whom Philinte thinks would be a better match for Alceste. Farrell speaks at a lower volume level than the others and shows much less proficiency in speaking rhymed couplet or in clarity of diction. Brian Tree is hilarious in his cameo appearance as Alceste’s bumbling valet.

To see how beautifully Moiseiwitsch’s stage works for classical theatre and to hear how much an audience can be enthralled by Molière’s language itself mades one wonder why the Stratford Shakespeare Festival cannot present its namesake playwright in the same way. Why is there so much effort placed in directorial smoke and mirrors that do nothing but distract attention from Shakespeare’s language and characters rather than enlightening them? If you want to see an example that so far is as close as you can get to what Stratford was like in its heyday in the 1970s and early ‘80s, then be sure to see this Misanthrope and Canada’s newest master of the art of classical acting, Ben Carlson.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Sara Topham and Ben Carlson. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.

The Homecoming

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:47:40 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Harold Pinter, directed by Jennifer Tarver
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
August 11-October 30, 2011

“Ruthless”

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s first-ever production of a play by Harold Pinter proves to be a superb evening of theatre. Under the direction of Jennifer Tarver The Homecoming, Pinter’s 1965 pitch black comic masterpiece, dazzles with its wicked humour and jaw-dropping audacity.

The play is set in the large grimy front room of a house in a working class neighbourhood of north London, wonderfully imagined in all its dingy brownish grey decrepitude by designer Leslie Frankish. A wall separating the front room from the stairs was removed when Jesse, the matriarch of the family, died, and serves as a constant reminder of her absence. Max, a retired butcher, is the patriarch of this womanless home. He does the cooking and his brother Sam, a private chauffeur, does the washing up. Living with them are Max’s two sons by Jesse, Lenny, who is likely involved in illegal activities including pimping, and Joey, a would-be boxer and the dimmest of the lot.

Pinter’s plays always involve struggles for power, territory or possession. Tension is already high at the very start when Lenny completely ignores his father’s presence and refuses to respond to his questions. Father and son are locked in a struggle for dominance in the household and Max is losing though he rambles on about his past prowess. When the mild-mannered Sam enters, Max takes his frustration with Lenny out on Sam. We see that the family harbours the illusion that once Joey has finished his training and is in the ring his earnings will lift the family out of the moribund condition it’s been in since Jesse’s death.

Into this charged atmosphere step Teddy, Max’s eldest son, away in America for nine years as a university professor, and his wife Ruth, whom the family has never met. When they finally do meet Ruth they assume she’s a tart Teddy’s brought home and as part of their resentment of his success they continually deny that she is actually his wife and mother of his three sons. Though Teddy is clueless how to react, Ruth shows that she is no stranger to game-playing. What ensues is a struggle as hilarious as it is disturbing between Ruth and the Teddy’s family and between Ruth and Teddy as to exactly how much a part of the family she will be.

The performances are excellent across the board. Brian Dennehy and Aaron Krohn give the lie to the commonly held notion that Americans cannot play Pinter. Dennehy creates a magisterial portrait of a Max, who like King Lear rages against others because he knows he has no power, who constantly asserts his authority because he knows he has none. He is so inured to speaking for effect rather the truth, he frequently contradicts himself--praising his wife in one breath, calling her a whore in the next.

Krohn’s Lenny is his main opponent and he gives a great performance seething with menace and frightening in its unpredictability. In true Pinteresque form he can make the mere repetition of others words or the simplest of questions reek with aggression. The creates an unsettling contrast between Lenny’s love of abstruse vocabulary and refined expression with a steely delivery that undermines any sense of gentility. He can, in the most unemotional terms, describe beating up an older woman, not unlike his own mother, because he decided she had the pox.

Stephen Ouimette, in a beautifully understated performance, is every bit their equal as Sam, the one representative of morality in the play. His meekness and politeness mask the inner outrage he feels at the goings-on in the family. He suffers an onslaught of insults from Max, seemingly because he knows they are unjust and can understand what motivates his brother’s anger. The calm of his reaction contrasts with the volatility of Lenny’s.

As the enigmatic Ruth, Cara Ricketts masterfully holds own against the men. The play has often been viewed as misogynist because of its casual discussion of rape and because of the men’s equation of women with whores. Yet, Tarver makes clear from Ruth’s first provocative remark that she has a sexual power the men don’t know how to deal with. When she coolly tells, Lenny, who wants to take away her water glass, “If you take the glass … I’ll take you”, the prospect opens up to Lenny and to us that Ruth is not the subservient 1960s wife we first took her for. Since Rickett’s Ruth never loses her poise and eerie serenity, we come to realize that she has her own hidden agenda and may be using the men of the family as much as they think they are using her.

If Lenny is the malevolent brains of the family, Joey and Teddy are its two dullards, though for opposite reasons. Ian Lake in a finely judge comic performance shows that Joey--demolition man by day, would-be boxer by night--may be physically fit but is otherwise quite a few bricks short of a Lego set. Teddy, in contrast, as so well played by Mike Shara, is too stymied by his intellect to take action. He’s trained to watch and analysis but not intervene so stands pathetically by while his brothers, father and wife make a fool of him.

Tarver masterfully keeps the atmosphere perfectly balanced between humour and menace. As is necessary in a Pinter play, she has made sure that the actors are absolutely clear about their characters’ motives even if they are not clear to us. In fact, part of our involvement in a fine production like this is in trying to work out what is really going on beneath the jumble of the characters’ posturing, half-truths and lies, where the subtext of what is said is greater and more complex that any words uttered.

