2014

Best Productions of 2014

Thu, 1 Jan 2015 17:32:44 -0500

Toronto:

In alphabetical order here is my list of the ten best productions in Toronto in 2014. As usual, I have excluded works that have previously appeared on this list such as the Canadian Opera Company’s remount of Madama Butterfly or Opera Atelier’s remount of Persée.

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Cineastas by Mario Pensotti, Grupo Marea at Luminato. The horizontally divided stage of the Argentine writer/director’s work reminded one of the kind of theatre Robert Lepage used to create before he became too enamoured with technology. In this dazzling piece, actors played out the real lives of five film directors on the lower level and the works they hoped to create on the upper level in a clever exploration of the distance between reality and fiction.

Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi, Canadian Opera Company. Robert Carsen’s production of Verdi’s final opera that moved the action from Elizabethan times to the 1950s was both handsome and satirical at once. Gerald Finlay etched the humour of the famous fat knight in exquisite detail. He led an all-Canadian cast that made one proud of the talent this country has to offer.

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis, Unit 102 Actors Company. Ronnie Rowe and Andy McQueen gave fiery performances in Unit 102’s hard-hitting production of Guirgis’ breakthrough play from 2000. The play may focus on dangerous prisoners on Riker’s Island, but director David Lafontaine never lost sight that the play is ultimately about faith and redemption. The atmosphere was so fraught and the performances so intense that at the end you felt the breath had been knocked out of you.

Kurios - Cabinet of Curiosities by Michel Laprise, Cirque du Soleil. After treading water with several ecologically themed shows, Cirque du Soleil returned to its origins with a show emphasizing the relation of man and machine. The marvellously realized steampunk style and the energetic electro-swing music united a well-chosen series of acts all concerned with changing the ordinary into the extraordinary. Even the clown, Canadian David-Alexandre Després, was one of the most hilarious the Cirque has ever had.

London Road by Adam Cork and Alecky Blythe, Canadian Stage. This amazing, groundbreaking musical used as its libretto the verbatim statements of people living on London Road in Ipswich where a serial killer had lived. Eleven veterans of the Shaw and Stratford Festivals combined their talents to play 63 characters to portray the changing mood of the neighbourhood from before the killer’s discovery to the community’s attempt to regain normalcy The cast sang the extraordinarily difficult music with aplomb to give us a glimpse of the future of musical theatre.

Lungs by Duncan Macmillan, Tarragon Theatre. British author Macmillan’s 2011 play is a virtuoso piece for two actors. In only 70 minutes they play out the entire relationship of two characters from their first meeting to the end, with time passing on the bare stage with just a gesture or change of tense. The play begins as a satire of young people so given to overthinking their every action that they almost prevent themselves from acting at all. Brendan Gall and Lesley Faulkner are note-perfect as the couple. If you missed the play before, be sure to see it now, revived at the Tarragon until January 25 by popular demand.

Mies Julie by Yaël Farber, Baxter Theatre Centre at Harbourfront World Stage. August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie refuses to die because it continues to be so relevant. South African writer/director Yaël Farber added to Strindberg’s battle of male and female, servant and master, the elements of black versus white and colonized versus colonizer to make Strindberg’s sociosexual conflict even more explosive with no-holds-barred performances from Bongile Mantsai as John and Hilda Cronje as Julie.

Moment by Deirdre Kinahan, Actors Repertory Company. ARC gave the English-language premiere of this powerful play by an exciting young Irish writer. Kinahan took the overused plot device of “family-gathers-secrets-are-revealed” and gave it a significant twist. The secrets are revealed halfway through the action, leaving the rest of the play to focus on the possibilities for forgiveness and healing. Christopher Stanton created beautifully as much tension surrounding the revelation of secrets as for the possibility of forgiveness. In a taut ensemble Ryan Hollyman, Deborah Drakeford and Janet Porter stood out for the intensity of their performances.

Of Human Bondage by Vern Theissen, Soulpepper. Soulpepper’s production was remarkable not only for Thiessen’s riveting adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s difficult novel but for director Albert Schultz’s revelation of a much more daring and inventive side to his direction than he has ever shown before. Both Gregory Prest and Michelle Monteith playing difficult-to-like characters held our interest by revealing their internal contradictions and the shared trait of self-hatred that draws them together. Luckily, Soulpepper is bringing this thought-provoking, highly theatrical evening back in 2015 from May 2 to June 20.

Talking Heads by Alan Bennett, Precisely Peter Productions. British director John Shooter took three of Alan Bennett’s thirteen acclaimed monologues known collectively as “Talking Heads” and set them in three rooms of the Campbell House Museum. Impeccably performed by Naomi Wright, Jason Gray and Alex Dallas, Shooter’s brilliantly simple idea turned the Campbell House into a kind of British version of Dante’s Inferno, where the characters we happen upon are compelled to tell us their stories seeking sympathy, forgiveness or understanding. It was a fascinating notion one hopes Shooter pursues with more of Bennett’s ironic tales.

On the other hand ...

This year saw a number of Canadian plays, many by well-known authors, so poorly written or with such improbable plots that they should never have been allowed past workshopping to reach the stage. These included: The Art of Building a Bunker by Adam Lazarus & Guillermo Verdecchia (Factory Theatre), The Bakelite Masterpiece by Kate Cayley (Tarragon), Bingo! by Daniel MacIvor (Factory Theatre), Death Married My Daughter by Dean Gilmour, Danya Buonastella and Nina Gilmour and Michele Smith (Theatre Smith-Gilmour), A God in Need of Help by Sean Dixon (Tarragon), Paolo and Daphne by Ned Dickens (Theatreworks) Sextet by Morris Panych (Tarragon), Soliciting Temptation by Erin Shields (Tarragon) and The Wanderers by Kawa Ada (Cahoots Theatre).

The award for the most poorly presented classical play in Toronto goes to Soulpepper’s production of Tartuffe, directed with a leaden hand by László Marton and serving too often to showcase the severe inadequacies of members of the Soulpepper Academy.

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Stratford:

The 2014 Stratford Festival saw a general rise in quality although only two thirds of the offerings could be classified as artistically successful. The three best shows were:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Stratford stages this comedy so often, you might think there was nothing new to say about it. Director Chris Abraham completely disproved this notion. He set the play at a reception for a gay wedding in the backyard of a house in present-day Stratford. To entertain the couple, their friends stage Shakespeare’s play using whatever comes to hand and casting parts with whoever is available. Therefore, both Oberon and Titania were male, Peter Quince and Lysander were female and all the fairies were played by children. Abraham’s concept changed the play from the usual mindless romp to a deeply satisfying celebration of diversity and inclusivity.

Crazy for You by George and Ira Gershwin. With Ken Ludwig’s expanded version of the 1930 Gershwin hit Girl Crazy, director/choreographer Donna Feore proved once again that her forte is dance-heavy musicals. American Josh Franklin and Canadian Natalie Daradich gave period-perfect renderings of the string of Gershwin standards and tap-danced up a storm. Feore masterfully guided the exuberant action so that the energy level gradually built up to such a point it (figuratively) blew the roof off the Festival Theatre by the end.

The Beaux’ Stratagem by George Farquhar. Stratford stages English Restoration and 18th-century comedy so seldom, it might be thought a risk to mount one on the Festival stage. Yet, under Antoni Cimolino’s direction, Farquhar’s 1707 play proved to be surprisingly modern in outlook and and, after Abraham’s Dream, the most enjoyable comedy at Stratford this season. Colm Feore and Mike Shara were well matched as two rakes who intend to bilk young women who fall in love with them of their fortunes. In the play it is they, however, who fall in love with two beauties thus undermining their own plans. The cast spoke Farquhar’s elegant, witty dialogue so beautifully, you really hated to leave such a world of refinement when the play ended.

Among several candidates for worst, one stood out for its incredible hubris:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play by William Shakespeare. It might have seemed like a major coup to entice the world-famous director to Stratford, but Peter Sellars proceeded to create the most perversely contrary interpretation of a Shakespeare play that Stratford has ever seen. Sellars sought to bring out the dark side of Shakespeare’s comedy but in so doing gave us two hours of unrelieved angst and dread often wrought by deliberate misreading of the lines, including treating the Pyramus and Thisbe play as if it were deadly serious and filled with ponderous existential paradoxes.

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Niagara-on-the-Lake:

The Shaw Festival had a very strong 2014 season, though, worryingly, it seems to have lost its grip on its namesake playwright. The three best were:

Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey. Under Jackie Maxwell’s passionate, insightful direction, O’Casey’s 1924 domestic tragedy was easily the most powerful play of the Shaw season. In one of her finest performances, Mary Haney played Juno Boyle, a woman vainly trying to hold her family together in the midst of the “Troubles” in Dublin. Jim Mezon played her loveable but useless husband as a Falstaffian mixture of cowardice and bravado. Meanwhile, Haney’s Juno suffers as a kind of female Job who loses everything she holds dear. It was hard to imagine a superior production.

The Sea by Edward Bond. The Shaw Festival’s first foray into Edward Bond was a great success with director Eda Holmes getting Bond’s grim humour just right. Fiona Reid excelled as the indomitable village queen bee Mrs. Rafi while Patrick Galligan gave his best-ever performance as the draper Hatch, who pitifully descends deeper and deeper into madness. Holmes’ clever use of billowing cloth for scene changes made the sea of the title an ever present force that mocks the mightiness that human beings try to muster.

When We Are Married by J.B. Priestley. The most side-splitting comedy of the season was Priestely’s 1938 play directed to perfection by Joseph Ziegler. I had seen a starry production of the play in London (UK) just in 2011, but the Shaw production outshone by far in the unity of its ensemble and in its attention to detail. Priestley’s exploration of what happens when six self-proclaimed pillars of the community discover they are not legally married is a wonderful satire both on male-female relationships and on social pretensions.

The least recommendable show this year was:

The Philanderer by George Bernard Shaw. Why American director Lisa Peterson, whose Director’s Note showed she had little notion of what Shaw’s play or period was about, was allowed to direct Shaw at the Festival Theatre is a mystery. She succumbed to the fallacy that older plays have to be goosed up to be made funnier and larded Shaw’s satire on maleness and femaleness with such exaggerated movements and other ill-considered comic notions that Shaw’s soufflé of a play completely collapsed.

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Elsewhere in Ontario:

This year at least four productions seen outside Toronto, the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival deserve special mention:

Les Misérables by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge. Though mainstream newspapers ignore it, Drayton Entertainment is becoming an increasingly important force in theatre in Southern Ontario. Nothing could prove that better than this, the first regional production in Canada of the world’s favourite musical. The great virtue of director Alex Mustakas’ production was that it concentrated on clarity of storytelling rather than on the special effects and myriad costume changes that mar Cameron Mackintosh’s latest version of the show. Of the three productions I have seen, Mustakas’ was easily the most insightful and the most moving.

Run for Your Wife by Ray Cooney, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge. Drayton Entertainment had a second major hit with its flawless production of Ray Cooney’s archetypical British farce. Marcia Kash proved yet again that she is one of the few directors in Canada who understands how farce works. Pace, timing and attitude are everything. With an excellent cast including two former Shaw Festival actors, she caused Cooney’s tale of a cheerfully clueless bigamist to have audiences doubled over with laughter.

Shrek The Musical by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, Grand Theatre London. Shrek is one of those rare instances where the musical is actually better than the movie it is based on. With a cast combining stars from Stratford, Mirvish and Soulpepper, director Susan Ferley showed off this satirical fairy tale in the best possible light. Liam Tobin, who was so hilarious as the title character in Elf last year, returned as the evil, but vertically challenged Lord Farquaad and proved he could be just as funny as a villain as had been as the hero.

Stag and Doe by Mark Crawford, Blyth Festival. In Mark Crawford’s play one couple’s stag and doe party has to share the same hall with another couple’s wedding reception. Some playwrights would simply approach this story as a situation comedy. Crawford, however, excelled in downplaying this aspect of his plot to make the play a comedy of character. The play’s humour thus did not rely on zingy one-liners but on close observation of how people in unusual circumstances interact. Well written and blissfully funny, Crawford’s play is sure to have a long life throughout Ontario and beyond.

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Mr Microcosmos (Karl L’Ecuyer) and Mini Lili (Antanina Satsura). ©2014 Martin Girard.

The 50 Most Read Reviews of 2014

Thu, 1 Jan 2015 13:06:53 -0500

In 2014 Stage Door received 133,115 pageviews from 59,990 unique visitors from 154 countries. As usual it is heartening to see that works like Kurios from worldwide companies like Cirque du Soleil are mingled with those from small local companies. Plays classical and modern, Canadian and non-Canadian, mix with operas, operettas, dance, sketch comedy and circus. Worthy student productions like Albert Herring and Fulgens and Lucres find a place next to professional productions.

The company with the largest number of entries in the top 50 is the Stratford Festival with eight, followed by Mirvish Productions with four. Cirque du Soleil, Tarragon Theatre and Unit 102 Actors Company tie with three each.

Some reviews from the past maintain their holding power, most notably Fate of a Cockroach by Tawfiq al-Hakim from 2005 and Zone by Marcel Dubé from 2012. The review of The Philanderer at the Shaw Festival from 2007 when the Festival offered both endings curiously had more readers than the review of the same play from this year with the original ending. As soon as the Stratford Festival announced that Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre (which it calls The Adventures of Pericles) would be part of the 2015 season, the review of Stratford’s 2003 production shot up into the top 50. Presumably in a spirit of compare and contrast, the review of Stratford’s 2014 production of King Lear made the top 50 as did the review of Stratford’s 2002 production. The Malcontent by John Marston staged at the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London, England, became the highest-charting non-Canadian production since an analytics programme was installed in 2011.

-The Editor-

The 50 Most Read Reviews of 2014:

1. Kurios – Cabinet of Curiosities by Michel Laprise, Cirque du Soleil, Toronto
1. Les Misérables by Claude-Michel Schönberg & Alain Boublil, Drayton
Entertainment, Cambridge
1. Fate of a Cockroach (2005) by Tawfiq al-Hakim, AfriCan Theatre Ensemble,
Toronto
1. Zone (2012) by Marcel Dubé, Théâtre français de Toronto et al., Toronto
5. Arrabal by Sergio Trujillo & Julio Zurita, Mirvish Productions, Toronto
1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (directed by Chris
Abraham), Stratford Festival
7. Sixteen Scandals by The Second City, Toronto
8. Crazy for You by George and Ira Gershwin, Stratford Festival
9. Man of La Mancha by Mitch Leigh & Joe Darion, Stratford Festival
10. King Lear (2014) by William Shakespeare, Stratford Festival

11. The Malcontent by John Marston, Globe Theatre, London, GBR
1. Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis, Unit 102 Actors
Company, Toronto
1. Genesis & Other Stories by Rosamund Small, Aim for the Tangent Theatre,
Toronto
14. The Motherf**ker with the Hat, Bob Kills Theatre, Toronto
15. Alice Through the Looking-Glass by James Reaney, Stratford Festival
16. Company by Stephen Sondheim, Theatre 20, Toronto
1. Albert Herring by Benjamin Britten, University of Toronto Opera Division,
Toronto
18. ‘O’ (2012) by Franco Dragone, Cirque du Soleil, Las Vegas, NV, USA
1. The Cousin from Nowhere by Eduard Künneke, Toronto Operetta Theatre,
Toronto
20. American Buffalo by David Mamet, Unit 102 Actors Company, Toronto

21. The Snow Queen by Derek Genova, Solar Stage, Toronto
1. Metamorphosis by David Farr & Gísli Örn Garðarsson, Mirvish Productions,
Toronto
23. Pith! by Stewart Lemoine, The Theatre Department, Toronto
1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Christopher Sergel, Young People’s Theatre,
Toronto
1. James and the Giant Peach by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul, Young People’s
Theatre, Toronto
26. Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy, Against the Grain Theatre, Toronto
27. An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
1. Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Mirvish Productions,
Toronto
29. Amaluna (2012) by Diane Paulus, Cirque du Soleil, Toronto
30. Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley, Seven Siblings Theatre, Toronto

31. London Road by Adam Cork & Alecky Blythe, Canadian Stage, Toronto
32. Tribes by Nina Raine, Theatrfront, Toronto
33. The Skriker by Caryl Churchill, Red One Theatre Collective, Toronto
34. King Lear (2002) by William Shakespeare, Stratford Festival
35. Run for Your Wife by Ray Cooney, Drayton Entertainment, Cambridge
1. Shrek The Musical by Jeanine Tesori & Robert Lindsay-Abaire, Grand
Theatre, London, ON
37. King John by William Shakespeare, Stratford Festival
38. Rebel Without a Cosmos by The Second City, Toronto
39. Cabaret by John Kander & Fred Ebb, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake
40. Talking Heads by Alan Bennett, Precisely Peter Productions, Toronto

41. A God in Need of Help by Sean Dixon, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
42. Marry Me a Little by Stephen Sondheim, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
43. The Land of Smiles by Franz Lehár, Toronto Operetta Theatre, Toronto
1. The Philanderer (2007) by George Bernard Shaw, Shaw Festival, Niagara-
on-the-Lake
45. Under the Skin by Betty Lambert, Unit 102 Actors Theatre, Toronto
46. Fulgens and Lucres by Henry Medwall, Poculi Ludique Societas, Toronto
47. Pericles, Prince of Tyre (2003) by William Shakespeare, Stratford Festival
48. The Dirty/Beautiful (2005) by Stephen Massicotte, Crow’s Theatre, Toronto
49. Free Outgoing by Anupama Chandrasekhar, Nightwood Theatre, Toronto
50. The Last Confession by Roger Crane, Mirvish Productions, Toronto

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Rola Bola. ©2014 Martin Girard.

Bed & Breakfast

Sat, 20 Dec 2014 16:01:35 -0500

✭✭✭✭✭
by Ann Powell & David Powell, directed by Sue Miner
Puppetmongers, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
December 19-21, 2014

“Oh, Amy!”

I have seen only four of Puppetmongers many shows, but Bed & Breakfast from 1985, now remounted for a short run in Toronto, looks very much like a masterpiece. Puppetmongers, siblings Ann and David Powell, have used many forms of puppetry in their shows from tabletop bunraku to object manipulation. The special feature of the utterly delightful Bed & Breakfast is its use of seven-inch-tall figures in a large four-storey-tall Edwardian dollhouse. To see the inhabitants of an intricately decorated dollhouse come to life will entrance any child over 5, but the Puppetmonogers’ dry wit and the subversive nature of the story will also amuse their accompanying parents just as much.

Bed & Breakfast is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea”. Puppetmongers have transferred the action to Edwardian times and have made some significant alterations to the story. In the Puppetmongers version, Prince Cuthbert’s indomitable mother Queen Daphne is becoming increasingly irritated that her son refuses to marry any of the eligible princesses that she introduces to him. One day in the conservatory she discovers the reason why. Cuthbert shares a love for entomology with one of the serving maids, Amy, and asks her to marry him. The Queen overhears and puts an instant stop to that. She fires Amy on the spot and sends Cuthbert on a round-the-world travel adventure so that he will forget Amy and come to his senses.

One night about a year later during a terrible storm, a young woman named Amelia shows up at the front door of Poshingham Palace. The Queen offers her shelter and because of Amelia’s demeanour begins to wonder if she may actually be a princess. To test this she has Amelia sleep on a bed piled high with mattresses under which she place one pea. It is well known that real princesses are so delicate that they can feel such a small object through all those mattresses and thus will not sleep well. Meanwhile, the large serving staff at the Palace comes to believe that the stranger is none other than Amy and does what it can to help the young woman pass the test.