Stratford hasn’t staged a contemporary play by a British author on the Avon stage since Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in 2004 and Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane in 1992. This production of The Homecoming deserves the greatest possible success. Let’s hope that it encourages the Festival in future to explore more of the classic plays of the past half century.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Brian Dennehy as Max. ©2011 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.

Hosanna

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:42:45 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by Michel Tremblay, translated by John Van Burek & Bill Glassco, directed by Weyni Mengesha
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
August 10-September 24, 2011

Although I never saw the classic 1974 production of Hosanna starring Richard Monette, former Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, I have seen two previous productions of the play since 2001. Stratford’s first-ever production of the Michel Tremblay classic has the greatest production values of the three but is otherwise lacking in almost every other way. Strangely, this is the first time the play struck me more as an historical artifact than as a living drama.

The story of drag queen Claude Lemieux know as Hosanna and Raymond Bolduc, known as Cuirette, his live-in biker boyfriend of four years, still has the potential to be relevant. The effeminate Hosanna has a job as a hairdresser but is the household’s breadwinner, while the butch Cuirette, who has given up painting, lives off Hosanna’s income. In terms of the social construction of gender roles, who is the “husband” and who is the “wife”? Hosanna also has his own internal crisis. Elizabeth Taylor has been his inspiration from early youth on. His appearance at a Halloween party as Taylor dressed for her entrance into Rome as Cleopatra was to signal his triumph over all the other drag queens of Montreal. Instead, in has turned into cruel fiasco planned, with Cuirette’s complicity, publicly to humiliate Hosanna. The disaster causes Hosanna to question his own identity. As a gay transvestite, is he a man or a woman? The terms of this question now seem hopelessly dated, but they are how this man at that time formulates his dilemma.

Linked to Hosanna’s dilemma is an allegory about Quebec’s role within Canada and Canada’s role in North America. What does it mean that a farm boy from St. Eustache should take an American movie star in a grandiose Hollywood epic as his model? It reflects the cultural colonization of Quebec by the anglophone world and of Canada by American popular culture. Tremblay views Hosanna’s humiliation as a painful but positive awakening.

Yet, the play is still a domestic drama rather like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where we follow a couple through a harrowing night when one of them must confront the loss of her illusions. Director Weyni Mengesha seems to have no grip on this aspect of the ply at all. Although the action begins with the furious and mortified Hosanna arriving home soon followed by Cuirette, Gareth Potter as Hosanna gives no indication of the devastation Hosanna is supposed to be feeling. His prime worry really does seem to be unhooking his dress rather than using that as a symptom of greater frustration. For his part, Oliver Becker as Cuirette seems altogether too jolly even though he should be cringing that Hosanna will think that he betrayed him. As a result the first act that should boil over with tension, has none. It’s played rather more like a foul-mouthed domestic comedy. The tension of Act 1 should lead us to seek its cause and hang on every word of Hosanna’s long Act 2 monologue of explanation. Yet, without an adequate build-up, the monologue takes on more a comic than tragic dimension. Hosanna’s drag queen world is small, constrained and petty, but that does not mean a person who has fought to be in it cannot suffer exclusion from it.

Potter gives a competent performance but without the highs and lows other have found in the role. He is far better at playing Hosanna as catty rather than truly emotional. Crucially, Mengesha doesn’t encourage him to invest his wicked humour with a sense of self-loathing essential for his transformation at the dénouement. Becker makes quite a likeable Cuirette oddly devoid of menace. Behind his harsh words and deeds we should sense a real love that may have motivated him to help purge Hosanna of his vanity. As it is, the two seems much more like annoyed roommates than quarelling lovers.

Michael Gianfrancesco has created a gloriously slovenly set for Hosanna’s one-room apartment, littered with all sorts of period details--vinyl records, a rectangular cradle phone, a boxy television set--that seemed to provoke much nostalgia in the audience for the 1970s. Dana Osborne’s costume for Hosanna as Cleopatra verged on looking too expensive to be home-made and not at all as tawdry as it is described. Bonnie Beecher’s lighting is effective in altering mood and in changing perspective as in the important transition from drama to monologue and back in Act 2.

One senses that Mengesha is out of sympathy with the material and cannot make us or the actors perceive the all-or-nothing stakes Hosanna sees in her plight. This lack of passion is what turns the play into merely a curious slice of 1970s gay life in Montreal rather than an involving drama.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Gareth Potter as Hosanna. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.

Twelfth Night

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 01:28:32 -0400

✭✩✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Des McAnuff
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
July 15-October 28, 2011

“Twelfth Night - The Musical”

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s latest production of Twelfth Night is breathtakingly superficial. An extreme example of directorial indifference, Des McAnuff’s interest in the play does not extend beyond its first line. He turns the play’s many songs into such production numbers that they, not the story, become the play’s main focus. Besides this, McAnuff deliberately distracts attention away from the dialogue either because he does not find it interesting or because he can’t be bothered to discover its meaning, let alone make it clear to an audience.

McAnuff takes his cue from the first line in the play (although it is not the first line in this production): “If music be the food of love, play on.” That one line becomes one of the many songs written by Michael Roth and McAnuff that bloat the play to a running time of more than three hours. Music is certainly important to the studied melancholy of Court Orsino, the man who speaks it, but McAnuff conveniently ignores the two lines that immediately follow: “Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die.” Orsino asks for more music not for celebration, as McAnuff seems to think, but to cure his desire for it but by giving him so much he will tire of it. Thus, this is hardly a well-considered rationale for a director to expand the musical portions of the play until they dominate the show--unless, of course, he intends that we, too, surfeit on it causing out appetite for the music and the play to “sicken and so die”.