The show begins with Ann Powell dressed in costume as Mrs. Powell the head housekeeper and David Powell as George the Palace’s odd-job man. The two use a family tree to explain the relation of Cuthbert to his parent and another tree diagram to explain the hierarchy of servants who work below stairs. For adults in 1985 the main reference for master-servant relations would have been the television series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75). Now it is impossible to watch Bed & Breakfast and not think of Downton Abbey.

The main feature of the show is the four-storey dollhouse with a front that splits into two that can reveal one half of the house at a time, only the stairs and landings or the entire house. Ann Powell is responsible for the incredibly detailed house and its furnishing and the exquisitely outfitted bendable dolls that inhabit it. Puppetmongers are known as pioneers in object manipulation and that is basically the style used in Bed & Breakfast. Except for a rod puppet representing a caterpillar that Amy and Cuthbert both admire, al the “puppetry” consists of the Puppetmongers handling the dolls and moving them from place to place within the dollhouse. Ann Powell interacts with the dolls in her full human form as Mrs. Powell, while David Powell interacts with the dolls sometimes through his similarly clad doll in the house or in his full human form. When the doll George is asked to bring in some wood and the human George goes out and brings real wood in from the audience, it is as if we are seeing the doll figure in close-up.

The absolute charm in Puppetmongers’ style of puppetry in Bed & Breakfast is that it is exactly like the way that children play with dolls in a dollhouse, except that here they have a fully scripted story to enact. The dollhouse is surrounded by drapery that creates a kind of proscenium around the house. The wide side panels come to have more significance that we first realize. Frequently throughout the action a character, most likely Amelia or the Queen, will ask herself, “I wonder what Cuthbert is doing now?” whereupon on one or the other of the panels a black-and-white slideshow will illustrate what Cuthbert is doing with David Powell voicing the unflappable Cuthbert.

Cuthbert does travel all over the world – from Egypt to Java, from Antarctica to the Arctic and across Canada by train. Rather like Bertie Wooster without his Jeeves, Cuthbert blithely gets himself into one dangerous situation after another. Far from weaning him from Amy, everything he sees makes him think of her and sigh “Oh, Amy!” Children will like the humorous drawing. Adults will enjoys Cuthbert’s twittish commentary and note such points that Cuthbert has bought land right near the erupting Krakatoa volcano and that the ship he hails for rescue from an iceberg in the Arctic is the Titanic.

Ann Powell is a master of distinct voices for the many characters from the imperious Lady Bracknell-like Queen, to the lower-class servants to the deliberately incomprehensible King. Since the visiting Amelia (or is it Amy?) has a very sound sleep in spite of the pea, Puppetmongers provide a very clever twist at the end, an insight credited to the King, that still leads the story to a happy ending while cleverly subverting the point of the original story.

This hour of wit and whimsy is one of the most joyous and unified of Puppetmongers’ shows. It is Puppetmongers’ 25th Winter Holiday production and part of their 40th anniversary season. It is a wonderful way to celebrate this ever-inventive company and to celebrate the idea Puppetmongers promote that adults, too, can share a childlike sense of wonder with their children.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) The cast of Bed & Breakfast, ©Dahlia Katz; Ann Powell in grey and David Powell in brown showing Poshingham Palace to the audience, ©2011 Christopher Jones.

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

Potted Potter

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 19:58:44 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Daniel Clarkson & Jefferson Turner, directed by Richard Hurst
Starvox Entertainment, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
December 17, 2014-January 11, 2015;
Starvox Entertainment, CAA Theatre, Toronto
June 13-July 22, 2018

“Rictusempra!”

If you think that Pottermania has died down in the wake of Twilightmania and Hobbitmania, you haven’t seen the cheering crowds at Potted Potter. On opening night the Panasonic Theatre was filled with a mob of adults and children equally psyched up to celebrate all things Harry Potter. For, indeed, a celebration of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books is exactly what Potted Potter is. The word “potted” may seem to imply some sort of satire, but the show never sets out to satirize the Potter books. That would only alienate the crowd. Instead, Potted Potter celebrates Rowling’s seven-volume epic by satirizing the attempts of only two performers to bring all seven books to life on the stage in only 70 minutes. The result is very like a Harry Potter panto that will please both adults and children alike.

Ever since the success of the The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) by the Reduced Shakespeare Company in 1987, performers have been finding humour in impossibly massive endeavours staged by small casts in short periods of time. Daniel Clarkson and Jefferson Turner followed in the wake of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and its five other abridgements in 2006 when they presented the first Potted Potter in Edinburgh before Rowling had even published Book Seven. Unlike Shakespeare (Abridged), Clarkson and Turner do not seek to make fun of their source but rather shift the burden of humour to the challenge itself of staging such an epic story of fantasy and magic.

In the present tour now playing at the Panasonic Theatre, the role originated by Daniel Clarkson is played by James Percy and that of Jefferson Turner by Benjamin Stratton. The performers play versions of themselves with Percy as “the world’s expert in Harry Potter” and Stratton as his friend who claims to have read all the Potter books but in fact has never gotten to Book Seven. In the rather overlong set-up to the show, we find that Percy has given Stratton a large sum of money in order to hire twenty actors from the Stratford Festival (some local research?) to help fill out the cast. Instead, Stratton has spent all the money on the really cool dragon that appears in Book 4. In fact, Stratton has also not bought the life-sized flying Ford Anglia needed for Book 2 nor any of the large animatronic devices Percy thinks he needs to tell the story. Instead, Percy realizes that he and Stratton will just have to muddle through trying to tell the story themselves with the paltry means at their disposal.

Besides a cute multicoloured wooden locomotive and tender, Stratton has constructed three useless props. One is a coffin marked “spooky”, showing he understands nothing about the Potter series. The second is a beach scene marked “Forbidden Forest”, showing he understands nothing about forests. And the third is a wardrobe. Why? So that the children can get to Narnia. The second two of these items get big laughs from the children. They know what a forest is and, unlike Stratton, they know that Narnia has nothing to do with Potter. In fact, the children especially are eager to catch Stratton out whenever he claims that some element of The Hobbit, the Twilight series, Star Wars or Shrek is part of the Potter books. It’s quite delightful to see what feisty purists young Potterphiles are.

It is also a pleasure to note that Potted Potter continues to refer almost exclusively to the books, not to the movies made from them. The only references to the movies are to Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and the fact that Book 7 was split into two films, and these appear more as improvised remarks than parts of the script. Keeping the focus on the books, besides promoting reading, also allows Percy and Stratton to interpret Rowling’s characters any way they like.

Percy, as the Potter expert, gets to play Potter. Stratton has to play all the other roles. This forces Stratton into an increasing manic cycle of quick changes using simple props as clues – devil horns for Voldemort, a bright orange wig for Ron or any of the Weasleys, a straw hat with attached pigtails for the strangely butch Hermione, an Afro wig and Scottish accent for Hagrid, a broken-topped wizard hat for Snape, a skull-faced mask for the Death-Eaters and so on. Stratton makes most of his quick changes while behind the wardrobe as he runs in circles around it.

Percy and Stratton give themselves a rest for Book 3 which is shown as a PowerPoint presentation on a screen that folds out from the wardrobe. While the presentation emphasizes how complicated Book 3 is, it also relates its underlying structure quite clearly.

Following Book 3 comes Book 4 and the World Quiddich Cup. This is the perfect introduction for the live quidditch game advertised on the Potted Potter posters and heavily touted at the top of the show. Two children are chosen from the audience as Seekers and the entire audience is divided into two teams. How the game progresses from that point on I will not reveal except to say that it is wonderfully imagined and absolutely hilarious.

The two last books are the longest but here are the most condensed. The final showdown between Harry and Voldemort is boiled down to a sing-off between the two actors standing at mics singing new words to the Gloria Gaynor’s hit “I Will Survive”. It’s a totally daft but rousing finale to an evening that has been totally daft but rousing from the start.

Percy and Stratton both generate such energy and work in sync together so perfectly you would never know they were not the originators of the show. Both are also expert physical comics and improv artists which comes in handy when anything in this fast-paced, action-packed show goes wrong, such as when Voldemort’s snake Nagini (a stuffed toy) accidentally slipped out of its leash and wound up hanging from the wand in Percy/Harry’s back pocket.

With its strong storytelling leavened by unscripted humour, topical references, audience participation and re-use of old songs, Potted Potter is very like a panto and, in fact, manages to be funny without slipping in naughty bits for the adults as at Ross Petty’s pantos. The more you know about the Harry Potter books from reading them, the more you will enjoy the show, though even if you know the story from the films or even from hearsay, you can’t fail to be impressed by the comedic talents of Percy and Stratton.

This fact makes Potted Potter an ideal holiday outing for families since it is only 70 minutes long or for groups of dedicated Potter fans. While children will enjoy re-hearing the story and laughing at all the slapstick and slip-ups, adults will also savour the inherent paradox of the show. Potted Potter does fail to bring Rowling’s seven Potter books to the stage in any kind of detailed fashion, but it is a case where the duo’s inadequacy only stimulates the imagination to fill in the events it merely sketches out. The Chorus to Shakespeare’s Henry V urges the audience to “eke out our imperfections with your thoughts”, and that’s exactly what we do in response to the deliberate imperfections of Potted Potter. In doing this the show creates a completely theatrical experience that in its own loony way amounts to an exhilarating communal celebration of the world of Harry Potter. Like the “Rictusempra” spell, it will cause you to laugh uncontrollably.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) James Percy as Harry and Ben Stratton as Voldemort; James Percy as Harry and Ben Stratton as Ron Weasley; James Percy as Harry and Ben Stratton as Dumbledore. ©2014 Starvox Entertainment.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

#UncleJohn

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 16:57:42 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto translated and adapted by Joel Ivany, directed by Joel Ivany
Against the Grain Theatre, The Black Box Theatre, Toronto
December 11, 13, 15, 17 & 19, 2014

Leporello: “But on Tinder, it’s over 13K”

Against the Grain Theatre has quickly gained renown for its productions of opera in intimate unconventional venues. #UncleJohn is Mozart’s Don Giovanni with Lorenzo Da Ponte’s 1787 libretto translated and radically adapted by AtG’s Artistic Director Joel Ivany. It’s wonderful to experience such a great opera performed in such a small venue as the Black Box Theatre for an audience of only 80. Ivany’s transposition of the action to the present is quite clever but there are flaws in his reimagining and overall the opera is not performed with the same finesse as such previous AtG productions as The Turn of the Screw (2012) or Pelléas et Mélisande (2014).

When you enter the Black Box Theatre at 1087 Queen Street West (the former location of The Theatre Centre), you see that the hall has been set up with white tableclothed cocktail tables, an active bar at the southwest corner and a large dais at the north end for a wedding party and guests of honour. Ivany’s conceit, executed with just the right mix of artificiality and reality by designer Patrick Du Wors, is that we the audience are the guests at the wedding reception of Zerlina (Sharleen Joynt) and Masetto (Aaron Durand). As we take our seats prerecorded music of crooners and songbirds of the 1940s and 50s is playing.

Ivany’s approach might work except that the singers do not treat us as present until Act 1, Scene 5, where the wedding reception is traditionally held at Don Giovanni’s castle. Up to that point in Ivany’s version, when Zerlina and Masetto enter it is to inspect the empty reception hall they have hired to use for their wedding the following day. Thus, despite all the pretence that we are there throughout the opera, we are, in fact, considered present only when lighting designer Jason Hand turns up the lights on us, just as in a conventional opera house.

In Ivany’s version, Anna (Betty Waynne Allison) is the daughter of Michael “The Commander” Bridge (John Avey), who is the caterer and event planner for Zerlina and Masetto. The Commander does not force “Uncle John” (Cameron McPhail) to fight a duel. Rather, while trying to attack John for seducing Anna, The Commander suffers a heart attack and John maliciously withholds his pills and cellphone from him so that he dies in agony. Instead of a physical mask, John masks the truth by concealing his role in The Commander death claiming the old man simply died of a heart attack. For help, Anna calls in Ottavio (Sean Clark), here recast as a policeman. Only later does it dawn on Anna that John must have murdered her father.

Later in the action, Ivany cleverly obviates the need for masks by using recent everyday technology. When John has his friend Leporello (Neil Craighead) “disguise himself as John, Ivany simply has Leporello send texts to Elvira (Miriam Khalil) from John’s cellphone. Ivany also updates Leporello’s famous Catalogue Aria by substituting social media platforms for the countries in the original. Thus he tells Elvira how many friends John has on Facebook, and followers he has on Twitter and LinkedIn, but, substituting for Spain, “On Tinder it’s over 13K”.

To stage John’s death, Ivany creates a nice reverse parallel with The Commander’s death. Throughout the action Ivany has had John pop pills from a little box he keeps. It’s not clear if they are uppers or downers, except that at the end when he ingests fingerfuls at a time he says it is to calm himself down. Indeed, John’s fright at seeing The Commander, whom in Ivany’s version Leporello does not see, causes him to overdose on his pills as The Commander watches. Just as John keep pills from The Commander, now The Commander causes John to take too many.

Dramatically, the first problem with Ivany’s adaptation is that his Uncle John is so obviously a predator. Ivany does not suggest any charm or magnetism that would draw so many women to John, and neither does McPhail. In fact, Ivany’s version is rather like the title character of Molière’s Dom Juan (1660), who has womanized for so long he now acts only out of habit, not desire, and does not notice that woman see through his ruses. The second problem is that the modern day setting forces Ivany to make Leporello be John’s friend rather than his servant. In the original Leporello has to put up with continual abuse from his master because his wages depend on it. In the updated version there has to be some reason other than wages to explain why one man would remain friends with a libertine who continually insults him and puts him into dangerous situations. Does the modern Leporello somehow live vicariously through John’s exploits? Does John hold some secret power over Leporello that forces him to stay? Ivany’s version supplies no answer to explain Leporello’s loyalty to John. As a result we still experience Leporello as John’s servant to make sense of the situation even though Ivany’s libretto insists that that is not the case.

Musically, there is much to enjoy, even though the cast is uneven. As Uncle John, Cameron McPhail produces a creamy baritone that is shown at it most beautiful in his serenade “Deh vieni alla finestra”. McPhail tosses off the Champagne Aria with manic vigour. Ivany’s libretto has John periodically mutter about “the darkness, the darkness”, perhaps to make John’s fear of death the motive for his pursuit of sex. McPhail conveys this haunted quality to John, but Ivany misses the ideal time to establish this motive when The Commander dies. Ivany has John show malice but not the fear or revulsion that would suit the fear of “darkness” his John suffers from.

As Leporello, Neil Craighead is quite amusing even if his motivation is totally unclear. The highlight of his performance is Ivany’s updated Catalogue Aria that Craighead delivers with aplomb.

Overall, the most consistently outstanding performances come from Miriam Khalil as Elvira and Sharleen Joynt as Zerlina. In both cases, the sheer beauty of vocal production – the lovely dark tones of Khalil and the shimmering brightness of Joynt – overcame the satirically colloquial nature of Ivany’s libretto. Ivany shows special insight into Elvira that sets her up as a parallel character to John. Both are obsessed, but in opposite ways. John is obsessed with bedding as many women as possible, while Elvira is obsessed with keeping hold of her one true love. In performance, Khalil shows that Elvira is as consumed by her fixation as John is by his. Joynt’s Zerlina, meanwhile is not as naive as most Zerlinas and seems wary of John even as he believes he is seducing her.

Aaron Durand makes Masetto a much more well-rounded character than he usually is. Not only does Durand possess a fine, agile baritone, but he is an excellent actor with the most expressive face of the entire cast. Masetto is so often made out simply to be a dullard that it is good to see him played as a basically good guy and trustworthy mate for Zerlina. His jealousy may be comic but Ivany has John give Masetto such a savage beating that it is John’s surprise attack rather than Masetto’s cowardice that causes John triumph over him.

Even if Ivany demotes The Commander to a mere caterer, John Avey makes him a powerful force. His ghostly appearance at John’s banquet is every bit as chilling as it is in a conventional production. Ivany’s view that the ghost is only in John’s mind is a good one and helps get around all the fantastical issues of a the Commendatore’s statue coming to dinner. This way Avey as The Commender becomes an externalization of John’s conscience, though it would have helped if Ivany had given us some clue beforehand that John actually had one. Avey’s forceful bass-baritone provided a welcome note of depth to the opera, both aurally and metaphorically.

Betty Waynne Allison sings Anna as if she were one of Wagner’s Valkyries rather than a Mozart character. Her voice has impressive strength but she sings in an unvarying forte. Yes, she is outraged, but some variation in dynamics or colour would help make sense of her words. As for Ottavio, Ivany has made him out to be one of the least effective policemen you might ever encounter. A position as a security guard or some rank with less authority would better suit his general uselessness. Sean Clark is not quite up for the role. He plays tag with the highest notes and needs to work towards a rounder tone.

The accompaniment is provided by the Cecilia String Quartet and pianist Miloš Repický. When the five work together as a piano quintet, as in the overture, the effect is highly enjoyable and one can note how Mozart so often anticipates in this work harmonies later common in Romantic music. Too often, however, Repický seems to be competing with the quartet rather than working with it, creating the sense of a loss of unity.

#UncleJohn is rather a paradox in that it’s point is to make opera more accessible yet the people who will appreciate all of Ivany’s in-jokes in the libretto will only be those who already know the opera well. The others at my table looked puzzled when, in the opera’s Finale Leporello had the orchestra play the Beatles song “Hey Jude” and then “Let It Go” from the Disney movie Frozen. They seemed to forget that at that point in the original the orchestra plays tunes from older operas, so in the update it plays more recent songs.

Much of Ivany’s updating is quite clever, but the prime virtue of the staging is to see and hear the opera sung and acted at such close range. You get a true quadrophonic effect when the singers are placed around the perimeter of the room, something you would never experience in a standard opera house. Operatic voices in such a small venue help make the tutti concluding Act 1 extremely exciting. Ivany has shown himself to be so inventive that I trust he will be able to work out the flaws in #UncleJohn before AtG presents it another time.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Sean Clark, Miriam Khalil, Betty Waynne Allison, Neil Craighead, Aaron Durand and Sharleen Joynt; Neil Criaghead and Miram Khalil; Cameron McPhail and Neil Craighead. ©2014 Darryl Block.

For tickets, visit www.againstthegraintheatre.com.

The Snow Queen

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 18:06:23 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Derek Genova, directed by Emily Johnston
Solar Stage, Toronto
December 13, 2014-January 4, 2015

“Love Melts an Icy Heart”

When you think of theatre for children in Toronto, Young People’s Theatre comes first to mind. Founded in 1966 it is the oldest and largest professional theatre for young audiences in Canada. Yet, it is not the only theatre for young people in the city. Solar Stage in the Madison Centre in North York is currently celebrating its 20th season of children’s theatre with a playbill of 21 shows from October 2014 through June 2015. Solar Stage aims at a narrower age range than YPT with ages 3 to 10 as its target audience, but this only means it has perfected an approach that it knows will appeal to younger theatregoers. Its latest show, Derek Genova’s adaption of The Snow Queen, based on the 1844 fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, is a perfect example of Solar Stage’s successful approach.

The first thing that is remarkable about Derek Genova’s adaptation is how faithful it is to its source. Kay (Timothy Ng) and Gerda (Emilie O'Brien) are two friends who grow up in adjoining houses in a small town in Hungary. They are devoted to each other and enjoy listening to the stories that Kay’s Grandmother (Amy Swift) tells. One day she tells them the story of a mirror created by a Hobgoblin (Shai Tannyan) that only shows the worst in what it reflects. The mirror was destroyed but its splinters, some no bigger than a grain of sand, still blow about in the air and can stick in a person’s heart and eyes, turning their hearts to ice and their eyes into organs that only see what is negative in everything.

Kay and Gerda go out to play after a recent snowfall and throw snowballs at each other when suddenly Kay experiences a pain in his heart and eyes. Soon he begins acting mean to Gerda and insults her without cause. It is clear to us, but not to Kay, that splinters of the Hobgoblin’s mirror have become lodged in Kay’s heart and eyes. At night the Snow Queen (Shai Tannyan) comes to visit Kay and asks him to come and live with her in her palace at the North Pole. Since Kay no longer likes where he lives or cares about anyone, he agrees and the Snow Queen carries him away. The Snow Queen kisses Kay twice, once so he will not feel the cold, a second time so he will forget his past life. She sets him to the task of trying to spell the word “Love” with pieces of ice.

Gerda now makes it her mission to find Kay and receives help from a River (Amy Swift), a Turtledove (Timothy Ng) and a Reindeer (Amy Swift). The Reindeer says he can take Gerda to the Snow Queen’s palace but Gerda will have to defeat the Queen herself.

This is an unusual adventure story for the 19th century in that it has a female hero and a female villain. In the original all the beings who help Gerda find Kay are also female. A great pity is that so many children will get to know this story first through the 2013 Disney animated feature Frozen that claims to be an adaptation of Andersen’s story. The problem is that Disney has so distorted the story that it has almost nothing in common with Andersen’s tale and navigates laboriously around the huge narrative holes its adaptation has created to make the simple point of the original that love can melt a heart of ice. Disney’s screenwriters have unnecessarily changed the two friends into two sister princesses and have given the powers of the villainous Snow Queen to one of the sisters so that the story is warped from a fairy tale into a story of a superhero who can’t control her powers.

It is therefore extremely refreshing to see that Derek Genova gives a clearer account of the original story that may simplify it and remove its explicit Christian religiosity, but still captures its gist and power. And it does this in only 60 minutes in a show filled with delightful songs by Robert Wilkinson and Sara Wilkinson.

The Solar Stage production is very basic but also very effective. The key to Rosanna Saracino’s design is that it is meant to stimulate children’s imaginations not to act as a substitute for them, which is the principal flaw of so many overproduced children’s shows. The side walls and back wall of the Solar Stage acting space have been painted with a snowy scene. Saracino uses screens on wheels to effect the various scene changes. Grandmother’s house is represented by two screens covered in fabric, one that reminds us of upholstery, one of wallpaper. When these two screen were turned around to show snow scenes on the other side, the children in he audience let out a surprised “ooh”. Who needs CGI when such a simple technique can elicit such a strong response? Saracino dresses the Snow Queen in a white gown with a white fur stole just as Andersen describes her. The costumes for the Turtledove, Reindeer and River are all quite imaginative, with the River’s flowing side-wings making it perhaps the cleverest of all.

The Wilkinson’s music is influenced by classic rock and pop. The wisest aspect of their musical settings is to give the Snow Queen the most attractive songs to sing, including a lullaby she sings to put the captive Kay to sleep. Just like the Snow Queen’s own beauty, the allure of her songs is a sign of danger since she tries to convince Kay that her palace is now his home.

The strongest singers and actors are Swift and Tannyan. Swift keeps her multiple roles completely distinct and projects both words and song better than the others. Tannyan is unrecognizable as the Hobgoblin, but is supremely aloof and appropriate chilly as the elegant Snow Queen. Ng and O'Brien give enthusiastic performances as Kay and Gerda, though both could adopt clearer diction and better projection.

If there is a flaw in the production it is that the musical accompaniment too often overwhelms the singers’ voices so that the words are lost. Genova and the Wilkinsons frequently use the songs to move the story forward so that hearing the words is key to understanding the story. A delightful aspect of the Solar Stage style is its encouragement of audience interaction. It is a pleasure to see how quickly the children get caught up in the story and how much they want to help the good characters achieve their goals. When Gerda asks where Kay is, the children call out as one the direction he has taken. Indeed, the one song that did not work, something involving Marco Polo, failed because Gerda wondered aloud where Kay had gone before she sang, meaning the children were calling out where he was while Gerda was stuck singing a song that seemed irrelevant to the situation. A fine move is to ask two children on stage to help Kay spell the word “Love” so that he will break the Snow Queen’s spell over him.

It is heartening to see that all children need, even today, is clear and straightforward storytelling presented in a simple but effective manner to catch them up in rapt, silent attention. Solar Stage recognizes that children have not lost their imagination and bring it with them to the show. There is much that writers of shows for children could learn from seeing a show at Solar Stage, the prime lesson being to learn to how to stimulate that precious gift of imagination that children possess.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Illustrations: (from top) Emilie O'Brien as Gerda, Amy Swift as Grandmother and Timothy Ng as Kay; Shai Tannyan as the Snow Queen. ©20014 David Glover.

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

Holidazed & Confused

Wed, 10 Dec 2014 02:58:47 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Kristopher Bowman, Leigh Cameron, Kyle Dooley, Devon Hyland, Hayley Kellett and Kirsten Rasmussen, directed by Paul Bates
The Second City, Toronto
November 27, 2014-January 16, 2015

“Second City Wins its Wings – Again”

If you feel like you’ve already overdosed on sugar plums, The Second City has the antidote for seasonal mawkishness with its holiday revue Holidazed & Confused. The show is a series of punchy sketches with one satirical hit after another and nary a miss. The revue is focussed less on Christmas itself than on shopping and family in general, but these overarching themes make this one of the tightest of The Second City’s more recent shows. It is stage by The Second City’s touring company and proves that the troupe is justly renowned.

The show begins and ends with parodic versions of seasonal carols. In between are deliciously incisive sketches that probe the paradoxes of modern life. One of the lead-off sketches takes on the ancient topic of a young boy asking his father the truth about Santa Claus. What gives this topic a twist is the acute awareness of both father (Kyle Dooley) and son (Kristopher Bowman) that having a father who does not tell the truth may inflict psychological harm on the son, while at the same time the father fears that revealing a cultural phenomenon like Santa Claus as a lie may inflict just as much harm. The father becomes increasingly taxed by the son’s questions about how Santa can be both fit and fat and how reindeer fly, until he hilariously reaches a breaking point.

Another sketch explicitly related to Christmas involves the whole cast as employees of Wal-Mart. They relate, as if in a documentary about a military siege, their anxiety before and the aftermath of the onslaught of shoppers on Black Friday.

The most unusual Christmas-themed sketch features an Austrian immigrant (Dooley) who wishes to apply as the mall Santa at the Dufferin Mall. The interviewer (Devon Hyland) is appalled that the immigrant plans to wear a costume with long horns and a tail and carry a stick. He plans to stalk children throughout the mall and tell them that if they don’t give up their naughty ways he will drag them down to hell. Nonplussed the interviewer insists that there is no way he will let the mall Santa look or act that way. This causes the Austrian to say he was not intending to play Santa but Krampus, Santa’s traditional companion in Austria.

The sketch is funny enough even if you think Krampus is a made-up character, but it’s even funnier if you know it’s real. In the countries that used to form the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Austrian tradition of Krampus is still widespread. Unlike the American Santa who gives presents to good children and a lump of coal to the naughty ones, in Austria the duties are split with Santa rewarding the good and Krampus punishing the bad, or at least frightening them into being good in time for Christmas. The sketch is especially subtle if you know this fact because you see how it pits one Christmas tradition against another, thus undermining the presumed universality of both in the process.

A fourth sketch explicitly related to Christmas is more like a miniature play than a sketch since its focus is more on character than satire. A young man (Hyland) goes to visit his grandmother (Kirsten Rasmussen) who lives in a retirement home. The young man is unhappy to see that his grandmother hasn’t decorated her room as usual. She tells him she just didn’t seem to have the energy this year and dislikes how the staff treat the old folks like kindergarteners when taking them on shopping trips to Wal-Mart. The young man, who seems to be so into online video games as to be friendless, decides to help out his grandmother and the sketch ends with a warm feeling of mutual understanding which is far from the norm of the short, sharp punch-line. This sketch, along with the other three Christmas-themed sketches, covers a wider range of the comic spectrum than is usual as Second City and is indicative of what makes Holidazed & Confused so satisfying.

Other sketches are only tangentially related to Christmas. Hayley Kellett sings an amusing song about not knowing what to get her online boyfriend from Christmas, but the occasion could just as well have been his birthday. In another the whole cast gathers as a family having Christmas dinner all clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters imaginable. The skit, though, is not really about Christmas but about the phase young kids go through of trying out what kind of language is and is not acceptable. Rasmussen, playing a little girl, is reprimanded by her father (Dooley) for using “bathroom language” at the dinner table. So the girl excuses herself and goes to the bathroom to unleash all her pent-up bad language. We find that all she knows are words like “poo” and “bum” and has yet to learn any of the really bad stuff. The skit ends with an unexpected but clever twist.

Other than these the sketches are not holiday-specific in any way. We simply respond to how inherently funny they are and how well they fit in with the general scheme of the show. One of the very best of these, really a classic of its kind, involves a young man (Hyland) who goes to a corner store to by a lime. The grocer (Leigh Cameron) informs him that her store, and in fact all the grocery stores in Canada have been bought by Rogers. A lime can only be bought in a bundle with other fruits. In fact, things can only be bought in bundles, and, as it turns, out, the style of service has changed to the familiar Rogers’ style, too.

In the best solo sketch, Hyland plays a version of himself who has proposed to a girl whose parents object. To convince them, Hyland chooses the only method he know – a PowerPoint presentation. Not only is the set-up clever but the more Hyland’s character reveals about himself the more he undermines his cause.

Two other solo sketches, unfortunately, don’t fit in at all. Cameron sings an overlong song about how everything makes her cry all the time. I thought this might turn into a parody of Tove Lo’s current hit “Habits”, but the main source of humour is that everything inexplicably makes Cameron’s character cry. It’s a topic that could easily be linked to the holidays but is not. The other is a long monologue by Kellett about how much she loves her motorcycle. In itself, Kellett’s detailed description of the grotesque pleasure the machine gives her is quite humorous, but the piece feels like part of different revue that somehow got dropped into this one.

Skits about an office worker (Bowman) having sex dreams about his female boss (Rasmussen) or two wine connoisseurs (Dooley and Cameron) describing the taste of a wine with increasingly sexual double entendres are all quite amusing but are also generic in appeal. They could be made to relate to the topic of the holidays but stand out as independent of the theme.

Holidazed and Confused follows the usual scheme of presentations at The Second City with a 45-minute-long first act followed by an intermission and a half-hour-long second act. After a five-minute intermission the cast returns for an improv session. Given that the show demonstrates the wide spectrum of comedy, it is appropriate that the scripted part of the show also includes improv. In one sequence, Cameron plays a little girl who has lost her mother in the Dufferin Mall (now stalked by the Krampus just to tie things together) and has decided that she will therefore try to find a new family to live with. Her interviews with in the patrons are uproarious since the innocent little girl has no sense of when she is being rude.

The second example comes in two parts. First, Hyland solicits information from a couple in the audience whereupon the cast, who all display an incredible memory for detail, create a typical day in the life of the couple. But there’s more. In the second act the cast enacts a parody of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life with Dooley as the George Bailey equivalent, Hyland as the angel Clarence and Kellett as the Mary Hatch equivalent. This improv section is a fine way for the cast to display their considerable talent while also bringing the sometimes straying show back to its nominal topic of Christmas.

The level of invention in Holidazed and Confused is so high that it’s a show you could easily see more than once – the first time to be surprised by the clever twists, the second to admire the troupe’s skill, not to mention a third just to enjoy with a group of friends. If you’re looking for a wealth of holiday cheer, here’s where you’ll find it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Kyle Dooley, Hayley Kellett, Kirsten Rasmussen, Devon Hyland, Kristopher Bowman and Leigh Cameron, ©2014 Paul Aihoshi; Krampus postcard, circa 1900; Leigh Cameron and Kirsten Rasmussen. ©2014 Paul Aihoshi.

For tickets, visit www.secondcity.com.

The Brown Bull of Cúailnge

Thu, 4 Dec 2014 18:23:59 -0500

✭✭✩✩✩
by Neil Wechsler, directed by Geoffrey Pounsett
The Room, The Grocery, 1362 Queen St. East, Toronto
November 27-December 14, 2014

“Fascinating Subject, Exasperating Play”

A new theatre company calling itself The Room is presenting the Canadian premiere of The Brown Bull of Cúailnge by American playwright and Buffalo resident Neil Wechsler. The play is inspired by an epic central to Irish mythology, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, known in English as The Cattle Raid of Cooley. Wechsler’s play is interesting in theory but tedious in practice. Wechsler’s repetitive style is the main source of this tedium but so is his deliberate withholding of background information that would make the action clearer.

The play includes a précis of the Táin Bó Cúailnge (pronounced “tahn bo ku-ill-ngeh”). We hear from one of the characters who is a poet that Queen Medb (pronounced “meev”) of Connacht and her husband Ailill were trying to decide who was wealthier. The two were equal in everything except that Medb lacked a bull to match Ailill’s. The only bull in Ireland equal to Ailill’s was the Brown Bull of Cúailnge in Ulster, so Medb and Ailill plan an attack on Ulster, where the 17-year-old Irish hero Cú Chulainn is king. Ailill takes one route to attack Ulster while Medb and exiles from Ulster led by Fergus mac Róich take another path. Fergus and his men are thus caught up in a struggle over possession of a bull that is just as pointless as the struggle in Homer’s Iliad over possession of Helen of Troy.

The characters of the play are Fergus (Dylan Roberts), the boy Muirgen (Gabriella Colavecchio), the mathematician Ath (Antonio Cayonne) and the poet Brug (Anand Rajaram). The four have become separated from their squadron, are now lost and do not know who is winning the battle. The action begins as the four are attempting to get some sleep, though with Muirgen’s constant questions, Brug’s decision to recite his poetry and the arguments that ensue, the continuing pretence that they are trying to sleep becomes ridiculous.

Wechsler establishes stylized patterns of dialogue that he repeats ad nauseam for the 70 minutes of the play. In this pattern a character will make a claim about something Fergus has done, Muirgen will ask Fergus whether it is true and Fergus will deny it. Fergus never confirms any of the rumours that have become attached to him and, indeed, negates any positive statement any of the other three characters make. The pattern is so predictable and therefore so tiresome that eventually audience members behind me began anticipating Fergus’s replies.

The plays iteration of statement followed by contradiction is so rigid that it nearly stifles any sense of drama. Yet, somehow, a change does occur. At the beginning Fergus is clearly the leader of the group and Muirgen is his devoted follower. Muirgen is so devoted that every question he asks Fergus ends in his name (another source of tedium). Nevertheless, Fergus’s unwavering denials of any positive statement the other three make begins to separate him from the others. While the others are looking for some point to the war, Fergus sees none. Fergus’s complete nihilism eventually draws the three together and an important moment occurs when Muirgen asks Fergus a question and for the first time does not end it with Fergus’s name.

Brug and Ath join together because they want the battle to mean something. Muirgen changes allegiance from Fergus to the other two for the same reason. But what precisely causes this turning point is not clear, at least after only a single viewing of the play.

The most bizarre aspect of this play based on mythology is Wechsler’s decision to withhold background information. The other three have a number of questions for Fergus regarding his past, all of which he denies. Wechsler seems to be counting on his audience’s ignorance of Irish mythology so that we will not know whether any of the questions brought up are part of myth or are not. If you do happen to know about Irish mythology, you have to wonder what game Wechsler is playing at.

As it turns out, all of the peculiar details that the other three mention are all part of the stories connected to Fergus mac Róich. Never mentioned in the play is Fergus’s former status as King of Ulster or why he was deposed. He is asked if it is true he is the hero Cú Chulainn’s foster-father, which is true in the stories but which Fergus denies. Wechsler’s version of Fergus also denies that he has been Queen Medb’s lover, that he is noted for his sexual prowess and that he made a wooden sword. He also denies any of the details concerning the bull’s extraordinary size or Cú Chulainn’s superhuman strength. Yet, all these are described in the Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Presumably, Wechsler wants to keep us in the dark about these details so that the others have to decide whether to believe rumour and poetic exaggeration rather than the banal truth. Wechsler shows that people choose to believe myth because it gives their lives meaning. Trading on our presumed ignorance has an unfortunate effect. It means that the majority of the play is taken up with people debating miscellaneous trivia that means absolutely nothing to us since we don’t know how it is connected to the story. Wechsler’s ploy also forces the character Fergus to become extremely annoying in that virtually all he does is to contradict what the others say. Since Wechsler keeps us ignorant, we don’t know why Fergus denies everything so vehemently. Is it because the statements are not true, or is it because Fergus wants to conceal the truth? Keeping Fergus’s motivation inaccessible along with the reasons behind his frequent departures from the stage make the potentially most interesting character the most annoying.

Dylan Roberts, who has the thankless task of playing Fergus, does not make the situation better by starting out his series of denials with such forcefulness he leaves himself nowhere else to go. As Muirgen and Ath, Gabriella Colavecchio and Antonio Cayonne both need to slow down their speech and to articulate more clearly, especially since they use so many Irish proper names. Colavecchio’s Muirgen does seem like an innocent but Wechsler’s forcing Muirgen to echo everything people say is tiresome. Cayonne’s Ath is potentially the figure we can relate to most, but Wechsler undercharacterizes him but giving him only three personal characteristics – a limp, a passion for women and a passion for mathematics. Wechsler also gives us no clue as to how three these go together.

Anand Rajaram’s Brug thus becomes, by comparison, the most fully realized character. Rajaram adds to this, in a way the others don’t, by developing grand gestures for the poet to use to bring out his comic side. His recitation of a portion of the Táin is pleasant in itself as well as providing us some context for the action.

Wechsler seeks universality through vagueness. We don’t know whether the four have been lost for ten days or 10,000 years or if they even exist. When he wrote plays about Irish myth, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) took the far simpler path of having the characters appear as ghosts reenacting the past which has the virtue of avoiding Wechsler’s rather too Beckett-like habit of having his characters discuss the status of their own existence.

In general, The Brown Bull of Cúailnge presents the spectacle of an intellectual playwright outsmarting himself. His stylistic ploys create a work that not only does not let us into the world of Irish myth but also becomes boring long before its 70 minutes are over. In the programme The Room claims that, “It enjoys bucking the odds and falling on its face from great heights”. While one appreciates its daring, let’s hope The Room can buck the odds with more successful results next time.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Dylan Roberts and Anand Rajaram; Antonio Cayonne and Gabriella Colavecchio. ©2014 Robert Harding.

For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/958652.

Paolo and Daphne

Wed, 3 Dec 2014 02:46:53 -0500

✭✭✩✩✩
by Ned Dickens, directed by Adrian Proszowski
Theatreworks Productions, Pia Bouman Theatre, Toronto
November 20-December 7, 2014

“Primus amor Phoebi Daphne Peneia, quem non fors ignara dedit, sed saeva Cupidinis ira”

“Peneian Daphne was Apollo's first love, which not blind chance, but Cupid’s savage anger, gave” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, I:6)

The world premiere of Ned Dickens’ Paolo and Daphne presents the spectacle of a director and his fine cast doing their very best to make a silk purse our of a sow’s ear. Dickens has specialized in writing plays based on classical subjects and Paolo and Daphne is an attempt to relocate to contemporary Toronto Ovid’s tale of Apollo and Daphne, one of the more than 250 tales in verse collected in his Metamorphoses (8 ad). It is an intriguing idea. The first opera ever written, Dafne (1598) by Jacopo Peri, chose this story for its plot. Richard Strauss wrote some of his most glorious music for his operatic version of it, Daphne, in 1938. Both Peri’s and Strauss’s librettists set their works in the ancient world. Where Dickens’ fails is in creating a believable enough modern drama to reflect this ancient story.