Though McAnuff claims in his Director’s Note in the programme that he has been inspired by popular music of the past sixty years, in fact his unmemorable tunes derive from the much shorter period of the late 1960s and early ‘70s when he began his career as a writer of musicals. After Orsino’s first speech the three musicians in Beatles costumes of the Sergeant Pepper era play on whereupon a white piano floats in played by a bearded, long-haired, white-suited young man who turns around to let us know he’s supposed to be John Lennon. This is just one of many gimmicks that make no sense. Why mix three Sergeant Pepper Beatles with the Lennon of “Imagine”? Quite often Feste will begin a song accompanying himself on the electric guitar only to have the “Beatles” float in on a bandstand as backup.

The two most ridiculous uses of music are when McAnuff turns the simple catch that Feste, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew sing into a loud Beach Boys tribute and later when he turns Feste’s short song “Hey, Robin, jolly Robin” sung to the imprisoned Malvolio into a hard rock number with Feste standing on top of Malvolio’s cage with the backup band behind. The show ends with one of Shakespeare’s loveliest songs, “When that I was and a little tiny boy”, sung by Feste to indicate that the life of celebration and surfeit is over and we must return to a world where “the rain it raineth every day.” This is usually does as a quiet close to contrast with the series of surprising revelations that has gone before. Not here. McAnuff makes this song, too, into a rock anthem with the entire cast joining in, forcing a lyric about the return to cold reality to become, contrary to its lyrics, a big upbeat finale.

In his Note, McAnuff claims that Shakespeare’s plays and design in Shakespeare’s time were “postmodern” far ahead of their time because Shakespeare mixed genres in his work and the players wore modern dress. Besides ignoring the heritage of medieval drama in Shakespeare and the fact that Elizabethans did not have the same historical sense we do, it ignores the fact that 18th-century playwrights like Voltaire and Goethe deliberately tried to move design to reflect historical periods more accurately. Even if McAnuff thinks his production is “postmodern”, he forgets that the mix of different styles must be used not willy-nilly but to some purpose.

Design Debra Hanson has extravagantly chosen the will-nilly approach. Her aggressively unattractive set depicts the top half of a huge carved oval wooden mirror placed over the central entrance to the stage with large shards of glass falling everywhere. A mirror is appropriate for a play with identical twins and mistaken identities, but why is it broken? That’s certainly not what the parallel marriages of Orsino and Olivia to the twins suggests.

For unknown reasons the men of Orsino’s court wear heavily embroidered 1960s-style Nehru jackets and jabots, while all the serving men are in 1960s black business suits. Olivia and her women are in high Victorian garb with bustles and lace, that is until they decide to play tennis when they change into 1920s outfits. Sir Toby and company are more diverse. Maria remains in Elizabethan dress throughout, but Sir Toby and Sir Andrew start out in 1920s outfits when they play golf (using and electric golf cart), switch into faux-Victorian countryfolk wear in the tavern scenes and end up in 1960s suits. What is the link between the 1920s and sport? Who knows. When Orsino and Viola take turns hitting baseballs launched by Orsino’s automatic pitching machine (I’m not making this up), they both stay in the 1960s. Multiperiod costuming can be used to underscore thematic points. Here it does not. Olivia’s move from the 1890s to the 1920s could have been used to show her interior progress from mourning to a more open life. But no, Hanson has her return to the 1890s right after the tennis scene and there she stays until play’s end. The most bizarre costuming is reserved for Malvolio, who not only appears in yellow stockings and cross-gartered, but also appears only for that scene in Elizabethan garb and sporting a pleated millstone ruff so enormous is attracts attention away from his legs which should be the prime focus.

As a director McAnuff follows in the inglorious footsteps of Richard Monette, Richard Rose and Leon Rubin in direction Shakespearean comedy by adopting their throw-anything-at-the play-and see-what-sticks approach. Therefore, in the letter scene when Malvolio utters the words “to be”, McAnuff has him adopt the Hamlet-holding-skull position. It gets a laugh but to what point? In the tavern scene the doorbell rings and John Lennon appears holding a square flat box. Guess what? He’s delivering a pizza! This also gets a big laugh but has nothing to do with anything. And so the action proceeds gimmick by gimmick. Often the gimmicks contradict the text. The imprisoned Malvolio complains about being kept in darkness, but the floor of his cage has bright lights under the frosted glass and the stage is far from dark. All of this conveys the sense that McAnuff does not merely not trust the play alone to be successful but can’t be bothered to explore its meaning. He can’t even make the plot clear since the scenes with Sebastian and the two sea captains are so covered by music we can’t hear what they’re saying.

McAnuff seems to have left the cast to their own devices. Andrea Runge is an insipid Viola, virtually incapable of making sense of her lines. She can’t seem to express more than one emotion at a time which is quite a liability with a character who is constantly torn. Sara Topham would make a fine Olivia if she didn’t have to work constantly against the gimmicks thrown her way. Mike Shara could also make a fine Orsino, but he does almost nothing with the role and never appears melancholy or love-struck.

Of the below stairs crowd, Brian Dennehy is jovial as Sir Toby Belch but does not make the part his own in a way that any number of Canadian actors might. Stephen Ouimette, however, despite having to do such nonsense as moonwalk, gives the finest performance of the evening as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. He is a master of physical comedy and comic timing and is able to make the fool and coward that Sir Andrew is into a sympathetic figure. Cara Ricketts is an enthusiastic but not very individual Maria, whereas Juan Chioran, clad rather like an accountant, makes Fabian into much more of a forceful character than he usually is.

Tom Rooney and Ben Carlson do good work as Malvolio and Feste and rise above the constraints McAnuff’s gimmicks put on them. Though Rooney does not really show enough menace as Malvolio in the early scenes, the bewilderment and quiet rage of Malvolio inside and out of confinement is quite effective. Carlson, as usual, is an exemplar of clear diction that the younger cast members would do well to follow. Those who did not see him in She Loves Me at the Shaw Festival in 2000, will be surprised to find what a talented singer he is in genres ranging from country to blues to ballads. He needs no suddenly appearing backup band to give his songs weight.

In his Note McAnuff claims: “The use of deliberate discrepancy seems particularly appropriate to the world of Twelfth Night - a play whose alternative title is What You Will (or, as a teenager might say today, “Whatever”), practically dictates a postmodernist approach”. Either McAnuff is sadly misinformed about the subtitle or wants to read it his own way. “Will” in Elizabethan times had more force as a verb than it does now and meant “want” or “desire”. What You Will definitely does not mean “whatever”, but a teenage “whatever” pretty well sums up how McAnuff does approach Shakespeare. It’s ironic that a director who is a master of making the slim meaning of musicals seem weighty is only able, or willing, to make the weightier meaning of Shakespeare’s plays seem slight.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Brian Dennehy, Ben Carlson and Stephen Ouimette. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tue, 9 Aug 2011 02:07:42 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Tennessee Williams, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 26-October 23, 2011

“Sizzling”

The Shaw Festival is already renowned for the uniformly high level of its productions, but sometimes a production comes together with such unity and force that it is more than just excellent but thrilling. This is the case with the Festival’s first-ever production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof staged to honour the 100th anniversary of Williams’ birth. The show is not merely hot but scorching.

Under the direction of Eda Holmes the entire cast gives performances of breathtaking intensity. Moya O’Connell begins the evening with the act-long near-monologue of Maggie, the cat of the title, whose goal is to stay on the hot tin roof she’s climbed up to for as long as she can. She married Brick Pollitt when he was a football star and now must cope with his withdrawal into alcoholism following the death of his best friend Skipper. When she escapes the party for the 65th birthday of Brick’s father, Big Daddy, she returns to the bed-sitting room where Brick has been holed up all day and reveals the kind of witty, vivacious woman she is through her humorous criticism of the family of Brick’s brother Gooper. Soon enough she realizes that Brick is not listening and O’Connell shows how that makes Maggie almost visibly shrink into herself like a freed spirit facing return to confinement or a prisoner led back to torture.

With complete naturalness O’Connell conveys Maggie’s complex mixture of love for Brick with anger, disappointment, resentment, pity and self-pity at Brick’s indifference. Her praise, taunts and pleading in lesser hands can seem like ploys to wrest some response from him, but with O’Connell Maggie’s varied attempts to communicate are all coloured with a sense of hope against hopelessness, with a sense that she can somehow breathe life again into a man bent on self-destruction. The greatest sign of hope in this act, as in Big Daddy’s conversation with Brick in Act 2, is that both she and Big Daddy continue to speak to Brick, as to a man in a coma, in spite of the seeming futility of ever breaking through the wall of impassivity Brick has built to protect himself.

The focus of Act 2 is Big Daddy’s confrontation with Brick. Jim Mezon’s Big Daddy bursts on the scene like an erupting volcano. Hurling a torrent of cruel insults at his befuddled wife and at Gooper’s family and their hypocritical sentimentalizing of his birthday, he clears the room to speak to his younger but favourite son to find out the truth of what is wrong. His proclivity to vulgarity, blanket condemnations and self-aggrandizement nearly sabotage his efforts. But beneath all the bombast Mezon shows Big Daddy has a real love for Brick and desires to communicate it even if he does know how to do it. Only when he finds they have a common enemy in Gooper and his wife Mae, does Big Daddy find way in to Brick’s secret. Gooper and Mae have claimed that Brick and Maggie have no children because Brick refuses to sleep with her and that he has begun drinking after Skipper’s death because the two had a homosexual relationship. Pig-headed as Big Daddy may seem, Mezon shows that the man does have knowledge about how people behave and that Brick has likely been punishing Maggie in order to punish himself for his own guilt.

Gray Powell’s Brick drinks to become numb. As he says, he waits for “The click I get in my head when I've had enough of this stuff to make me peaceful”. Powell makes Brick seem like someone who hasn’t slept for days and who speaks as if completely detached from what he is saying. He’s broken his ankle trying to leap hurdles as he used to do in high school. Now his cast is a sign of his failure and the need for a crutch. Brick thinks the crutch he needs is alcohol. When Maggie tries to help him walk he rejects her, but Holmes insightful direction focusses on Brick’s gradual realization after his confrontation with Big Daddy that Maggie is the crutch he really needs to move forward. Powell shows us that beneath all of Brick’s sullen irritability, rampant self-hatred is seething that alcohol can numb but never exorcise.