Ovid’s account is one of revenge, transformation and celebration. Apollo, god of reason and light, slew the deadly serpent Python and turned its lair into his oracle at Delphi. In an encounter with the boy-god Eros, son of Venus, Apollo boasts of his achievement and mocks Eros’s skill in archery. In revenge, Eros shoots the nymph Daphne with a golden arrow that produces undying hatred and shoots Apollo with a leaden arrow that produced undying love. The love-struck Apollo pursues the ever-fleeing Daphne until she begs her father, the river-god Peneus, for help. His response it to turn her into a tree, specifically the bay laurel. Apollo decreed that forever after her leaves would crowns rulers and poets.

In Paolo and Daphne, Dickens omits the revenge part of the story and starts right in with Paolo/Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne. Paolo (W. Joseph Matheson) is a cynical immigration lawyer in Toronto with a reputation of being helpful in getting pretty women into Canada especially in return for sexual favours. Daphne (Karen Glave) is his dedicated personal assistant. When the play opens, Paolo, asleep on the pull-out bed of the sofa in his office after a booze-fueled evening, immediately declares his love for Daphne, again, while she responds to him, again, that she can never love him. We can understand why Paolo might love Daphne, but why she can never return his love is never explained. Besides this, since they have apparently been colleagues for a long time and since Paolo’s unreciprocated love has existed from the start, it stretches believability that they have not worked out this problem before now. How exactly have they managed to work together without resolving this issue?

Into their world steps a young woman (Daniella Forget) with a Slavic accent who tells Paolo he can call her Illyria, without suggesting that that is her real name. Not only is Illyria the setting for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, about a chain of unrequited loves, but it is also the ancient name of Thrace, which in Byzantine times would have extended into the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia among other republics.

Hungry, sleepless and not having bathed, Illyria asks Paolo if she can use his shower. He agrees and when she emerges, she who had previous been quite and withdrawn, throws herself at Paolo to initiate sex. We might accept that Paolo is a sleazy lawyer, but it is impossible to believe that he would agree to Illyria’s request for a shower before ever taking down any of her personal information. He is a lawyer, after all, and can be entrapped and sued like any other person in a position of authority. We are meant to believe that she throws herself at Paolo because she has been told to do so by other immigrants he has helped. Yet, when we later hear her story of how she had been gang-raped in Bosnia, the idea that she would agree to see such a lawyer, let alone act as a sexual aggressor is beyond implausible.

When Paolo finally convinces Illyria that he is not interested, she apologizes for her error and they try to proceed with a normal interview. Illyria, however, will not tell Paolo her real name or where she is from, and while Paolo objects, he still says he can help her. After a series of poorly motivated exits and entrances for both Illyria and Daphne, the three finally find themselves together and Illyria claims that Paolo and Daphne are characters in the book she carries, which just happens to be Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The three duly read out Ovid’s account of Apollo and Daphne, whereupon Dickens introduces the idea that we all have a story that is like the thread that helped guide Theseus into the labyrinth to kill the minotaur and out again. Basically, Dickens is repackaging the pop psych notion that we all have to confront our inner demon to move forward. Daphne alludes to her “minotaur” but we still never learn precisely what it is. Paolo tells us his Phaëton-inspired story of his son. And Illyria, who now sometimes goes by Io or Callisto (both nymphs raped by Jupiter), tells of the horrors of Bosnia.

Far too obviously, Dickens acts as a puppeteer forcing his characters into situations whether there is sufficient motivation for them or not. The idea of having modern life reflect mythic reality is part of the Modernist movement and is most completely embodied in a novel like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). There, however, the motivation of every thought and action of the novel’s three main characters is minutely correlated with mythological precedents. In Dickens, after 90 minutes of talk, we still have no handle on the personalities of any of the characters. All we now is that they are modern representatives of ancient figures.

Yet, even this fails. If Paolo is Apollo why associate him with liquor and sex, the attributes of his diametric opposite, Bacchus or Dionysus? If Daphne is meant to reflect her namesake, why hasn’t she already fled Paolo?

Dramaturgically, the play is a mess. Dickens has Daphne exit. A scene ensues between Paolo and Illyria. Illyria exits. Daphne enters and Paolo has to describe to Daphne the scene between him and Illyria that we have just witnessed. Dickens does this twice in a row, which is two times too many for any play that can be called well written.

Luckily for Dickens his play could not be better directed and performed than it is in Theatreworks production. Director Adrian Proszowski keeps the pacing tight and action-filled and all three cast members play their roles with undeniable intensity. Daniella Forget as Illyria has perhaps the most difficult role since most of what she has to do, including shooting an arrow out the window, makes no sense. Yet, despite everything, she manages to muster sympathy for her character. One expects that her character will be revealed as a lunatic, only to find that Dickens is using her to preach his moral, several times, that we must understand our stories since they are modelled on archetypal stories from the past.

Theatreworks’ mandate is “Re-imagining through exploration and creative production the telling of stories derived from ancient texts”. It’s easy to see how Paolo and Daphne fits that mandate, but that does not make it a good play. The director and cast work so well together it would be wonderful to see them work together on another project, one that is really worthy of their talent and dedication.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) W. Joseph Matheson, Karen Glave, Daniella Forget and cellist Samuel Bisson; . ©2014 Theatreworks Productions.

For tickets, visit https://totix.ticketpro.ca/?lang=en#def_1105982850.

Shrek The Musical

Mon, 1 Dec 2014 02:13:10 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music by Jeanine Tesori, book & lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Susan Ferley
Grand Theatre, London
November 28, 2014-January 3, 2015

Shrek: “My future looked bleak but the freak has turned out just fine”

The Grand Theatre’s production of Shrek the Musical is a great success. The musical is based on the 2001 movie Shrek, which in turn was based on the 1990 children’s book of the same title by William Steig. If, like me, you did not particularly like the movie, don’t worry. This is one of those rare cases where the musical based on the movie is actually better than the movie.

The movie had musical numbers but they were all pre-existing pop and rock songs. The musical has a high-class pedigree. The new score is composed by Jeanine Tesori, who won the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music for the musical Caroline, or Change written with Tony Kushner. David Lindsay-Abaire, who wrote the lyrics and the new book, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit Hole. The combination makes for a musical where the music is memorable and varied, the plot tight and the lyrics witty and very funny.

The movie Shrek made by the young company DreamWorks was conceived as an anti-Disney animation film. William Steig’s story had an ogre as a hero, not a beautiful prince or princess. The hero had an animal sidekick as in Disney, but one he doesn’t like. The villain is more comical than scary. And the songs were pre-existing oldies. Changing to a purpose-composed score for the stage musical is a step towards making Shrek more like a Disney musical thus letting it fall to Lindsay-Abaire’s lyrics to maintain the satirical thrust.

The show begins by skewering storybook conventions, with characters stepping out of an oversized storybook, when we see the parents of the 7-year-old Shrek (Zoë Brown) kick him out of the house in ogre tradition to live his life in a swamp. Immediately after wards, we see the parents of 7-year-old Princess Fiona (Skylar Serafim) send her out of their castle to live in the top of a tower surrounded by molten lava and guarded by a dragon waiting until her prince comes to rescue her.

Then we fast-forward several years to find the older Shrek (Steve Ross) living alone in the patch of swamp he has staked out. The problem is that a host of fairytale creatures – Pinocchio (Robert Markus), the Big Bad Wolf (Matt Alfano) and the Sugar Plum Fairy (Callandra Dendias) among others – begin arriving and asking to stay on his land. The reason is that the evil ruler of Duloc, Lord Farquaad (Liam Tobin) has exiled them from the kingdom as freaks to return only on pain of death. The major irony is that Lord Farquaad, who, as we discover later, is the son of one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs, is a “freak” himself, since he is severely vertically challenged.

Shrek sets off to complain to Farquaad about the situation, not because he cares about the creatures’ plight, but just to get his privacy back. Along the way he rescues a Donkey (Troy Adams) from Farquaad’s guards. For this, the Donkey insists on being Shrek’s friend, although Shrek is not interested. Meanwhile, Farquaad is looking for a princess to rescue so that he can become king. He is too cowardly to do it himself so he wants to find a substitute. When Shrek arrives, Farquaad makes a deal that if Shrek rescues Fiona he can have his swamp back. Thus, Shrek reluctantly sets out on what in most stories would be an heroic quest.

The show has an ideal cast. Steve Ross, who is far too often cast as a sidekick (Sancho Panza to Don Quixote in Stratford’s Man of La Mancha), finally gets the chance to play a title role. He relishes the opportunity, not that he lets it show since his Shrek is as grumpy and embittered as he is supposed to be. What Ross does especially well is show how Shrek begins to fall in love with Fiona while realizing all the time how hopeless it is for a princess ever to love an ogre. Ross is in fine voice and well brings off such songs as the introductory “Big Bright Beautiful World” and the reflective “Who I’d Be”.

Elicia MacKenzie, Maria in the Mirvish production of The Sound of Music, is now thoroughly at home on stage and reveals a talent for comedy that previously had remained hidden. Tesori has written a great introductory song for her, “I Know It’s Today”, where the imprisoned princess keeps her hopes up that one day her prince will come. The song is introduced by the Young Fiona (Skylar Serafim), continued by the Teen Fiona (Alexandra Grant, who has a beautifully rich voice) and then the adult Fiona, concluding with a trio of the three Fionas all together. MacKenzie conveys Fiona’s disappointment that her rescuer should be an ogre, but as she, Shrek and the Donkey journey back, MacKenzie subtly indicates how Fiona falls in love with Shrek despite his looks. Fiona and Shrek even engage in a burping and farting contest (courtesy of sound designer Jim Neil) that ought to reveal to Shrek how perfectly suited Fiona is to him and his crude sense of humour.

The most important change from the movie is the softening of the character of the Donkey. In trying to make the Donkey annoying, the writers of the screen version succeeded all too well so that we wished the motormouth beast would shut up just as much as Shrek does. In the musical, however, Lindsay-Abaire only suggests the Donkey’s tendency to garrulousness and instead focusses on the character’s common sense. Shrek is blinded to his own virtues by his unhappy childhood and the stigma of being an ogre, but Lindsay-Abaire’s Donkey sees through all that and helps Shrek appraise his situation more clearly. Troy Adams, last seen as the male nurse Belize in Soulpepper’s Angels in America, brings his wonderful combination of snappy comic repartee with an undertone of real concern from that role to this, thus lending Donkey a depth and importance the character never had in the movie. Adams is also a fine singer as proved by his vital rendition of “I Won’t Let You Go”.

Liam Tobin, who made Buddy’s innocence so hilarious in the Grand Theatre’s Elf last year, does the same with Lord Farquaad’s villainy in Shrek. To make the 6’4” Tobin a dwarf, designer Bill Layton has Tobin act the part on his knees with dummy legs and feet hanging from his waist and a long cloak trailing behind to disguise Tobin’s legs. The way Tobin appears proud and disdainful in this ridiculous set-up is hilarious in itself. But the way Tobin makes his newly shortened self behave so naturally, even dancing and riding a horse, is quite amazing and proof again of Tobin’s knack for physical comedy. He also possesses a fine speaking and singing voice and manages to convey Lord Farquaad’s innate insecurity beneath even his most gleefully villainous declarations.

Other standouts include Alana Bridgewater as the Dragon. Bridgewater gets to unleash her powerful voice for the rousing song “Forever”. Layton has created a fantastic dragon whose face alone takes up a third of the stage. Director Susan Ferley wisely has Bridgewater, clad in the Dragon’s colours, stand next to the dragon puppet to sing.

Robert Markus is a comically helium-voiced Pinocchio both singing and speaking and actually does have a nose that grows. Stratford regular Matt Alfano is a hoot as the Big Bad Wolf, who dons grandma’s clothes not because he ate her but because he’s into cross-dressing. Callandra Dendias is a charming Sugar Plum Fairy, but is especially funny as the voice and puppeteer of Gingy the Gingerbread Man, whom Lord Farquaad is in the midst of torturing when we first meet him.

The show is filled with surprises from a chorus of the Pied Piper’s tap-dancing mice to the Three Blind Mice as Supremes-like backup singers. Layton’s set and costumes designs rise to the shows manifold challenges and achieve the look of a beautifully illustrated children’s book come to life on stage. Ferley has an unerring sense of how to pace the show and remembers to slow down for reflection between the show’s many exuberant numbers. For all its gags and satire, the Lindsay-Abaire gives the show a clear uplifting message about diversity in the song “Freak Flag”, where the cast-out fairytale creatures defiantly band together to sing: “All the things that make us special / Are the things that make us strong”.

If you already live in the London area, make sure a visit to see Shrek is on your list. If you are outside the area and habitually take your children’s to see the family shows at Stratford, consider strongly making a trip to London for Shrek, because the show is much more enjoyable and kid-friendly and than most of the so-called children’s shows that Stratford has mounted so far.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Steve Ross as Shrek and Elicia MacKenzie as Princess Fiona; Troy Adams as Donkey and Steve Ross as Shrek; Liam Tobin as Lord Farquaad. ©2014 Chris Montanini.

For tickets, visit www.grandtheatre.com.

The Little Mermaid

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 02:33:26 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman & Glenn Slater, book by Doug Wright & Glenn Casale, directed by Ann Hodges
Drayton Entertainment, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge
November 27-December 21, 2014

Sebastian: “Darling, it’s better down where it’s wetter”

Drayton Entertainment has scored another coup by presenting the Canadian premiere of the new 2012 version of The Little Mermaid. The musical is based on the 1989 Disney animated feature of the same name and on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen on which the film is based. Of Howard Menken’s three stage versions of Disney films, The Little Mermaid is more serious in tone and more moving than his Aladdin of 2011 or his Beauty and the Beast of 1994. Drayton has come up with a beautifully imagined, well-cast production that provides family entertainment on a very high level.

The stage version of The Little Mermaid premiered in New York in 2008. In 2012 the book and production were completely revised by Glenn Casale and this is now the official licensed version. Just as the Disney film differs significantly from the original fairy tale, so does the revised stage musical differ from the Disney film. Casale’s revisions all help to tell the story more clearly and to give the musical more impact on stage. The result now seems less like a Broadway musical than a classic operetta. This is all to the good since it gives the work a more elevated tone.

In the musical the little mermaid Ariel (Jayme Armstrong) disobeys the decree of her father Triton (Marcus Nance) to stay away from the water’s surface where she has the habit of idealizing what life on land would be like. The seagull Scuttle (Keith Savage) thinks himself an authority of all things human and gives her comically wrong information about human ways. Her first contact with a human comes when Prince Eric (David Cotton), who sails the sea trying to locate the source of a beautiful singing voice (Ariel’s), falls overboard in a storm and Ariel saves him from drowning and swims away before he can thank her.

Angered by Ariel’s behaviour, Triton appoints the court composer, the crab Sebastian (Mark Cassius), to guard her constantly. Realizing she is in love with Eric, she visits the sea witch, the octopus Ursula (Kristen Peace). Ursula’s bargain is that she will give Ariel legs and lungs to live on land for three days. If she cannot receive true love’s kiss from Eric in that time, she will return to the sea and be forever Ursula’s slave. All Ariel has to give up for those three days is her voice. Ariel agrees. Once on the surface, Eric takes her in as a presumed sole survivor of a shipwreck. Although he is falling in love with the mute girl, he is still entranced by the voice he hears coming from the ocean (kept in Ursula’s magic shell) and thus assumes that the mute girl and the owner of the voice are two different people.

One aspect of the musical that makes the plot more complicated than it need be is the relation between Triton and Ursula. Unlike the movie, the musical presents the two as brother and sister and equal heirs of their father Poseidon. Each ruled half of the ocean until Ursula began to practice black magic and he deposed her, now ruling the entire ocean himself. The musical depicts Ursula’s enticing Ariel to visit her as part of her revenge on Triton, but that is wholly unnecessary since Ariel already has the motivation to visit the sea witch just as the Little Mermaid does in Hans Christian Andersen’s original story from 1837 or the mermaid Rusalka does in Antonín Dvořák’s 1901 opera of the same name.

The reason for this backstory is to help lead the musical to a happy ending which does not happen in Rusalka or in the original story. It takes some of the burden of making the decision to be human from the mermaid and relates it to the larger battle between brother and sister. In so doing it reduces the need for the mermaid to be punished for a longing against nature. The sibling conflict makes the exposition too long and it also changes the point of the story from the perils of unlawful desire to a reconciliation between Triton and Ariel, father and daughter, and the truth that parents eventually have to let their children live their own lives. The sadness of the original story’s ending of the mermaid not at home on land or in the sea changes to the more specific pain of a father having to allow his daughter to live in a completely different world.

While Disney’s happy ending necessarily simplifies the story, few parents will mind that their children do not have to deal with the question of how long it will take the mermaid to obtain an eternal soul that ends Andersen’s tale or the eternal limbo for the mermaid that ends Rusalka.

Drayton’s production is quite elaborate with a cast of 22 adults plus a children’s chorus of 25. As is required in productions of Disney properties, J. Branson’s sets and Leon Dobkowski’s costumes, originally for Music Theatre Wichita, reflect the elaborate designs of the 1989 animated film. Kevin Fraser’s lighting is essential in creating the atmosphere of the below-sea and above-worlds. While there is no credit for projections, the production makes use of animated projections both on the front curtain and on the back wall of the stage. Often those on the front curtain depict incidents via animation that would be very difficult to depict on stage, such as Ariel’s rescue of the drowning Eric from the bottom of the sea. Over-dependance on video would be a mistake, but luckily, in addition to projections of filmed waves crashing on the shore, Hodges and her creative team also use theatre techniques like long blue banners streaming across the stage and schools of fish on sticks to depict the underwater realm.

The show is very well cast with many Drayton favourites in key roles. One of these is Jayme Armstrong, Drayton’s Mary Poppins in 2013 and Fantine in Les Misérables this year, who plays Ariel. With her pure, high operetta-like voice, clear diction and prim demeanour, she will immediately remind viewers of a young Julie Andrews. She has a delightful stage presence that creates an immediate bond with the audience and a lovely voice that is capable of conveying the longing of the show’s big tune, “Part of Your World”.

David Cotton, Marius in Drayton’s Les Miz, returns as Prince Eric, attractive in both voice and bearing. Cotton and Armstrong have a strong onstage chemistry that helps them maintain the attitude of longing for a kiss throughout the whole length of the number “Kiss the Girl”.

Marcus Nance is an authoritative Triton with his resonant bass-baritone in an athlete’s body. It is largely due to his fine acting that Triton’s complete change in point of view comes across as so convincing. As Triton’s nemesis Ursula, Kristen Peace is as flippant as Nance is earnest. Her vocal heft gives her depth but her intonation brings out her underlying malice.

Mark Cassius is amusing as an easily befuddled Sebastian. His fine voice leads two of the musical’s best-known choruses – “Under the Sea” and “Kiss the Girl” – his Jamaican accent perfectly suited to the Caribbean flavour of the songs. (What a Jamaican crab is doing in the North Sea is a question Disney doesn’t answer.) Sebastian’s avian counterpart is Drayton favourite Keith Savage as Scuttle. Savage makes the most of Scuttle’s (mistaken) belief in his expertise in all things human and relishes the mispronunciations of choice words that pepper the seagull’s speech.

13-year-old Aidan Tye makes a very impressive Flounder, a youngster clearly enamoured of Ariel but too embarrassed to say anything about it. Of the actors he is best at maintaining flowing arm movements whenever he is in the sea. Nick Settimi may feature in only one scene as the maniacal Chef Louis, but he makes that scene hilarious.