The fourth major player is Corinne Koslo as Brick’s mother, Big Mama. Koslo’s petite stature works in this role since it makes Big Daddy’s continual insults seems even more cruel and unfair. Koslo makes us cringe with pity as Big Mama tries to rationalize Bid Daddy’s hateful attitude toward her as his way of showing love. She makes us see that all Big Mama wants are the traditional comforts of family life--children, celebrations, harmony--but Brick reviles that as “mendacity” and Big Daddy as hypocrisy. Despite her capacity for self-deception, Koslo makes clear that his woman is not the fool her husband thinks her. When Gooper shows her the papers he rather to readily has drawn up to give him control of Big Daddy’s fortune, she sees immediately the what he’s up to.

As the scheming Mae, Nicole Underhay gives a wonderfully wicked portrait of coarseness. The forced dulcet tones she uses when others are about vanish as soon as she is alone with Maggie and can flaunt her fertility in the face of Maggie’s childlessness. She seems to be the one who pushes her husband Gooper into action, since, as Patrick McManus plays him, Gooper is otherwise so reticent and spineless.

Brick says that he and Maggie merely share the same cage and designer Sue LePage has created a set with its huge shuttered doors that when lit by Kevin Lamotte often looks like an enormous cage. The verandah on two sides of the corner room gives a hint of the nearly complete lack of privacy Maggie and Brick suffer in Big Daddy’s house and helps explain why a retreat inwards is Brick’s only real option for escape. As an outward expression of its owner, the room also looks decrepit with paint barely covering the wood. Lepage’s costumes both suit the period and highlight the inherent beauty of Maggie, the prim dowdiness of Mae and the vain ostentation of Big Mama.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is so often revived as a star vehicle that it is refreshing and enlightening to see it performed as an ensemble piece. The main characters may have their principal turns, but they recede when others take the floor. The result is a more cohesive presentation of the play. When Stratford presented the play in 2005, the focus was the war between two sides of the family for Big Daddy’s fortune. This is a superficial view since it’s clear early on that both Big Daddy and Big Mama see through the posturing of Gooper and Mae. Holmes highlights the more essential point that Brick and Big Daddy unlock the deliberately hidden self-knowledge in the other--of guilt in Brick, of approaching death in Big Daddy--and that only such knowledge can cut through the world’s stifling mendacity.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Gray Powell and Moya O’Connell. ©2011 Emily Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.

The Admirable Crichton

Mon, 8 Aug 2011 11:11:10 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by J.M. Barrie, directed by Morris Panych
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 9-October 29, 2011

“A Man’s Man”

J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton receives an extraordinarily inventive production at this summer’s Shaw Festival. Barrie satirical fable asks whether the class system, so dominant in Britain, is “natural” or an artificial production of civilization. It reaches a predictably ambiguous conclusion but along the way provides hilarious scenes of role reversals between masters and servants. Audiences will find many fascinating parallels between this play of 1902 and Barrie’s better-known Peter Pan of 1904.

When the play begins we meet the Earl of Loam in his Mayfair mansion observing one of his monthly teas in which both the masters of the house and the servants must treat each other as equals. Loam is of the firm opinion that class distinctions are artificial but that he must abide by them since society demands it. These teas are his one means of soothing his social conscience. No one except Loam actually enjoys these occasions, least of all his faithful butler Crichton, who feels that they could foment disorder in the hierarchy of servants below stairs and, if Loam’s views were generally adopted, would create chaos in society.

The views of master and servant are put to the test when Loam’s yacht, in the midst of a world-wide sailing adventure, is shipwrecked on a desert island. Loam has brought his three daughters, his nephew Ernest, the Reverend Treherne, Crichton and Crichton’s would-be fiancée Tweeny. As one might expect, the aristocrats, so used to sloth and indolence all their lives, have no clue how to survive, whereas the ever-resourceful Crichton, no longer bound by his obsequious position, takes matters into his own hands and teaches the others how to thrive in this alien environment. We see the other side of Barrie’s double-edged satire in the amusing Act 3, where a second social hierarchy has entrenched itself on the island with Crichton at the top.

The play itself is already fun enough, but director Morris Panych expands the dramatis personae to include a chorus of six animals (Wolf, Fox, Crane, Crow, Hedgehog and Hare) who narrate the events using Barrie’s stage directions for their text and sing songs at various intervals. This is really more of a good thing since Barrie’s stage directions are as amusing as his dialogue. Panych has moved the setting from 1902 to the 1920s for no apparent reason except that he likes the songs of that period which the chorus sings usually to cover scene changes but once, with Irving Berlin’s “Shakin’ the Blues Away”, to express Crichton’s feelings of freedom on the island.

The fact that this chorus is comprised all of denizens of England and not the island and are drolly costumed by Charlotte Dean as humans ready for a formal tea provides a witty commentary on the question of “nature” in the play while setting up the show as a kind of topsy-turvy Aesop’s Fables with humans rather than animals as the characters. Indeed, Ken MacDonald’s clever design makes the sets look as if hand-drawn and cut out of the paper used for notes for the play. This gives the effect of a stage-sized pop-up book, while the animals with their songs behind a row of footlights surround this fable with the aura of the music hall. Panych goes one step too far in beginning the show with projected credits as if it were a movie, a technique he has used too often before and not always appropriately. It would be much more in keeping with the music hall theme to use title cards on easels rather than to add one more medium to the mix.

The play is a treat for actors since they get to play the characters in two completely different environments. Steven Sutcliffe is truly admirable as Crichton, the character with the greatest journey to make. We see his thoroughly stiff and proper self in Act 1 blossom in the new freedom he has in Act 2 even using his wits against his former masters. In Act 3 his success at survival seems to have brought along more questionable traits like egotism and ostentation. Act 4 finds him and all the other shipwreck survivors awkwardly trying to re-adjust to expected social norms in England. Sutcliffe particularly shines here in showing how Crichton must consciously bury knowledge of his past superiority and glory beneath everyday formalities.