Though the romantic story will likely appeal more to girls than boys, the musical is so filled with colourful visual effects, movement and memorable tunes that it should please children of both sexes and all ages. Don’t rush out of the theatre too quickly because the Dunfield Theatre gives young theatregoers the chance to have their pictures taken with members of the cast in the lobby after the show.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) David Cotton as Prince Eric and Jayme Armstrong as Ariel; Thomas Alderson as Jetsam, Kristen Peace as Ursula and Gregory Pember as Flotsam; Keith Savage as Scuttle. ©2014 Hilary Gould-Camilleri.

For tickets, visit www.draytonentertainment.com.

Cinderella: The Gags to Riches Family Musical!

Sat, 29 Nov 2014 01:28:52 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Reid Janisse, directed by Tracey Flye
Ross Petty Productions, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
November 27, 2014-January 4, 2015

“At Least You Get Home Before Midnight”

For its 19th annual holiday season panto, Ross Petty Productions is presenting a new production of Cinderella. Writer Reid Janisse’s updating of the fairy tale to present day Toronto is a clever idea executed in a clumsy fashion. Janisse gives the story an overly complicated set-up that prevents the familiar plot from kicking in for nearly a half hour. Once the plot does get going, it moves swiftly enough although the cast don’t encourage as much audience participation as they could – and it’s audience participation that makes pantos so enjoyable for children.

Janisse begins the show with a completely unnecessary prologue. Dwayne (Eddie Glen) and Zane (Janisse himself) are two slacker kids who belong to a Hogwarts-like school. Professor Yongenbloor (Dan Chameroy) want to tell the story of Cinderella the tradition way. Dwayne and Zane want to tell it a more modern way. They let the audience vote and, of course, the two faux-teens win out over the stuffy professor. As if this were not slow enough, the trio are given a rap number besides. Kids will likely pick up from the school crest and from Yongenbloor’s academic gown that his character is some offshoot of Professor Dumbledore. But what gradeschoolers are going to know that Dwayne and Zane are based on Mike Myers and Dana Carvey in the movie Wayne’s World from 1991?

In Dwayne and Zane’s updated version, Cinderella (Danielle Wade) spends her days running the organic vegetable stall in St. Lawrence Market that her late father left her. Contrary to any other Cinderella, this one has a staff of people who work for her. As one would expect, Cinderella is disliked by her stepmother Revolta Bulldoza (Ross Petty) and her two stepsisters Nastine (Bryn McAuley) and Shakiki (Cleopatra Williams). But the traditional idea that Cinderella slaves for them has gone out the window. We feel sympathy for her because we know we are supposed to because her name is Cinderella, not because of what we see on stage.

Janisse has replaced Cinderella-as-drudge with Cinderella-as-independent-businesswoman-whose store-is-taken-away which hardly has the same impact. Revolta takes over Cinderella’s store and forces her to sell a new snack food she invented called Hypno-Chips that not only are not organic but contain toxic waste and weapons-grade plutonium. These snacks do not merely undermine health but alter the mind so that the consumer becomes the zombie-like slave of Revolta. While this notion does tie in with the current craze for zombies in pop culture, it does take the story pretty far off course.

After trying to establish all of this, Janisse then has to give us his new take on Prince Charming. The character is now the world-famous teen singing heartthrob Max Charming (Jeff Lillico). Janisse shows us about three times in succession how Max doesn’t care for the screaming groupies who surround him because they are in “love” only with his image, not with him. Finally, after two songs too many, Max convinces his manager Dan Dini (Janisse again) to let him roam the streets of Toronto incognito. Finally, he bumps into Cinderella, the two fall in love at first sight, and, without revealing his identity, he asks her to come to the Eligi-Ball, a fundraising reality show event that Max is hosting where the girl he chooses will get to go on a date with him.

Now the action of the fairy tale can start, but even then it is held up by an extensive section devoted to Cinderella’s fairy godmother who just happens to be Dan Chameroy playing his beloved kooky-looking man-hungry character Plumbum for the sixth time. Plumbum first appeared as one of Cinderella’s stepsisters the last time Petty staged the panto in 2008.

Since Janisse has taken Cinders out of her usual rat-infested kitchen and doesn’t want to suggest that the St. Lawrence Market is riddled with vermin, he is at a loss how to replace them. This requires the introduction of yet more characters, this time in the form of a yardful of garden gnomes. Once all this exposition is dealt with, Plumbum is free to transform them into the lovely coach and horses and footman who accompany Cinders to the ball ending the 90-minute-long Act 1.

A new design feature of this panto is a giant LED screen that covers the entire back wall of the stage. Here projection designers Beth Kates and Ben Chaisson create the modern equivalent of scenic backdrops that have the advantages of changing instantly, shining brightly and displaying innumerable complex effects, like bombs shooting from magic wands, too complex for most conventional technology. Kate and Chaisson also use traditional front projection on walls flown to midstage and on the front curtain itself. Front projection is also used on a drop down screen for a series of commercials that punctuate the action. These commercials featuring characters from the panto used to be show in clumps in the first and second acts, but now they appear on a regular basis very much as if one where watching television. They would be annoying expect that they are so well done that they are often funnier than the material they interrupt.

The cast is very well chosen. Petty, Eddie Glen in his 11th panto, here as Cinderella’s pal Buttons, and Dan Chameroy now form a team. Glen and Chameroy now receive as much if not more applause than Petty, who seems content to soak up the boos that arise whenever he appears. Chameroy’s Plumbum, a truly hilarious creation, now has more stage time than Petty’s villains, and Chameroy’s improvisations are often wittier than anything in the script. Add that to his gift for physical comedy and his running commentary on his own and others’ performances, and Plumbum has now become the centre of the show.

Eddie Glen, however, is no slouch. He has the acting-to-the-audience style of panto down perfectly. And in improvisational matches of wit with Petty or Chameroy, he wins every time.

After two years as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Danielle Wade is now completely at home on stage and is a plucky and endearing Cinderella. Most Cinderellas would not have the attitude to pull off a fine rendition of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”, but Wade certainly does.

Boyish charm and instant likeability are qualities that Jeff Lillico brings to every performance. Even though he won Dora Award for Outstanding Performance By a Male In A Musical for The Light in the Piazza in 2010, he oddly is seldom given the chance to sing and hardly ever given the chance to show his wilder side. Here it’s great to see him cover Ed Sheeran’s bouyant “Sing” with such enthusiasm one moment only to express his longing in Foreigner’s power ballad “I Want to Know What Love Is” the next. It’s just too bad he doesn’t get the chance to sing more of the song. His plea to Cinders in Act 2 to the tune of Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” is more proof that his fine singing voice should be heard more often.

As the stepsister, Bryn McAuley and Cleopatra Williams are virtually indistinguishable with the same look, gestures and deliberately ear-grating voices. Some productions try to differentiate the sisters, but here where the goal is uniform obnoxiousness, the two are perfectly matched.

Even though Cinderella had had a week of previews before it opened, actors did not yet realize or were not encouraged to stop the show for audience participation as often as they could have. Kids who have seen Petty’s pantos before are trained to boo him whenever he appears, but there are other kinds of participation that are more interesting. One time when Chameroy as Plumbum enters, she keeps stumbling over the name of the girl she is supposed to help. Eventually the kids shouted “Cinderella” to her but he made little of it. He could have repeated the name back to them incorrectly to encourage them to shout it again correctly, but he did not. Later in the show, Jeff Lillico as Max Charming is offered a Hypno-Chip to eat. Much of the audience shouted out “No!” when he said the chip looked good, but he downed it without making it a point of participation. I still fondly remember when Melissa Thomson as Snow White in 2001 asked the audience several times whether she should eat the poisoned apple, only to receive heartfelt cries of "No!" and "Don't do it!" If he had been directed to do so, Lillico could have done the same before biting into his tainted chip because the audience was clearly ready to warn him – but he let the moment pass.

In the past several pantos, directors seem to have forgotten how important it is in this form to make children feel they are directly involved in the action. If a character like Snow White or Prince Charming makes a wrong decision, the audience will know that at least it gave them a clear warning. Let’s hope that forms of participation other than booing the villain develop in Cinderella as the run continues because the potential is certainly there. At present the show’s zippy conclusion, where there is a mad chase for Plumbum’s magic wand almost, but not quite, makes up for the show’s snoozy beginning.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Jeff Lillico, Danielle Wade, Dan Chameroy and Eddie Glen (centre) with dancers; Cleopatra Williams, Ross Petty and Bryn McAuley; Danielle Wade and Jeff Lillico. ©2014 Racheal McCaig.

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

James and the Giant Peach

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 17:25:01 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
music and lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul, book by Timothy Allen McDonald, directed by Sue Miner
Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
November 27, 2014-January 4, 2015

“This Peach is a Bit Too Fuzzy Around the Edges”

The musical of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach premiered in 2010 at the Goodspeed Opera House. A substantially revised version was presented last year at Seattle Children’s Theatre and this year Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre is giving the work its Canadian premiere in its new form. Sue Miner’s production is imaginatively designed and well-directed, but the musical does not overcome certain flaws in Dahl’s book and even adds some of its own.

James and the Giant Peach from 1961 is only the second of Dahl’s 17 books for children and, unlike a later book like Matilda from 1988, shows more of an interest in surreal fantasy than it does in character. The main difficulty in making James into a stage show is that, unlike the title character of Matilda, James is largely a passive character to whom much happens but who takes little action. As a result, James’s setbacks and triumphs are not due to anything he does but to external circumstances. A stage version of the story can dramatize these circumstance as does the Pasek and Paul musical, but it still gives children no hero they can root for as they can a Tom Sawyer or an Anne of Green Gables.

For those unfamiliar with the story, James Henry Trotter (Alessandro Costantini) has a happy life until the age of 4 when both his parents are eaten by a rampaging rhinoceros escaped from the London Zoo. After a time in an orphanage he is sent to live with his only remaining relatives, two maiden aunts Spiker (Nicole Robert) and Sponge (Karen Wood), who make their money through pickpocketing and petty theft. For three years they beat and verbally abuse him and treat him as their slave.

All this changes when one day a mysterious Old Man (Dale Miller) appears and tells James how to make a magic potion. Rather than drinking the potion as he is supposed to, James spills it on a barren peach tree near his aunts’ house that immediately starts growing an enormous peach. It is so big that one could crawl into in, which James does when he sees a hole in it. Once inside the hollow pit, he sees it is inhabited by human-sized insects – a Ladybug (Lana Carillo), a Spider (Saccha Dennis), an Earthworm (Jacob MacInnis), a Centipede (Dale Miller) and a Grasshopper (Stewart Adam McKensy). They also hate the aunts and become James’s friends. Ruining the aunts’ plans to cash in on this anomaly of nature, the Centipede gnaws the peach free of the tree and it rolls into the English Channel and eventually to the United States, where becomes impaled on the top of the Empire State Building and James and his friends start a new life.

As a narrative, the first problem is that James is freed by a deus ex machina in the form of a wizard who never appears in the story again. Timothy Allen McDonald, author of the musical’s book, could have remedied this problem by having the wizard reappear at important moments to suggest that what happens to James is actually part of the wizard’s plan, but McDonald does not do this. McDonald does make certain characters reappear in the story contrary to Dahl’s book, but in this case it only causes confusion.

In Dahl’s book, Spiker and Sponge are killed when the giant peach rolls over them on its way to the sea. This is also what Sue Miner’s production seems to show. It is then rather a surprise to find them alive later on and discussing what to do now that the peach is gone. Given that they have only eked out a living by theft it is even more surprising to find that McDonald places them on the Queen Mary on a crossing to New York to start a new life. It is there in New York that McDonald decides to have the aunts killed when the peach falls from the Empire State Building. McDonald obviously does want to get rid of the book’s chief villains as soon as Dahl does, but reviving them means he has to lose the focus of Dahl’s book where the giant peach is lowered from its height and helps to feed thousands of hungry children who become friends with the once lonely James.

McDonald’s book emphasizes the rather more subversive side of Dahl’s novel concerning family. Just because he is related to Spiker and Sponge by blood, does not mean James has anything in common with them, whereas by their mutual respect for each other James finds a new, more loving family among the insects inside the peach. These insects are so diverse that they include the Earthworm, who tells James that it is both a boy and a girl (a fact, no matter how true, that the audience of children reacted to with a collective “Eeuw!”). This could make for an interesting discussion in class, but to make this fact more persuasive, McDonald could have avoided Dahl’s mistake of making herbivorous rhinoceroses carnivorous, but he does not.

Pasek and Paul’s music, written in a generic post-Sondheim, post-Kander style is pleasant during the moment but immediately fades from memory once it is over. What will stay in the theategoer’s memory much longer is Yannik Larivée’s impressive design. The entire stage is framed by two parentheses that we realize are the shape of two side of a peach. Midstage is a wall with a large peach-shaped cutout with a curtain behind it concealing a screen. There Miner stages some of the more complex action scenes using shadow puppets, such as the rhino attack on James’s parents or the giant peach rolling down the hill over James’s aunts.

Set elements pivot into the peach cutout from either side – the aunts’ decrepit house and barren peach tree branches. One of the most imaginative effects Miner creates with lighting designer Jason Hand. The magical peach when it first appears is a light shining through the screen on an object behind it. We see the peach grow in stages ever bigger until it fills the entire peach-shaped cutout. The midstage wall then becomes a side of the giant peach and the acting space in front is the area inhabited inside it.

Robin Fisher has created an array of wonderful costumes along with puppets for the Ladybug and Grasshopper before they are magically enlarged. Especially clever are the costume for the life-sized Ladybug and the Spider, where the actor has two pairs of extra arms attached to her own arms to give the beast eight limbs.

Alessandro Costantini makes the quietly passive James quite sympathetic. Alessandro does show that James gains in confidence when he is surrounded by a supportive group like the insects, so that James’s decision to rescue the Centipede when he falls overboard into the sea becomes a personal triumph for his character. Nicole Robert and Karen Wood make Spiker and Sponge so nasty they seem more like witches than simply evil human beings. During their introductory song when they describe the joys of thievery, it would help if Miner had them plying their trade on passers-by so we could see the two in action. Both are prone to over acting but that is perhaps part of the fun of playing a villain in a children’s show.

All of the cast are fine singers. Stewart Adam McKensy is a standout for the warmth of his voice. The two most interesting insects are the Centipede and the Earthworm. Dale Miller shows that the Centipede has anger management problems and can’t get along well with a group. His belief that others don’t like him makes him act unkindly to others. Therefore, when James rescues him, Miller takes the chance to show us a a real change of character. Jacob MacInnis’s Earthworm also undergoes a change. At first shy and fearful, he summons what little courage he has to try to tempt seagulls down to the peach so Spider can harness them. This change, so well expressed in the song “Plump and Juicy”, is the musical highlight of the show.

In YPT’s production the visuals go a long way to make up for the passive hero and the forgettable music. The music might have more impact if certain audio problems were solved. We can hear the actors’ voices well when they sing alone, but in groups of two or more their words become completely blurred. Fans of Dahl and of obscure musicals will certainly want to see the show as will those looking for a family show that, for a change, does not have a holiday theme.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Saccha Dennis, Lana Carillo, Dale Miller, Jacob MacInnis, Stewart Adam McKensy and Alessandro Costantini; Karen Wood, Alessandro Costantini and Nicole Robert. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.

Le Chant de Georges Boivin

Thu, 27 Nov 2014 11:10:36 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Martin Bellemare, directed by Mario Borges
Les Productions Kléos, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
November 26-30, 2014

Georges: “J’ai perdu ma référence dans le monde”

Le Chant de Georges Boivin is a wonderfully funny, warm-hearted play. The fact that it stars the great Québécois actor Pierre Collin, who plays at least a dozen roles, is reason enough to see it. But the play itself, winner of the Gratien Gélinas Award in 2009, tells a fascinating story that sweeps away the stereotypes people too often associate with old age. Playwright Martin Bellemare does not claim that life begins at 70, but he does demonstrate that dreams and a zest for life need not diminish with the passage of time.

Bellemare’s solo play thrusts us in media res as Georges Boivin accompanied by three friends, Jean-Pierre, Clément and Gérard, sets off to travel from Quebec to Vancouver to find Georges’ first love, Juliette. Georges knows she has married but does not know her married name and all he has is an outdated address, yet he feels sure that he will be able to find her and has convinced his three friends to come along. This introduction allows Bellemare to flip back and forth between the car trip in the present and Georges’ reminiscences. Thus, Georges’ journey forward in the present also becomes a journey backwards to reclaim his past.

What has impelled Georges to make this cross country trip is the recent death of his beloved wife Ginette. Since Georges mourns her passing every day, one question the play raises is why Georges feels such a need to locate the first woman he ever loved. Georges gives the answer near the very end of the play when he says, “J’ai perdu ma référence dans le monde” (“I’ve lost my point of reference in the world”). Finding Juliette is not the act of finding a woman to replace Ginette, but rather finding that one other person who can give him the sense he exists and that his life is important.

Bellemare makes this point near the very beginning of the play when he has Gérard say, “Des fois, Quand je regarde en arrière, Je suis capable de voir des étapes dans ma vie. D’autres fois, Rien. Comme si tout ce qui était derrière moi C’était arrivé à quelqu’un d’autre” (Sometimes, when I look back, I can see the stages of my life. Other times – nothing. As if everything behind me had happened to someone else”). Gérard’s negative feeling is what Georges feels and he makes the journey in hopes of banishing it.

Georges’ existential plight is what gives the play its depth. On the surface, however, it is a lovingly observed comedy. Georges’ companions could not be more different. Jean-Pierre is deaf and hardly says a thing but he also has the most acute memory of the group. Gérard is loud and gruff. And Clément is the oldest at 92, is still married and speaks in an affected Parisian accent. The closer the travellers come to Vancouver, the more Georges’ goal seems impossible.

Pierre Collin is an ideal Georges. Tough and crotchety on the outside but emotional and filled with longing on the inside. Collin differentiates Georges’ three travelling companions so well that soon we know who is speaking simply by Collin’s change of voice and gesture. Collin also plays a host of minor characters, including himself and Juliette when they were young, so that the play play becomes a real tour de force for the actor.

Designer Michel St-Amand has given the play a minimalist look with only a single chair for a prop and screen at the back where moon shines. It turns out the screen conceals several surprises while Alain Jenkins’ soundtrack instantly creates the ambience of whatever place Georges happens to be. Just as the play begins in media res it ends in media res – a decision by Bellemare that some may find exciting, others disconcerting.

When Bellemare was aged 17 to 20, he worked as a hospital orderly with older people who were classified as “confused”. As he says in his Author’s Note, “I wanted to give voice to a character not often seen in theatre”. His play is really a gift to a senior actor and you can tell that Collin truly relishes the plays’s demands. It is a play that makes one thankful that Bellemare wrote it, thankful an actor like Collin acts it and thankful that the Théâtre français de Toronto has brought the play and Collin here to Toronto for us to enjoy. Let’s hope some Ontarian playwright will be inspired by Bellemare’s example to write such a fine, multifaceted work for one of our many senior actors.

Le Chant de Georges Boivin is performed in French with English surtitles.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Pierre Collin. ©2014 Victor Diaz Lamich.

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

The De Chardin Project

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 15:34:49 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Adam Seybold, directed by Alan Dilworth
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
November 26-December 14, 2014

“L'Homme, non pas centre statique du Monde, - comme il s'est cru longtemps -
mais axe et flèche de l'Évolution”, Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phénomène
humain

Adam Seybold’s The De Chardin Project won the 2013 Dora award for Outstanding New Play in the Independent Theatre category. An uncommonly intellectual play, it takes a look at the confluence of science and religion in the life of the great French thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who was not only a Jesuit priest but also a paleontologist and geologist. Director Alan Dilworth gives the play a highly imaginative staging, but his theatrical invention cannot disguise the fact that Seybold’s play is essentially undramatic.