Nicole Underhay is delightful as Lady Mary, a purposeless and disdainful creature in England who gains purpose and a sense of self-worth on the island. Her difficulty in adjusting in Act 4 and her attempts to forget her relationship with Crichton on the island provide most of the tension of the conclusion.

David Schurmann is wonderfully pompous as the Earl of Loam. Not only does the island bring out the hypocrisy of his supposedly progressive views but reveals a talent for abject subservience. Kyle Blair has a fine comic turn as Ernest, likely modelled on the character in Oscar Wilde’s best-known play, who occupies his time spouting epigrams and doing nothing whatsoever. Neither aristocratic ability is of any use on the island as he soon discovers.

Moya O’Connell and Cherissa Richards plays Lady Mary’s sisters Lady Catherine and Lady Agatha, who are even more vain and idle than she is. Their humiliation on the island, like Ernest’s, is one of the many comic rewards of the middle two acts. Marla McLean plays one of the few characters who is not a caricature. Tweeny is a low level maid who just does odd and ends, but she has a spark of wit and an immediate likability that distinguish her from all the others servants. It’s no wonder Crichton is drawn to her despite her untidiness and that we sympathize so strongly with her when his attentions drift away from her to Mary. As Lady Brocklehurst, Gabrielle Jones does her best to convey in a rather short time the supreme imperiousness of this diabolus ex machina, clearly patterned after Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, who forces the conclusion of the play. Ideally, however, the role should be played by someone older and made up to look less attractive and much more forbidding.

The Admirable Crichton is like a Peter Pan for adults. The dominance of upper over the lower class in Crichton is replaced by the dominance of adults over children in Pan. After the curtain calls the play finishes with a rousing reprise of “Shakin’ the Blues Away” by the whole company, which perfectly describes how the show will affect any audience, young or old.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nicole Underhay, David Schurmann and Steven Sutcliffe. ©2011 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.

Topdog/Underdog

Sun, 7 Aug 2011 01:49:50 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Philip Akin
Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 6-27, 2011

The Shaw Festival is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. It is a powerful, provocative evening of theatre featuring riveting performances from its two actors, Kevin Hanchard and Nigel Shawn Williams. This is one of the most important American plays of the past ten years and yet another must-see at the Festival.

Like Sam Shepard’s True West (1980), the play uses two brothers to represent ironically two sides of the American Dream. In Shepard Austin, the younger, is a Hollywood screenwriter and manufacturer of dreams. Lee, the older, has been living a life of “freedom” as a thief and drifter. Topdog/Underdog concerns the inheritance of the African-American male and is therefore is considerably more gritty and more ominous. Where in Shepard the brothers live in a well-appointed suburban home, in Parks the two live in “a seedily furnished rooming house room”. In Parks the older brother is the one with a job, while the younger, who lives in his shadow is a thief. The theme is still freedom and dreams but on a much smaller scale. The older brother was a master of the game of three-card monte until the murder of a friend put him off the game. The younger brother who always watched from the sidelines practices the game endlessly but still can’t find the secret that made his brother such a master and may never learn it since his brother has vowed never to touch the cards again.

While Shepard’s brothers end up in a murderous struggle, Parks takes the matter a symbolic step further. As a joke the brothers’ father in Parks named the older brother Lincoln and the younger Booth. In a further irony, Lincoln, the sole breadwinner of the household, earns his money by wearing white face to play Abraham Lincoln at an arcade where people pay for the chance to assassinate the sixteenth president with a cap-gun. Whereas the brothers in Shepard have a mother still alive if out to lunch, Lincoln and Booth were both abandoned by their parents who separately gave each an inheritance of $500.00 to live on.

Both Lincoln and Booth are prisoners of the past. Lincoln literally recreates a past historical event and has sunk into alcoholism to drown his memories of all the pain he caused people who lost all their money playing monte with him. Booth continually tries to recreate his brother’s card routine thinking that despite his ineptitude it will lead him to fortune and freedom. He is particularly keen on winning back the affections of his one-time girlfriend Grace, often called “Amazing Grace”, by trying to impress her with clothes or luxury items he’s stolen. Though Lincoln claims to have seen her, inconsistencies in Booth’s behaviour cause us to wonder if this symbolic Grace actually exists. Lincoln may despise the confidence game as living off of others’ misery but comes to see it may be the only option he has. Booth comes to fear that the only thing that gives him any sense of self-worth may in fact be a lie.

The brothers’ symbolic names plus references to the Cain and Abel story mean we know the story will have a tragic outcome. That Parks can still make this conclusion so shocking speaks to the freshness of her writing and the depth of her insight. Philip Akin’s clear perception of her achievement is evident in his incisive, highly nuanced direction and the in the powerhouse performances he has elicited.

Kevin Hanchard’s Booth has his style down pat with all the right moves and puffed up poses but with none of the substance. Much of the play’s abundant humour comes from his braggadocio and smart-ass remarks, but underneath it Hanchard shows us that Booth is still an innocent, never wanting to admit he can never be as good as his brother or that grace, whether capitalized or not, will never be his.

Nigel Shawn Williams is magnificent at Lincoln, giving us the portrait of a man sunk into himself, trying to convince himself that his work is not a degrading farce, insulting to his race and to history. Williams shows Lincoln’s alcoholism has already caused the beginnings of a tremor which itself is a sign of how determinedly he has endeavoured to obliterate the past. Hanchard’s and Williams’ narratives of the obscenities they witnessed as children are chilling.

The main flaw in the production is the set design of Camellia Koo. Rather than the furnished room described, she gives us a vast abstract space, the floor only partially covered in wooden floor tiles as if the project were abandoned. She gives the impression that the brothers are not living in a rooming house but squatting in a derelict building. The large space gives no suggestion of claustrophobia and its abstractness shifts the balance in the play between the real and symbolic too strongly toward the latter. The venue itself is part of the problem. The play would have a stronger impact on a smaller stage in a more compact auditorium like the that of the Court House Theatre.

Despite this, the chance to see two such breathtaking performances in such a dazzling play should not be missed, especially by those who don’t live near Toronto. Those who do live in or near Toronto should know that the same production will be presented there later this year at the Theatre Centre November 24 to December 4.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Kevin Hanchard and Nigel Shawn Williams. ©2011 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.

The President

Sat, 6 Aug 2011 20:53:30 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Ferenc Molnár, adapted by Morwyn Brebner,
directed by Blair Williams
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 9-October 9, 2011

The Shaw Festival has revived The President, its hit lunchtime show from 2008. If you saw it before, you’ll want to see it again. If you missed it before, don’t make the same mistake twice. Three years later this lunchtime show still deliver the most uproarious hour of fun you may ever have in the theatre.

Though most of the cast has changed, two key players remain--Lorne Kennedy in the title role as Norrison, president of an enormous company, and Jeff Meadows as Tony Foot a clueless communist cab driver. Kennedy’s performance is still a tour-de-force. He delivers his lines with breathtaking rapidity and yet with such absolute clarity that you would gasp at the his sheer technical virtuosity if your continuous bouts of laughter gave you any chance to do so. Meanwhile, Meadows’ character’s verbal and mental slowness is perfect foil for Norrison’s tachylalia and presticogitation.

Briefly, Norrison is confronted with the fact that his ward Lydia, whose wealthy parents have entrusted to him to protect from vice in the big city, has secretly married and is pregnant by Tony Foot, the most unsuitable candidate possible. With Lydia’s parents’ arrival immanent, Norrison has only one hour to transform Tony from a nobody and slob to the kind of aristocratic executive that her parents would admire. To emphasize the pressure of time, playwright Molnár has a secretary pop in cuckoo clock-like every ten minutes to announce the time.

Morwyn Brebner’s adaptation of Peter Kaslik’s translation of Egy, kettő, három (“One, Two, Three”) cleverly transfers the action from 1929 Budapest to 1960s New York. While her dialogue is funny what keeps the audience doubled-over in laughter is not only Kennedy’s performance but the entire cast’s absolute precision in the revved up action and dialogue.

It’s amazing how many members of the 15-person cast create instantly memorable characters in a minimum of stage time. Julie Martell takes over the role of Lydia and makes her brunette Marilyn Monroe clone where innocence and sexuality combine in an irresistible mélange. Peter Millard handily takes over the role of Bartelby, Norrison’s unflappable advisor. Jenny L. Wright is the new Miss Petrovich, in constant tears over a not-so-secret heartache. Ken James Stewart ably distinguishes himself in three roles--the accountant Mr. Pinsky who really does seem to be dying of fever; the photographer Mr. Christian, whose cowardly rejection of Miss Petrovich Norrison manages to solve along with everything else; and the incredible homely Miss Hoygabow, whom Norrison assigns to Foot as the secretary least likely to arouse jealousy. Michael Ball returns in the tiny but memorable cameo as the Count von Schottenberg, a drunken janitor whose aristocratic name passes on to Tony through rapid adoption. To have Laurie Paton and Tara Rosling as two of Norrison’s secretaries is luxury casting indeed.

It couldn’t be more fitting for the Shaw Festival to revive this play for its 50th season with its magnificent central performance and the entire cast in top form. If laughter is the best medicine, here’s a play that will give you a super-concentrated dose of youth and happiness.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Julie Martell and Lorne Kennedy. ©2011 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.

Maria Severa

Sat, 6 Aug 2011 07:55:22 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
music, book and lyrics by Paul Sportelli and Jay Turvey, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 5-October 2, 2011

August 5 saw the world premiere of Maria Severa, the sixth musical by Paul Sportelli and Jay Turvey. The work has many inspired sequences imbued with the fado music native to Portugal, but it does not rise to the height of Tristan, the duo’s previous musical for the Shaw in 2007. Whereas Tristan was based on a novella by Thomas Mann, Sportelli and Turvey have had to concoct their own, severely flawed story for Maria Severa.

As the programme note by fado specialist Richard Elliott makes clear, little is know about the historical Maria Severa-Onofriana (1820-46) except that she was the first fado singer to become famous. It is also known that she was one of the mistresses of Francisco de Paula Portugal e Castro, 13th Count of Vimioso (1817–1865), who used to take her to watch him bullfighting. Fado, a blues-like urban song style that became popular in the mid-19th century predates Severa, but the myth that she originated it dates from the novel A Severa by Júlio Dantas (1876-1962) that he made into a play in 1901.