Seybold begins the play just after Teilhard (Cyrus Lane) has suffered the heart attack that would claim his life. An enigmatic spirit Guide (Maev Beaty) appears to him to lead him to the next plane of existence. This journey seems to involve revisiting past significant events in Teilhard’s life from childhood to old age with the Guide taking on the guise of all the people with whom Teilhard interacts. What Seybold gives is basically the old notion of a dying person’s life passing before his eyes.

We see how he learns the concept of infinity from his mother along with the idea that death is just a passage from one state of existence to another. From a discussion with a British boy in Egypt, we see how Teilhard views the cross as a symbol of the intersection of our daily lives moving ahead horizontally, en avant, with a vertical pull to evolve to a higher state of being, en haut. When we see him teaching we learn that he regards Genesis not as a factual statement of history, as some fundamentalist Christians still do, but as a metaphor for spiritual evolution. Since St. Augustine, the Catholic Church had had the notion of the Fall of Man as a felix culpa, as in the Paschal Vigil Mass, “Exsultet O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem ("O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer"). Teilhard, however, in viewing the Fall as necessary to Man’s development cannot see it as a fault.

For this unorthodox view Teilhard is punished by the Church. He is no longer allowed to teach and none of his theological or philosophical writings, including his most important work The Phenomenon of Man (written 1938-40), may be published. Given the choice whether to leave the Jesuit order or to live in “exile” in China where he was conducting paleontological excavations, he chose the latter. One result of his work in China is that he became one of the discoverers of Peking Man, the missing link, he thought, between prehistoric and modern man.

We find out most directly the gist of Teilhard’s thought when he explains it to his secretary Lucile Swan . Teilhard does not believe that science and religion are incompatible. In fact, he believes that they are inextricably intertwined in that the purpose of creation is evolution. In The Phenomenon of Man Teilhard lists five stages of this evolution. Geogenesis is the formation of the earth. Biogenesis is the evolution of life from matter. Anthropogenesis is the evolution of man on earth. Noogenesis is the emergence of the self-reflective mind in man.

Seybold omits the fifth stage which is “Christogenesis”, or the merging of the human with the divine. Instead Seybold stops with noogenesis and concludes the play with the Guide giving Teilhard a vision of the discovery of cave paintings that could serve as proof of Teilhard’s concept of noogenesis.

While the various short scenes that make up the play are dramatic, they do not create a dramatic arc. Except for the first scene where Teilhard expresses fear of dying as an old man and the second scene where he does the same but as a child, Teilhard as a character does not change at all for the entire play. He speaks of his work to friends and defends himself to opponents but once past childhood Seybold shows him as fully formed. In the play, Seybold has Teilhard speak of the vows of poverty and chastity that he took on becoming a priest. Yet, Teilhard, born to a wealthy family, did not become a priest until age 30 and Seybold tells us nothing about how that important decision came about.

As is often the case in plays about famous thinkers, Seybold’s series of snapshots about the man gives us an idea of the varied circumstances he encountered but we emerge with no clear picture of what Teilhard was like as a person, why he thought as he did or whether his thinking about evolution itself evolved over time.

This means that the role of Teilhard is not very interesting. For the vast majority of the play Cyrus Lane plays Teilhard as the same unchangingly stolid character, superficially friendly but primarily inward-looking. While he plays the young Teilhard as a boy, he does nothing to age Teilhard as the action progresses, even saying that he is an old man at the end with the same vigour of voice and limb he had used earlier.

The role of the Guide, in contrast, provides a showcase for the actor. Maev Beaty successfully adopts American, British and Canadian accents while playing both men and women of different ages and backgrounds. Her portrait of Teilhard’s mother is clearly distinct from her impression of a curious British boy in Egypt, a sacred American soldier in World War I, an aged Jesuit Superior General or the American woman who becomes his secretary and falls in love with him. Beaty’s performance is outstanding, but the dazzling variety she displays only shows Teilhard as opaque and monochrome.

The physical production of the play is inventive. The Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace has been reconfigured so that the stage, rather like a rectangular boxing ring, stands elevated and separate from the audience surrounding it on three sides. Director Alan Dilworth and designer Lorenzo Savoini seem to have taken a page out of the style of the British company Complicité in a show like Light (2000), where the seemingly bare stage is revealed as a treasure chest of props. Through trap doors in the set, the Guide produces chairs, tables, water jugs, teapots, indeed whatever props are needed in any given scene. This combined with Savoini’s squares of light and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sometimes starling soundscape are what lend the show its magic.

Quite contrary to Seybold’s intention, what attracts us most to the play is everything that does not have to do with its central character who remains nearly as unknown by the end of the show as he was at the beginning. Rarely does Seybold ever allow Teilhard to express his thoughts in the ecstatic manner that shines through in his writings and has won his thinking a large following around the world. The illuminating joy of transcendence, the sense of his speaking to us as from soul to soul, is something that the structure of Seybold’s play singularly fails to capture.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Maev Beaty and Cyrus Lane; Maev Beaty and Cyrus Lane. ©2014 Michel Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.

Fishskin Trousers

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 11:28:20 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Elizabeth Kuti, directed by Matthew Gorman
Cart/Horse Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
November 20-December 7, 2014

“Deep Waters”

Cart/Horse Theatre is current presenting the North American premiere of British playwright Elizabeth Kuti’s Fishskin Trousers. Kuti’s play uses the structure of interwoven monologues pioneered by Brian Friel in Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994) and taken up later by other Irish playwrights like Conor McPherson in This Lime Tree Bower (1995) and Mark O’Rowe in Terminus (2007). Kuti rings new changes on this type of play that only deepen the aura of mystery it is capable of engendering. Though it is only 75 minutes long, the Cart/Horse production is so quietly powerful the world it draws you into will stay with you long after the performance ends.

In the four plays mentioned above, the speakers are all contemporaries and witnesses to different aspects of the same events. Kuti links her three monologuists by place since the phenomena they describe all occur in Orford in Sussex, England. However, she makes a radical change to this type of play’s typical structure by having her three characters speak from completely distinct time periods. The question the play raises is how these three stories are related.

The first speaker is Mab (Arlin Dixon), kitchen servant to Bartholomew de Glanville at Orford Castle in 1173. She gives us an eyewitness account of how fishermen one day found a sea creature, half-fish half-man, struggling in their nets. Knowing de Glanville is interested in freaks of nature, they take him the creature, later known as the Wild Man of Orford in the account given by chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall in 1200. He is not a traditional merman in that his scaly legs ending in finned toes are separate. Thus, he looks as if he were wearing fishskin trousers. The lord and his men imprison the creature in the castle keep and torture him in an effort to get him to speak.

The next speaker is Ben (Craig Pike), an Australian radar scientist in 1973 seconded to work on the top secret Cobra Mist project on Orford Ness. The project was built to test experimental over-the-horizon radar that could detect aircraft over 2000 nautical miles away. Ben, a post-grad at Stanford, is brought in when the system is plagued by unexplained noise. On his own Ben finds a different sort of noise that he can’t account for and that his supervisor believes is simply an error. When not at work, Ben strikes up a friendship with a local barmaid named Mabel, who is fascinated by the lost city of Dunwich. Once the capital of the medieval East Anglia, storms, floods and erosion caused two-thirds of the city to sink into the sea. Mabel, like many locals, claims she can hear bells tolling from the sunken churches.

The third speaker is Mog (Julia Course), a school teacher in 2003, who finds she is pregnant by the married man she has been having an affair with. The difficulty is that a sonogram of her fetus shows an anomalous deformation of the legs and her doctors recommend a “discontinuation” of the pregnancy. They give her pills to begin the process and send her off. The news hits Mog hard since it comes just before her 30th birthday. To seek some solace and to reflect on her decision she drives to Orford where she grew up.

The characters do not interact but stay fixed in their chairs speaking directly to the audience in several rounds of the same sequence – Mab, Ben and Mog. With each round the speakers take their stories farther and reveal details that build parallels among tales that initially seem to have little in common. All three speakers are unmarried, all three feel alienated from their environment and all three encounter a strange being from the sea. While each story presents a mystery in itself, the growing parallels among the stories creates a greater mystery that encompasses all three.

While Kuti’s speakers exist in different time periods, she gives Ben a speech that only increases the mystery surround the speakers’ stories. In a phone call to his mother back in Australia, Ben speaks of his excitement about a new theory of time that conceives of it not as a line but as a balloon that is continually expanding. Although he doesn’t say so, Ben is referring to the Einstein-de Sitter model of the universe named after Albert Einstein and Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter, who was the first person to apply Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to astronomy and hence to formulate the nature of space/time in the universe. Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1922 of a red shift in the galaxies in space that confirmed the Einstein-de Sitter model was a sensation. The implication for time in this model is that everything that has happened and will happen already exists simultaneously. (It is J.W. Dunne’s version of this idea that would go on to influence J.B. Preistley’s so-called “time plays” like Time and the Conways [1937].)

Thus, although Kuti presents her three speakers as existing in different time periods, she suggests, via Ben’s speech, both that these periods may be simultaneous and that what the three speakers encounter may be eternal. As Kuti has Mog note about her fetus, we all begin as fish.

The three stories in Kuti’s play are engrossing in themselves and even more engrossing in relation to each other. It is amazing how Kuti is able to allude to so many fascinating aspects of history, myth and science in only 75 minutes, thus stimulating more ideas in a short time than do many modern plays two or three times that length.

Kuti also creates three distinct characters with whom we feel an instant bond. Arlin Dixon’s Mab knows she’s no master storyteller, yet Dixon makes Mab’s simplicity and lack of artfulness a virtue, her sincerity and restricted vocabulary only emphasizing her sincerity and making the fantastic sights she sees more concrete. Mab’s Suffolk accent and archaic language at first seems incomprehensible but soon enough we adapt to it as Dixon draws us into her story.

Pike’s Ben tells his story with a self-conscious irony totally lacking in Mab. He is the only one who quips or indulges in a little nudge-nudge-wink-wink with the audience. Pike makes a brave attempt at an Australian dialect especially in its mutation of vowel sounds, but he misses the difference in cadence and accentuation. Yet, Pike fully masters Ben’s change of mood when his tale takes a turn from the mundane to the extraordinary and the joking drops out to be replaced with wonder.

Course presents Mog as a complex young woman. As a narrator she tries to maintain a sophisticated distance from her topic, but gradually this wears away to show the distress that Mog has tried in vain to keep in check.

Designer Jenna McCutchen’s simple but effective set places each speaker on a chair appropriate to the period and place of his or her time and dresses each speaker in period-appropriate costume. The three chairs are placed diagonally on a what looks like several dried blue-green fish skins sewn together and in the process of being stretched, ropes passed through holes in the skin and tied to metal cleats around the perimeter of the stage. Kaileigh Krysztofiak’s lighting moves its strange glow from speaker to speaker. Andy Trithardt’s sound design underscores the eerie atmosphere.

Like your reviewer, you may never have heard of Elizabeth Kuti before much less this play with the peculiar title. Yet don’t let that prevent you from experiencing a poetically told tale that opens mysteries within mysteries and asks where the boundary really lies between the natural and the supernatural.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Arlin Dixon and Craig Pike; Arlin Dixon and Julia Course. ©2014 Matthew Gorman.

For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.

Sextet

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 15:01:01 -0500

✭✭✩✩✩
written and directed by Morris Panych
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
November 12-December 14, 2014

“Six Characters in Search of a Plot”

Morris Panych’s new comedy Sextet, now having its world premiere at the Tarragon Theatre, is frustratingly peculiar. Panych seems to be writing a modern sex farce where the only two people who have sex in it are a married couple. As the title implies this is a six-character play. Three of the characters are genuinely funny, but the other three are not. Panych’s plotting becomes so contrived and consequently so confused that we care nothing about any of the characters or what happens to them.

Panych’s premise is that a string sextet on tour has been caught in a blizzard and has taken the last available rooms in the nearest motel. Gerard (Bruce Dow) is the leader of the group and is married to Mavis (Rebecca Northan). Gerard, however, wants him and his wife to be free of the constraints of traditional marriage and encourages her to have affairs just as he does with both sexes. Mavis, therefore has slept with Otto (Jordan Pettle). She doesn’t love him but he, unfortunately, is in love with her. When he learns that Mavis is pregnant, he is certain that she is carrying his child because Gerard’s sperm count is known to be so low.

Meanwhile, Harry (Damien Atkins), the show’s narrator, a gay cellist, is forced to share a room with the group’s resident dumb hunk Dirk (Matthew Edison), thus causing Harry almost unendurable frustration. Dirk, however, realizes that he is attracted to Sylvia (Laura Condlln) because she has so far proved resistant to his charms. Sylvia’s hormones are raging, but since Harry is gay and her trusted confidant and Dirk is too much of a narcissist, Sylvia decides to throw herself at Otto. Panych thus constructs a neat circle with Harry after Dirk who is after Sylvia who is after Otto who is after Mavis who is after Gerard who is after Harry.

The situation does have great potential for comedy but Panych squanders it by giving in to his usual flaw of having all his characters speak and act in the exactly the same way, over-analyzing and over-intellectualizing their situation so that nothing happens. Thus we have a farce with six doors but no action, only six people who all speak in unnaturally long sentences declaring that that they don’t know what to do and that nothing makes sense.

In place of action, Panych substitutes the revelation of two secrets. One, is that Harry is gay. Sylvia is the only who knows, but how this could possibly be true, first, among musicians and second, among a group who has long been touring together. How can everyone know that Gerard suffers from Klinefelter syndrome and that Mavis has a a retroverted uterus and not know something far less recherché like Harry’s being gay?

The second secret has to with Mavis’s baby. Otto is convinced it is his, but Mavis insists is it not. Mavis, a strict Catholic, wants to trick Gerard into believing that the baby is his, despite his abnormally low sperm count. Whose the baby really is the is the big punchline of the play, but there were noticeably no oohs or aahs when the revelation was made because Panych had overstretched this plot point so far that we ultimately didn’t care.

Panych’s satire of human sexuality is so limp because it seems about 50 years out of date. Gerard’s explanation why he and his wife have an open marriage sounds positively antique. Sylvia as a radical feminist who hates men but needs to have regular heterosexual sex is another throwback. Worst of all for an openly gay playwright like Panych is his creation of a self-loathing homosexual like Harry. The action is set in 2014 so where does Harry’s bizarre conclusion that he will have to remain celibate all his life even come from?

Panych has written a play where six characters do nothing but complain for 90 minutes and who undergo no change of personality or world view. This gives the cast very little to work with. The two actors who do the best are Damien Atkins and Matthew Edison. Having seen Atkins play an out man with AIDS in Angels in America, it is amazing to see him turn himself into a stereotype and squeeze himself back into the closet as Harry. What makes Atkins performance successful is that he emphasizes Harry’s generally neurotic and over-analytical nature rather than the point that Harry is self-loathing gay. Atkins has perfect comic delivery and can rattle off Panych’s paragraph-long sentences in a single breath.

Edison is also very funny as Dirk. He is a hunk who knows he is a hunk and is therefore not surprised that he can have every woman he wants, except for Sylvia, in whom he has no interest until he sees that she strangely has no interest in him. Even though the mentally dim, macho narcissist is a stereotype, Edison manages to enliven it with his own quirkiness.

As Sylvia, Laura Condlln would be an excellent comic figure if her character’s problem of hating men but needing to have sex with them were not such a retrograde satire of feminism. Panych has Sylvia throw herself at Otto not for any logical reason but only so he can complete his neat little circle of relationships. Given how artificial the situation is, it’s not Condlln’s fault that she can’t make it believable. Sylvia’s relationship with Harry, in contrast, does seem real and Condlln is at her best when she is allowed to show her gentler side.

The artificiality of Gerard and Mavis’s relationship is so great it is no surprise that neither Bruce Dow nor Rebecca Northan can make it convincing or amusing. Panych does not help them by constantly revising how much each knows about the other. Jordan Pettle’s character of Otto seems like an afterthought. Panych needs six character so he creates Otto as the sixth, but forgets to give him any personality. All we know is that Otto is rich and that he believes in sex for procreation. Since even Dirk’s character is deeper, Pettle seems all at sea.

Ken MacDonald, ordinarily a perceptive set designer, has actually designed a set that causes the play to be more confusing than it already is. It looks great as long as you don’t try to fit it to the story. MacDonald has lined up six identical motel rooms in a row with door, bed, headboard, and identical over-bed paintings all in the same configuration. The only problem is that Panych’s play calls for four room, not six. Married couple Gerard and Mavis are in one, Otto and Sylvia have rooms to themselves and, as Harry complains, he and Dirk have to share a room. If, then there are four rooms, why are there six doors? Obviously, four doors would disturb the neat pattern of MacDonald’s design, but six doors means that it becomes very difficult at times to know who is in whose room and how he or she got there? This breaks one of the essential rules of farce that the audience must know at all times who is where and why.

Panych tries to give this pointless show some meaning by having the sextet that his group will play be Verklärte Nacht (Tranfigured Night) by Arnold Schoenberg. The sextet from 1899, for all its modernity, is actually programatic in that it retells in music the story of Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name about a woman who confides in her lover that the child she is carrying is not his. In case we don’t get the relation of the work to his plot, Panych repeats the point several times. What he does not repeat is the conclusion of the poem in which the woman’s lover tells her that it doesn’t matter that that child is not his because it will still be born out of love for him.

Panych seeks profundity by concluding the play with the sextet transformed into a cohesive unit by the playing of the piece, suggesting that music is greater than petty human foibles. It’s too bad he didn’t think of having his sextet play at the beginning of the play and thus avoid the display of human foibles both in his characters and in its author for pouring out reams of words with nothing to say.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Jordan Pettle, Matthew Edison, Damien Atkins, Laura Condlln, Rebecca Northan and Bruce Dow; Laura Condlln and Bruce Dow. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.

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

Moment

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 12:43:18 -0500

✭✭✭✭✭
by Deirdre Kinahan, directed by Christopher Stanton
Actors Repertory Company, The Grocery, 1362 Queen St. East, Toronto
November 6-22, 2014

“Family Gathering – Gathering Clouds”

Actors Repertory Company is currently presenting the English-language Canadian premiere of Moment, a play from 2009 by Irish playwright Deirdre Kinahan. The plot of Moment is one of most overused in modern drama – a family member returns home and long-buried secrets are revealed. What is so remarkable is that she has given this familiar scenario a distinctive twist and made something old seem new again. Director Christopher Stanton’s insightful, highly detailed staging and the ardent commitment of the entire cast makes Moment an exciting theatrical experience.

A character returned home after an absence is an ancient dramatic plot device that regained popularity in the realistic plays of Henrik Ibsen. That combined with the family gathering gone awry has been a mainstay of drama for at least a century. Notable recent examples include David Eldridge’s Festen (2004) and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County (2007). Both of these plays are about a big family celebration. Kinahan’s play is unusual in its emphasis on the mundanity of this family meeting.

Teresa Lynch (Deborah Drakeford) is simply getting ready for an ordinary tea (light supper) with help from her daughters Ciara (Aviva Armour-Ostroff) and Niamh (Janet Porter). The daughters are glad to help because Teresa seems distracted and over-excitable. Simple details about what she should serve and what she should wear seem disproportionately to upset her. Teresa has prescriptions for antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills, but she also has daughters willing to help her so that Kinahan is at pains to underline that she is not portraying that all-too-common dramatic entity, the dysfunctional family. The family is functioning and Ciara receives help from her loving husband Dave (Andre Sills).

Despite this, we do note that Niamh does not want her boyfriend and co-worker Fin (Gordon Bolan) to stay to tea. We assume that Niamh fears her mother will leap to conclusions and become too excited. More troubling is Teresa’s almost forgotten news, that her son Nial (Ryan Hollyman) will be stopping by and will be bringing a woman with him. While Ciara takes this in stride, Niamh clearly finds this upsetting and hopes to be absent by the time Nial appears.

For his part Nial does not want to return home at all. The idea is that of his newly wedded wife Ruth (Bahareh Yaraghi) who wants to meet Nial’s family, of which she is now part, before she and Nial head off to Spain. Contrary to both Nial and Niamh’s desires, circumstances force all the characters to gather to share the same tea at the same table. Niamh cannot disguise her animosity toward Nial and because of her prodding, the secret no one but Niamh wants to discuss finally comes out. Ruth admits that she knows about Nial’s past. She knows that is was in prison for fourteen years for committing murder.

Contrary to most plays about hidden family secrets, Kinahan reveals this secret at the end of the first act. And herein lies the novelty of her play. Moment is not about the revelation of the secret as much as it is about how the family deals with the secret once it is out in the open. Nial committed the murder when he was a boy. While in prison he developed a talent for art and in the course of his incarceration became a celebrated painter whose primary theme is how people are imprisoned in life in various ways. He feels he is a different person now than he was when he first went to prison and he wants a fresh start. He wanted to avoid seeing his family because he feared they would be unable to see him as a different person.

Niamh is the perfect embodiment of that fear. To her Nial’s freedom, new vocation, new wife, mean nothing. To her he is still a murderer and she wants him to know that she has been serving a sentence for his deed as much as he has in prison. To her his deed drove their father to an early death, their mother to a dependency on pills, while it destroyed her youth. Kinahan’s Act 2 is so fascinating, and so unlike the typical family secret play, because it explores what, if any, kind of compromise can be reached between such opposing points of view.

Moment is an ensemble piece and director Christopher Stanton has chosen a very strong cast who work so well together they feel like a family. All the performances are characterized by the ability to maintain a facade of calm while conveying a sense of disquiet or worse underneath. As Teresa, Deborah Drakeford has what would seem to be the most impenetrable façade. Her character is clearly so over-medicated that she is frequently confused and somnolent. Her face is often expressionless except for a wan smile. Despite this, Drakeford is able to show that anger about her condition and anxiety about what is happening still lie close to the surface. Without warning her inner feelings will break out in the form of shouting that soon subsides or she will suddenly struggle with people trying to sooth her. Drakeford gives her character an unpredictability that creates a fraught atmosphere even before Nial and Ruth arrive.

Janet Porter captures Niamh’s difficulty with great subtlety. In the presence of her mother and Ciara and even in the presence of Fin, she gives us the sense of repressing feelings that could too easily escalate into anger. As the effort of Niamh’s attempts at self-control become more obvious, the more anxious we become about what she will say or do. In the beautifully staged tea sequence when all the characters are at the table, Porter has Niamh withdraw so far into herself it seems she will implode. In fact, she explodes, leading to the revelation of Nial’s secret and a disastrous end to the family gathering.

As Nial, Ryan Hollyman gives what may well be his finest performance ever. Even at his first entrance when no one else is home, his character exudes such discomfort that it taints the already fraught atmosphere. Before his secret is out, he shows us that Nial is struggling to present himself as a new man in the face of everyone’s knowledge, including his own, of his horrific past. In the second act Hollyman shows us the two sides of Nial that are at constant war. One side’s pleas for forgiveness are heartbreaking. The other side’s narration of what happened during the murder is chilling. Hollyman demonstrates how naturally these two sides can coexist. This is important since part of Kinahan’s point is that none of us really knows what harm we are really capable of in any given moment.

The play is staged in a large room in a venue called The Grocery at 1362 Queen Street East, although the room is at the back of the building and the entrance is through a gate off Greenwood Avenue. Designer Jackie Chau has transformed the space to look like a large dine-in kitchen with a huge table, early on seen as a symbol of family, as its central fixture. Only 30 people are admitted per performance to sit around the room’s four walls, with the actors frequently playing within inches of them. Moment mostly demands kitchen-sink realism, but Kinahan herself breaks this mould by using a flashback to depict the events that led up to the murder. This disruption gives Stanton leave to add other non-naturalistic touches to the play. The symbolism of feathers blown or strewn about the room is not clear until after Nial’s second act narrative about the murder. To emphasize the central power struggle in the play, Stanton has Niamh and Nial stand on the table facing each other and holding knives as they deliver their lines. Stanton often uses a sound cue of the roar of wind or water to indicate the emotional tension beneath the placid surface. For his part, lighting designer Nicholas Blais achieves a surprising range of effects given the nature of the space.

One might quibble with Stanton’s decision to have the actors use Canadian rather than Irish accents. References to Dublin and Cork plus vocabulary common to the British Isles do sound unusual in Canadian accents, but the payoff in bringing Kinahan’s story home to us rather than portraying it as alien and therefore dismissible is worth the loss of the Irish lilt. Ruth’s character is English and would be marked as such by her speech throughout, but Stanton solves this by having Chau dress her in a style far more elegant than that of the other women.

Moment is a thoughtful, eye-opening take on familiar dramatic material. Unlike previous examples of the family secret dramas, Kinahan implies that keeping a secret leads to a kind of disease that and only be alleviated by exposing it. Or, to change metaphors, the action, especially as directed by Stanton, is conceived of as a natural event like a storm that gradually gathers in Act 1 until it explodes, then rages in Act 2 until it dissipates leaving the atmosphere cleansed. ARC’s production is an excellent introduction to a playwright whose work I now long to see more of.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Janet Porter, Bahareh Yanaghi, Andre Sills, Gordon Bolan, Ryan Holly man and Deborah Drakeford; Ryan Hollyman and Deborah Drakeford. ©2014 Karl Ang.

For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/899552.

Boiler Room Suite

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:30:19 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Rex Deverell, directed by Richard Quesnel
Lost & Found Theatre, Kitchener-Waterloo Little Theatre, Waterloo
November 5-15, 2014

Sprugg: “People should be more content with not being able to understand things”

There are some plays that come to have a description attached to them that does not accurately reflect the play’s content. One famous example is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, forever burdened by the narrator’s description of it in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind”, a notion that makes indecisiveness Hamlet’s “fatal flaw” and an idea impossible to wrench from students’ minds once they’ve seen the film.

On a smaller scale something similar has happened to Rex Deverell’s play Boiler Room Suite from 1977, now receiving a welcome revival by Kitchener’s Lost & Found Theatre. The description of the play on the website of the Playwrights Guild of Canada states, “Two of life's losers pass an evening huddled for warmth in the basement of a derelict prairie hotel. Together they act out their fantasies, trying to bring "a little warmth, a little kindness to each other's lives”. This description also appears on the paperback edition of the play. The problem with this description is that it is mistaken. Seeing the play in performance only underscores how this description incorrectly summarizes the action and diminishes the subject matter of the play.

In Boiler Room Suite, two aged alcoholics, Aggie Rose (Kathleen Sheehy) and a man named Sprugg (George Joyce), climb in through the basement window of the grand Provincial Hotel to find warmth beside the boiler. This “boiler room suite” is Aggie Rose’s secret hideout. She has only met Sprugg today and invites him into her place for the first time. We learn that Aggie Rose was once an actress who fell into her present condition because she was unable to find enough work in Canada. Sprugg tells us that he is a failed poet but strangely he is unable to remember what his last name is or even where he comes from. Yet, despite this, he claims he has to leave tomorrow to meet other people.

The first half of the play seems to be heavily influence by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) by showing us how the two tramps while away the time by playing various games. The first key difference between Boiler Room Suite and Godot is that Deverell’s two tramps do not have the excuse that they are waiting for anyone and therefore have no assigned purpose or duty. The similarity is that whether the tramps have an appointment or not, one cannot escape the notion that they are waiting for death.

The second key difference is that while the relationship of Beckett’s tramps is complementary, that of Deverell’s is not. The phrase which is patently false in the PGC description of the play is “Together they act out their fantasies”. It is quite clear in viewing the play that together they act out Aggie Rose’s fantasies. Of Sprugg’s fantasies, we know nothing. Sprugg has the role of suggesting scenes for Aggie Rose to act out and he plays supporting roles in these fantasies, but the fantasies are always hers. This means the dynamics of Boiler Room Suite are quite different from those in Godot, and lead us to wonder why there is such an imbalance between the characters.

Aggie Rose tells Sprugg that lying below in the basement, she likes to imagine the lives the of the privileged folk on the floors above. This leads Sprugg to have Aggie play one of these people and she becomes the haughty Madame Avoirdupois and Sprugg the waiter from whom she orders baked “peasant [sic] under glass”. After this scene has played out, Sprugg encourages Aggie to something even grander – to play the Prime Minister of Canada. The third fantasy is grander still when Sprugg encourages Aggie to play God herself, who commands Hawaii to move into the centre of the Prairies.

A prime concern of Beckett’s tramps is whether anyone sees them. Their theory being that if they are observed, they will at least have some proof that they exist. This is not the case in Deverell. Periodically, the tramps acting is interrupted by laughter from a hidden source. Two-thirds through the play, the two discover that everything they have been doing has been observed by Pete (Alan K. Sapp), the boiler maintenance man who has found the tramps’ antics highly entertaining. Afraid he will evict them as he says, Aggie Rose knocks him out and the two escape into the hotel proper to find alternate accommodation. They soon return, however, because, in a blight to Aggie’s Rose’s previous fantasies, they discover that the hotel is completely abandoned. When Pete comes to, the tramps ask him why he is working there and he says that he was hired to keep the boiler running because without heat the hotel would collapse just as a would a body without a beating heart. The fact that the hotel is empty places Pete in an existential quandary. Why should he enforce the rule that no one camp out in the boiler room when no one lives in the hotel?

By this point it should be clear that Deverell has not written an absurdist drama like Beckett but an allegorical one. Deverell even has the tramps discuss the symbolism of the boiler room. Deverell has Sprugg say, “Look at it – furnace, fire, demonic keeper with demonic laugh, infernal light, heat, it’s all here. It’s a symbol of hell, Aggie”. Aggie, however, disputes this interpretation and says that instead, the boiler room is “A symbol of heaven” because “It’s nice and warm down here” and “When I first came here, I thought this was a Godsend”.

In her final fantasy, Sprugg asks Aggie to imagine herself somewhere beyond this specific time and place, and she imagines herself as Cleopatra on her barge with Sprugg as the bargeman. Aggie subsequently goes to sleep and remains asleep for the rest of the action. Given the tramps’ earlier discussion it’s difficult not to imagine that Sprugg is a very different bargeman, let’s say Charon, and that Aggie Rose’s Nile is more likely the Styx. One key to this interpretation is that Sprugg’s earlier speech about the universe: “The universe, my dear, operates with precision and the order of a divinely ordained dial-the-time-lady service” in that time goes on indefinitely and therefore must have been created. Not only that, but Sprugg exclaims, “I and the time-lady are one”.

Given that Rex Deverell was a rural Ontario Baptist minister before he became a playwright, it would not be unusual for him to have written an allegory about time, death and dying. Lost & Found revived the play because it deals with the issue of homelessness, yet its realistic and symbolic layers allow it to support multiple interpretations.

Director Richard Quesnel tries to keep both in balance, but when he has Sprugg produce a flower magically out of the air, he suggests that the character may be more than just another tramp.

The play is a wonderful showcase for its two principal actors. Sheehy, in particular, gets a wonderful chance to show her range by contrasting the frowsy, grumpy Aggie Rose with Madame Avoirdupois and her increasingly grand successors. Yet, at the same time as Sheehy’s Aggie Rose rises to greater heights in her fantasies, she also becomes more exhausted after each one so that we feel we see Aggie Rose declining before our eyes.

Joyce’s Sprugg is a delightful roué with more than a touch of the con man about him. To make the two levels of the action clear, Joyce always gives the impression that he is not so much inside Aggie Rose’s fantasy as observing her play within it. It is as if his character in expanding her horizons of what role she can play is easing her to playing a role beyond time and space in general. Alan K. Sapp makes for genial Pete, our hidden onstage audience, who bears no malice toward the tramps.

Designer Nicole Lee Quesnel has created a convincing grungy boiler room for the set, with a fire ablaze in the boiler to stand for the warmth that becomes such a symbol in the play. Richard Quesnel’s direction could be tighter and the transitions from reality to fantasy and back smoother, but overall his staging of the play reveals that it is more than merely a realistic comedy/drama about homeless people. Quesnel’s production makes one wonder why Deverell’s play is not better known and more often produced and studied. We owe a debt of thanks to Lost & Found Theatre for bringing this undeservedly obscure Canadian play to light.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top), George Joyce and Kathleen Sheehy; Kathleen Sheehy and George Joyce. ©2014 Tom Vogel Creative.

For tickets, visit www.lostandfoundtheatre.com.

Buyer & Cellar

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 16:14:00 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Jonathan Tolins, directed by Stephen Brackett
David Mirvish, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
November 13-30, 2014

“The Madwoman in the Basement”

Buyer & Cellar comes to Toronto wreathed in glowing reviews from its run in New York. Experiencing it, however, makes you wonder if New York critics somehow collectively suspended their sense of judgement. The show is entertaining, but it’s also a piece of fluff that has nothing to say about anything. It also assumes that the audience is inherently intrigued rather than put off by the self-indulgent lives of the rich and famous. The show may have a gay character as its narrator but it ultimately confirms rather than challenges stereotypes.

At the very start of the show Christopher J. Hanke, the actor who plays the central character Alex More, comes out to deliver a disclaimer. The show is in no way based on real events. It’s source is the 2010 book My Passion for Design written and photographed by Barbra Streisand about “the taste and style that have inspired her beautiful homes and collections” [note the plurals]. One aspect that caught playwright Jonathan Tolins’s eye has to do with Streisand’s home in Malibu. There she apparently discovered the perfect way to display all the Americana she has been collecting over the years that no longer fits into the house she lives in. Inspired by the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, Streisand created her own quaint shopping street in her basement where different parts of her collection could be displayed as if they were the wares of the various shops.

Tolins thought it would be interesting to imagine what it would be like for to be hired by Streisand to work as the cleaner/shopkeeper for this private shopping mall. Tolins therefore presents us with out-of-work actor in Los Angeles, Alex More, who has just been fired from his latest job, this time playing a cartoon character at Disneyland or “Mauschwitz” as he calls it.

Tolins creates some tension by having Alex answer an advert to work as a shopkeeper for a private employer without ever knowing who this employer is. Alex is amazed to see his employer’s Norman Rockwell-like recreation of an idyllic midwestern farm with working mill. The best part of the show involves Streisand’s visits to her private mall, pretending to be someone else, and attempting to buy one of her own antique objets from Alex the shopkeeper. Alex decides to play his role and to pretend he doesn’t recognize Streisand and sets a price on the objet that she thinks is too high. Once this episode of overt mind games between employer and employee is over and Streisand begins to use Alex as a confidant, the show becomes both more sentimental and even less believable.

At the start of the show Alex claims that he is not like other gay guys and does not have an “inner diva”, i.e. a female singer to identify with who can express on a larger scale the emotions that he as a private individual cannot. We think that is just as well since the whole concept of “inner diva” is as old-fashioned as gays who call themselves “Friends of Dorothy”. It comes from a time when gay men had only female singers to identify with since there were no publicly out male singers. It also assumes that popular culture is only arena where gay men find any profundity. Alex says that he had no feelings positive or negative about Streisand before he took the job. The point of the action is to change that position.

Alex’s boyfriend Barry (also played by Hanke) thinks the whole situation Alex has got himself into is outrageous. Why should he spend all his working hours underground catering to the fantasies of some woman who is so wealthy she is like a modern equivalent of Marie Antoinette, who used to pretend she was a shepherdess on her own little toy farm at Versailles?

By creating the character of Barry, Tolins gets to present two sides of his material, presumably to appeal to both pro- and anti-Streisand factions in the audience. Alex becomes more drawn into Streisand’s world and begins to think that the poverty of her humble origins in Brooklyn somehow justifies her present excessive mania for collecting. Barry simultaneously points out that lots of people have humble origins and yet have not been driven to Streisand’s excesses.

Tolins has us discount Barry’s opinions in two ways. First, Alex is played as if he were an eternal teenager not unlike Sean Hayes’ Jack on Will and Grace. Barry, however, is not a more straight-acting Will to Alex’s Jack, but bitchier and more effeminate. Tolins has Alex disregard Barry’s views as the product of his negative personality and of envy. Second, Tolins has Alex discard Barry entirely when Barry thinks Alex has become too involved with his bizarre employer. We are supposed to see Alex’s breaking up with Barry as a good thing whereas it actually means that a voice critical of the situation is cut out of the play.

While Tolins presents Streisand (also played by Hanke) as every bit as controlling, self-centred and materialistic as Barry says she is, the play ends with Alex emulating Streisand-like behaviour and we’re are supposed to applaud this as a triumph. Tolins’ play is thus conservative in that he shows Alex finally discovering his inner diva, outdated as that is, besides admiring the behaviour of the super-rich.

Tolins does satirize the excesses, like a private shopping mall, that extreme wealth allows and the general out-of-touchness of the super-rich whose wealth has insulated them from reality. Yet, Tolins is also quite happy to depict Streisand as an eccentric who enjoys role-playing as long as her superior power is acknowledged. Admiration of the wealthy has roots that go back to the very beginning of American history, yet in the US of the present where the wealthiest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%, there is something more disturbing than amusing about watching a play focussed on the eccentricities that extreme wealth makes possible.

Hanke is quite likeable as Alex although it is embarrassing to see a 38-year-old express himself in ways more often seen in teenaged girls. For “Oops, I said the wrong thing!”, he puts his elbows out and covers his mouth with his hands, fingers splayed. For “Ooh, that’s weird!” he puts his head to one side, grimaces with eyebrows way up. Hanke recurs to the same few gestures far too often and his overall boyishness, while initially fun, gradually become wearing. We start to see why Alex is unemployed as an actor. He can’t seem to play mature.

Hanke’s impression of Streisand is peculiar but we gradually come to accept it. Although the 70-year-old is no crone, Hanke plays her bent over at the waist and talking in a low Brooklyn accent with her head parallel to the ground. Only in Streisand’s embittered personal assistant and in a guest appearance of the super-manly James Brolin, does Hanke get to show the range of his acting talent.

Though the show is not billed as if it were geared only to Streisand fans, the more you know about Streisand the more likely you are to get the innumerable unglossed allusions to her scattered through the play. You have to know who Jason is, no last name or anything. (He’s Streisand’s gay son by Elliott Gould.) You need to know plot points of films Streisand was in like Funny Girl (1968), The Way We Were (1973), The Prince of Tides (1991) and Meet the Fockers (2004). And you have to have a good working knowledge of The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) in order to understand what is so humorous about Barry’s lengthy analysis of it. At least Tolins provides a gloss about the non-Streisand film Capricorn One (1978), a movie that happened to star Streisand’s first and second husbands.

Given that the story of Alex More is entirely fictional, this kind of trivia – about Streisand’s life, her house, her collections, her movies – seems to be what the show is really about. Tolins’ fantasy is amusing but totally lacking in substance. If that’s what you look for in an evening out, this show is for you.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Christopher J. Hanke, ©2014 Joan Marcus; Christopher J. Hanke, ©2013 Kevin Thomas Garcia.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

NSFW

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 12:47:45 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Lucy Kirkwood, directed by Joel Greenberg
Studio 180, The Theatre Centre, Toronto
November 12-30, 2014

“Leaders, thinkers, dreamers, shoppers”

Studio 180 is current presenting the North American premiere of Lucy Kirkwood’s wickedly funny satire NSWF. The play’s title is an internet acronym for “not safe for work”, usually displayed as a warning that the content could compromise the viewer if accessed on an office computer. The focus of the play, however, is not computers or risqué internet content. Instead, Kirkwood focusses on exploitation in the print media, both in its abuse of employees and in its objectification of women.