Sportelli and Turvey accept the myth at Severa invented fado but otherwise make no use of Dantas in their musical. They begin by having Carlos, Maria’s guitarist, state that he wants to go back whereupon eight of the cast members claim in turn that he or she was responsible for the tragedy. We assume they refer to Maria’s tragedy, but by the end that is not at all clear. This introduction seems to have been forgotten by the creators when they reached the conclusion. The action cannot be the flashback of Carlos, since he dies before it is complete and the idea that all may be responsible is never mentioned again. If the musical purports to show Maria’s tragedy, what is it? It can’t be that she cannot marry the man she loves because she repudiates him. It can’t be that someone dies who loved her because she does not know until he dies that it was so. The real Maria Severa died of tuberculosis and Dantas’ Maria dies on stage while singing and a character exclaims “Morreu o fado!” (Fado has died!)--yet neither happens in the present musical.

In creating a book to accommodate the few facts of Maria’s life, Sportelli and Turvey have not come up with anything peculiar to Portugal but rather one of the most archetypal operetta plots--”nobleman falls in love with commoner but cannot marry her”. Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince (1924) is probably the best-known example. Yet, while we can get caught up in spite of ourselves in the break-up between Karl Franz and Kathie in The Student Prince, we feel nothing about Armando (as the Count is called) or Maria in Maria Severa. Part of the reason is that Sportelli and Turvey have not just concocted a generic plot but have also created, with one exception, completely generic characters, defined by only one or two personality traits, who function more as part of the plot mechanics than as complex people.

Most of the songs Sportelli and Turvey have written are very good, though, unlike Tristan, there is a greater tendency in the lyrics to fall back on clichés. All three fado-like songs for Maria are powerful, especially the final song, “Who Am I?” Otherwise, the two best numbers are the song for Clara (Maria’s aristocratic rival) “The Money Tree” about having to smile and keep quiet; “The Bullfighting Song” for the whole company, except Armando, who express their feelings while watching Armando in the ring; and “The Fountain in the Square”, an hilarious attempt by Maria’s mother to relive her own past glory as a singer. On the other hand, a song like Bread and Butter” keeps struggling not to sound like “The Money Song” from Cabaret; “A Prayer is a Boat” about polytheism versus monotheism has no real purpose in the plot; and “It’s in the Blood”, where Armando and his brother satirize other blue-bloods like themselves, means Maria’s outburst against aristocrats doesn’t quite make sense if the two closest to her are so self-aware.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Julie Martell holds the title character together by force of her personality alone. Maria is the cliché of the poor woman and prostitute proud of herself despite her class and profession. Martell puts real feeling into her songs, but her role is hampered since her character doesn’t change. If only Sportelli and Turvey did not try to make her into a symbol of fado rather than a complex woman who furthers the cause of fado, her character might be able to breathe. Mark Uhre is well cast as the aristocrat and part-time bullfighter. He shows hauteur and elegance in his every move. He sings his one solo “Wandering Moon” beautifully although the lyrics are rather hackneyed. His character also does not change which causes Maria’s rejection of “his people” not to make much sense. The musical should more logically be presented as his reminiscences of the past rather than Carlos’s.

The only character who really comes to life is Maria’s Mama played by Jenny L. Wright. Haranguing customers for stealing from her as she serves them five-day-old stew shows a nice cohabitation of moral contradictions. Her performance of her favourite song from the past with all its stylized gestures is the funniest part of the show while it also, belatedly, points out while the fado Maria favours is so revolutionary.

Neil Barclay is in fine voice as Father Manuel, the Vimioso family’s padre, although we’d like to know more about what he did to cause an exile to the northern provinces. Jonathan Gould is forceful as Armando’s brother, but the facts that he drinks and is the second son are merely repeated without elaboration. Jeff Irving is a brooding Carlos, but the creators give no explanation why he should keep his love for Maria hidden for so long. Saccha Dennis is a fiery Jasmine, Maria's friend and co-worker from Brazil. Her character has no particular function other than as Maria's confidante and, rather improbably, to encourage Armando not to give up, as if matadors needed such advice. Jacqueline Thair is excellent as Clara, who shows through body language long before she says anything that she chafes under the role as Armando’s destined fiancée. Sharry Flett seems to revel in the chance finally to play a real villain. She is so good at covering scheming with politeness that one hopes there are other such roles for her in future in more substantial works.

Sue LePage’s costumes accurately capture the exotic setting of mid-19th-century Portugal, something rather like one associates with Carmen but more straight-laced and more baroque. Judith Bowden’s bizarre expressionist set, however, has nothing to with the period. Inspired by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neta, the middle and upper sections suggest an abstract tree while the awkward ramp at its foot which cuts the stage diagonally in two has the sole virtue of separating the world of the tavern in the Mouraria district of Lisbon on stage right from upper class world of the Vimiosos on stage left.

Since Maria Severa died ten years before Shaw was born, the musical is the first new work the Festival has produced about someone who lies outside both the Shaw’s original and extended mandate. One can’t really complain since the Festival routinely neglects works from the 19th century even though Shaw lived almost half of his life in that period and was necessarily influenced by it. It is more than a little ironic that this new musical should have such an operetta-like plot since the Festival also routinely neglects operetta, even though both the Golden and Silver Ages of that genre occurred during Shaw’s lifetime.

While Maria Severa is not a success in its present form, let’s hope that Sportelli and Turvey are able to take another look at it and rethink it to enhance its drama and round out its characters. First they will have to decide if the story is about communal guilt, the rise of fado or about the love of two dynamic people from different social classes. At present it tries to be about all three and treats none of them satisfactorily.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Mark Uhre and Julie Martell. ©2011 Emily Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.