In the odd structure of the play, the first two-thirds of its 90-minutes take place in the London office of editor of Doghouse Magazine, a men’s magazine featuring a scantily clad woman on the cover and unclad women inside. First we see how friction has developed between the editor Aidan (Patrick Galligan) and his three assistants. Because all three are overqualified for their positions and because of the negative economic climate, they are lucky to have paying positions at all having already worked for years as unpaid interns. Aidan is perfectly aware of this and thus feels he can demand what ever he wants of them since paying jobs are so scarce for young people nowadays.

Aidan seems to be having sex with his personal assistant Charlotte (Jessica Greenberg), who, despite this, belongs to a feminist group even though she is too embarrassed to tell them where she works. Rupert (James Graham) is fed up with Aidan’s manipulative ways. When Aidan asks him to go on another “man challenge” despite previously telling him he wouldn’t have to do another for six months, Rupert snaps and quits. Meanwhile, when lower gofer Sam (Aaron Stern) refuses to write about his planned romantic proposal to his girlfriend, Aidan easily demotes him back to gofer after tantalizing him with feature writer status.

The main focus of the Doghouse Magazine scenes is its new big-boobed find for the cover, a girl selected from hundreds of photos by Sam. The girl’s father Mr. Bradshaw (Ian D. Clark) has many reasons to be enraged, not the least that his daughter is only 14, but Aidan thinks a combination of charm and monetary recompense will be all that is necessary to subdue the father’s rage. The task proves far more difficult than Aidan imagined.

The final third of the play takes place in the office of the chief editor of the women’s magazine Electra, a fictitious British version of Cosmopolitan. Sam, who has been made a scapegoat for the fiasco at Doghouse, is now interviewing for a job at Electra with Miranda (Susan Coyne), the editor herself. All seems to be going well until Miranda gives Sam a test wherein he must find the physical flaws in the photos of three beautiful women. What we learn is that Electra’s goals are nominally to help women be their best selves. At the same time, encouraging women to be their best means advising them how to overcome flaws they didn’t even know they had so that they come to depend on Electra for help.

Kirkwood’s biting analysis of men’s and women’s magazines shows that they both exploit and objectify women. Doghouse turns women into objects for the lustful male gaze. Electra turns women into objects in need of repair that only the magazine and the products it promotes can supply. Just as the economic downturn has made both male and female editors free to exploit their workers, Kirkwood has deliberately set her play in the dying world of print media so that editors like Aidan and Miranda, both aware that their days are numbered, are even more desperate to succeed while they still can. What Kirkwood captures best of all is the executive-speak of both Aidan and Miranda, who exude soothing and nurturing tones that barely conceal their cut-throat attitudes to any form of opposition.

Aidan’s conversation with Mr. Bradshaw is a masterpiece of this kind of duplicity. Galligan masterfully catches exactly the right level of smarm with which Aidan intends to smother Bradshaw’s anger, but when that doesn’t work we see that Aidan has backup plans B, C and D already thought out to suss out any chink in Bradshaw’s armour of indignation and once found to thrust in his dagger until Bradshaw pleads for survival. Aidan’s escalating attacks on Bradshaw are increasing outrageous, but Galligan makes them perfectly believable and never lets down the smoothness of his façade although he lets us see the feline underneath who enjoys calculating how to attack and toy with its prey.

For his part, Ian D. Clark is excellent as Mr. Bradshaw, an ordinary man for whom we feel nothing but sympathy. We admire how long he holds out against Aidan, but it is clear that Aidan is an expert at manipulation whereas Bradshaw is not since he mistakenly believes that honesty and decency will triumph in this corrupt world.

As Miranda, Coyne employs tactics of control that are different from Aidan’s. In interviewing Sam she flirts with him and simultaneously judges him according to how he responds. She will make outlandish statements out of the blue and claim that she is just a silly woman, but is still keenly observing Sam to see which aspect of her he credits more. Coyne shows how Miranda makes her conversation deliberately disjointed as a test to see how accommodating to her quirks her potential hiree will be. Kirkwood’s Aidan and Miranda are both spot-on studies of executive language and power and both are brilliant embodied by Galligan and Coyne.

Kirkwood spends little time giving the three younger subordinates much personality. Greenberg’s greatest moment comes during Aidan’s conversation with Bradshaw. Although she has almost no lines, Greenberg manages to communicate silently through a growing coldness in Charlotte’s face and posture Charlotte’s increasing disgust with her boss’s tactics. James Graham’s Rupert is the most outspoken of the three and when Rupert has nothing else to lose the most flagrantly insulting. His appearance in Miranda’s office, which I will not describe, shows how talented Graham is at physical comedy. Stern’s meek Sam hysterically descends into hysteria and self-loathing once he realizes his mistake. In his interview with Miranda, Stern shows a young man only partially aware of the mind games Miranda is playing with him, but so desperate for a job that he is willing to go along with anything she suggests. The Miranda-Sam interview is clearly a parallel to the Aidan-Bradshaw conversation in that both end with the total destruction of innocence.

Denyse Karn deserves praise for her extremely clever puzzle-like set that changes from the Doghouse office to the Electra office in a rapid and most ingenious fashion. Her costume designs help us read the characters’ personalities almost before they speak a word. This fact, of course, is highly important in this particular play where both males and females are judged first by their appearance.

Kirkwood's play is both funny and cringe-making because it so accurately reflects the power games that executives play with their subordinates. While the play’s primary critique is the objectification of women by both men and women, its larger critique involves the society – the ABC1 class that both publications seek as readers – who supports this form of exploitation. NSFW is a sharp, witty exposé of the kind of amoral behaviour that some people even praise as necessary in a dog-eat-dog business environment. Kirkwood’s play is so enjoyable because it shows fierce intelligence combined with devastating humour.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Aaron Stern and Patrick Galligan; Susan Coyle & Aaron Stern. ©2014 Karri North.

For tickets, visit http://studio180theatre.com.

The Motherf**ker with the Hat

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:30:01 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by Layne Coleman
Bob Kills Theatre, The Coal Mine, 798 Danforth Ave., Toronto
November 11-30, 2014

Jackie: “"Your – whaddyacallit – your world view? It ain't mine. And the day it is,
that's the day I shoot myself in the head”

The deliberately in-yer-face title of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ latest play might lead you believe that its content might be even more provocative than his previous works like Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train (2000), Our Lady of 121st Street (2003) or The Last Day of Judas Iscariot (2005). As it turns out The Motherf**ker with the Hat (for so it is spelled in the programme) is more compact and conventional in form and structure than the first two plays and less grandiose in theme than the last. In fact, if you take away the coarse language and imagery to which Guirgis’ characters are inured, the story of Hat, for short is really about such old-fashioned questions as how to be moral in a corrupt world and whether some betrayals are beyond forgiveness. Under director Layne Coleman the cast gives white-hot performances.

Compared to Guirgis’ other plays, the plot of Hat is quite simple. Jackie (Sergio Di Zio), a former drug dealer now a parolee, comes home to Veronica (Melissa D’Agostino), his girlfriend since Grade 8, with some great news. He just got a job and feels his life may finally have turned a corner. He has managed to stay away from booze and drugs and is better at controlling his anger. Now he has a job with the possibility of promotion. He and Veronica might finally be able to live the normal life they always dreamed of.

There are only two problems. Veronica is still hooked on booze and drugs with no sign of getting clean. And worse, there is a man’s hat on the table that is not Jackie’s and the male smell in the bed is also not his. Veronica’s mixture of lies and pleas to forget the incident lead Jackie to leave her to seek help from his AA sponsor Ralph (Ted Dykstra).

Ralph is a proudly reformed alcoholic who likes to set himself up as Jackie’s role model. Ralph has turned his life so far around from his old ways that he is now a health and fitness nut, purveyor of “nutritional drinks” and firm believer in 12-step plans to recovery. He is married to the beautiful Victoria (Nicole Stamp), who gave up a promising career in finance to be with him. What Jackie wants is a gun to scare the guy with the hat whom he thinks he knows. For that, Ralph and Jackie have to visit Jackie’s gay Puerto Rican cousin Julio (Juan Chioran), who has the connections, unwilling as he is to use them, to get a weapon.

As it turns out, Jackie’s quest to punish the guy with the hat is more than a little ironic since Jackie, Ralph and their two women have all been unfaithful to their partners at some time or other. The only character who has remained faithful to his partner is Julio, but even his partner (never seen) has betrayed him. Surrounded by such moral chaos, Sergio faces the question of how to be a moral person since he firmly believes that that will help him to improve his life. When Victoria offers herself to Jackie because she wants to “forget everything” for at least a few minutes, Jackie states that, much as he would like to give in, he believes there is a “code” that he wants to follow that prevents him from adultery. When Jackie finally discovers the truth concerning the man with the hat, he then faces the more difficult question of how much he is able to forgive those concerned.

Sergio Di Zio has always given fine performances in the past, but his performance in Hat is truly extraordinary. If it is not Dora-worthy I don’t know what is. His character covers a huge emotional arc and Di Zio traverses it all the time making us aware of Jackie’s conflicting emotions. He makes the struggle of an unlucky man to be virtuous absolutely gripping since he has to fight against his own flaws as well as those of all around him. Throughout the action we root for him since Di Zio makes so clear what effort it takes Jackie to force himself to do what he thinks is morally right rather than follow instincts that he knows would only lead him into more trouble.

As Veronica, D’Agostino represents the complexity of what Jackie is up against. The fact that Jackie and Veronica love each other is never in doubt. What is in doubt is whether Jackie’s love and desire to change can cope with a partner who is addicted to lies and drugs and is in denial about it. D’Agostino accomplishes the difficult task of making us see simultaneously what is good and attractive in Veronica and what is so deeply flawed about her.

Dykstra has the great role of Ralph, whose conversion to healthy living somehow does not cover the whiff of the con man that he still carries with him. We would like to believe that Jackie’s sponsor is the right person to go to for help, but his penchant for slogans and his new convert’s enthusiasm to fitness only highlight his shallowness. Dykstra brings off the role with great humour and panache.

We don’t find out much about Nicole Stamp’s character until the second half of the play. There she makes us see that Victoria is far from the bimbo we had assumed would fall for someone like Ralph. She may be alluring but she is also burdened with the bitter knowledge concerning the realities of her choices and Ralph’s.

The character of Julio is a bit of a problem. On the one hand he’s a slightly effeminate salon owner and rather too close to being a limp-wristed cliché. On the other, he’s a gym bunny and made himself a martial arts expert with Jean-Claude Van Damme as his hero. One has the feeling that Guirgis has tried to counter one cliché by simply grafting another one on to it. It is entirely to Chioran’s credit that he is able to make these two sides of the character work together as well as he can, although the result still has the vibe of forced political correctness. At least, Guirgis give Julio the best written long speech of the play which Chioran brings off beautifully, even winning a round of mid-show applause for it.

Bob Kills Theatre has staged the show in the round in the intimate new basement space of The Coal Mine. Steve Lucas’s functional set serves as three different apartments, but Layne Coleman’s pacey direction is still so precise we’re never in doubt which is which.

With Hat, some Guirgis fans may be disappointed that he seems to have given up the daring experimentalism of his earlier work. On the other hand, this new play is different for Guirgis in that is focusses so closely on the development of a single character. What is missing from Guirgis’ earlier work is the sense of the mystical – the sense that the amoral, profanity-riddled lives of his characters actually are part of a larger pattern with theological implications. Yet, even if this is true, the performances in Hat are so thoroughly riveting no lover of modern drama will want to miss them.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Sergio Di Zio, Juan Chioran, Ted Dykstra; Sergio Di Zio and Melissa D’Agostino. ©2014 Matt Campagna.

For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/859215.

Fulgens and Lucres

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 17:00:23 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
by Henry Medwall, directed by Matthew Milo Sergi
Poculi Ludique Societas, West Hall, University College, Toronto
November 7-9, 2014;
Luella Massey Studio Theatre, Toronto
November 14-16, 2014

A: “There is so much nice array
Among these gallants nowaday
That a man shall not lightly
Know a player from another man”

The chances of seeing a production of Fulgens and Lucres (1497) by Henry Medwall (c. 1462-1502) in any English-speaking country are next to zero. Little enough attention is paid to Shakespeare’s contemporaries and virtually none to his predecessors. Luckily, the University of Toronto is home to a theatre company called the Poculi Ludique Societas (“The Cup and Game Society”), one of the few university companies devoted to producing theatre from the middle ages up to the closing of the theatres in England in 1642.

This year the PLS, as it is known, is celebrating its 50th anniversary. To kick off the celebrations it is presenting Fulgens and Lucres, a play written 67 years before Shakespeare was born, that it has not mounted since 1973. The cast of performers with an active background in theatre show off this play in the best possible light. While it is a text that can seem rather unengaging on the page, the new PLS production directed by Matthew Milo Sergi brings it so much to life that it should appeal even to those outside of academe.

Fulgens and Lucres (aka Fulgens and Lucrece) is extremely important in the history of English drama for two reasons. First, it is the earliest surviving example of a completely secular play. English drama began with the medieval mystery plays based on stories from the Bible and continued into the 16th century with morality plays, often with religious themes and allegorical characters, such as Everyman, first performed c. 1510. One could easily give the characters of Fulgens and Lucres allegorical names, but the significant point is that Medwall not only chose not to do so, but emphasizes that the action is set in ancient Rome. Second, Fulgens and Lucres is the first extant play in English with a subplot, a characteristic that would distinguish English drama from its continental counterparts into the 17th century. In this case the story of the servants provides a comic mirror of that of their masters and actually takes more stage time than the main plot.

The play may be set in ancient Rome but it is not based on history. Instead, Medwall was dramatizing an English translation of the humanist treatise in dialogue form De Vera Nobilitate (On True Nobility) from 1438 by Buonaccorso da Montemagno. The treatise makes the radical claim that true nobility does not lie in illustrious descent but in a person’s character and career. From his source Medwall takes the story of the Roman senator Fulgens, whose only daughter is being courted both by the nobleman Publius Cornelius and by the plebeian Gaius Flaminius. Lucres asks her father for advice. In the source the father has the two suitors plead their case before the senate. Medwall has the two plead their case directly to Lucres. While the source does not reveal the senate’s decision, Medwall does reveal Lucres’s.

To this main plot Medwall adds his own comic subplot about Cornelius’ servant “A” and Gaius’ servant “B”, who are both in love with Lucres’s maid Joan. They tell Joan to decide between them and she sets them to various physical contests, in contrast to the oratorical contest between Cornelius and Gaius.

Medwall was chaplain to John Morton, Cardinal and Archbishop of Canterbury. It is presumed that Fulgens and Lucres was first performed at a banquet held by Morton for two foreign ambassadors. The play has no fourth wall since A and B speak directly to the audience. We first assume that the two will be comic commentators on the action since they both speak of their anticipation of seeing a play. But soon enough they become involved in the action when they hear that Cornelius and Gaius are both in need of servants. Medwall’s dramatization of the audience’s psychological involvement by showing it physically being drawn into the action of a play thus predates by 110 years Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), the most famous example of this in English.

Director Matthew Sergi is well aware of this. He has A (Lauren Shepherd) enter and begin her address to the public and then has her invite Catt Filippov, who has been seated at the banquet table with the audience to come on stage. After convincing us that she is just an embarrassed audience member dragged on stage who fumbles in trying to read B’s lines from the script, Filippov whips off her modern dress to turn into B herself. Drawing on moustaches in lipstick to suggest the male actors who would likely have played these roles, A and B, hearing that Gaius and Cornelius are in need of servants, go off to present their services to them.

Throughout the act action A and B function as a bridge between the audience and the play. Most of their commentary is spoken directly to the audience. When not acting, A and B chat and flirt with the crowd. Sergi takes this a step farther by having the two invite members of the audience on stage for various purposes – one pair to illustrate the ideal couple, four people to participate in a basse danse with the cast. As the third servant, male actor Chris Tsujiuchi in drag as Joan is allowed to ad lib directly to the audience.

Yet, even the characters of higher rank speak to audience as much as the other characters. Fulgens (Don Johanson) explains his decision to allow Lucres (Cassidy Sadler) to make her own decision directly to us. When Gaius (Austin Leggett) and Cornelius (Marlow Stainfield) plead their cases nominally to Lucres, they like orators also speak to us who have assembled to hear them. After each suitor has given his speech, Sergi has A and B ask the audience to show by its applause which one it thinks has won the debate. Sergi’s direction thus emphasizes that important side of early drama, interaction with the audience, that may be implied by the text but tends to lie hidden from readers of the text alone.

If the servants are a bridge between the audience and the play, Sergi also uses them as a bridge between the present and the past. He therefore allows them a more modern gestural language than their masters. As A, Lauren Shepherd combines her helium voice with perfect comic timing with the result that she is often reminiscent of Curly of the Three Stooges. In contrast, to the earthy A, Catt Filippov as B is more of sprightly and bright, rather like Peter Pan. When dance music plays, the first instinct for both is the 21st century not the 15th.

The hefty Chris Tsujiuchi, clad in headscarf and apron, is especially funny since he plays Joan as a big mama with attitude who punctuates his remarks with finger snaps and head turns. Pneuma may play medieval music, but Tsujiuchi is free to add a soul-like riff whenever he wants to.

The servants’ masters may be models of seriousness but are still engaging. Don Johanson is the old Fulgens, but that doesn’t mean he can’t turn a cartwheel before his big introductory speech or dance with the same vigour as the others. Sergi gives Cassidy Sadler’s Lucres flowing, balletic arm movements to accompany her speeches either to illustrate how high above the others she is in virtue or to give her a way of physically demonstrating her grace. Austin Leggett is an ardent, earnest Gaius, whose performance makes us see him as the predecessor of all of Shakespeare’s ardent, earnest lovers. Marlow Stainfield is very funny as the vain Cornelius, obvious proud of his long locks that he shakes for emphasis and completely unaware that his egotism is what makes him a laughingstock.

In imitation of the original setting, long tables are set up in the West Hall of University College in the form of a U with a separate high table for dignitaries behind the U. The performance space thus becomes the entire area enclosed by the U with the opening at the top for entrances and exits. To one side of that opening, there being no balcony in West Hall as there would have been in a typical Tudor hall, was situated the early music trio Pneuma, who provide vibrant accompaniment to the songs, dances and some speeches and play interludes between scenes. The group also contributes to the comedy of Cornelius’ speeches by playing fanfares on kazoos after each important point of his argument.

Linda Phillips has created attractive costumes for the cast. The males wear gold-brocaded cream jerkins or doublets with maroon leggings, Lucrece a lovely flowing white gown and the drudge Joan a bright yellow shift. Phillips’ comic triumph is the finery that Cornelius changes into for the debate. This is all in flaming scarlet with a massive codpiece that is not the simple bulging triangle of cloth one might expect but rather a strap-on phallus of red velvet with gold trim. The codpiece both links Cornelius to the phallus-wearing satyrs of ancient comedy and reveals his true nature as a debauchee despite noble blood. Much humour derives from the superior attitude Stainfield affects as Cornelius despite the ridiculousness of his garb.

For anyone with an interest in early English drama, Fulgens and Lucres is a must. There’s no use waiting for the Stratford Festival to do it. In 60 years it has not staged even one pre-Shakespearean English play. Even the PLS has not staged Fulgens and Lucres since 1973. But, more important, what this production so ably demonstrates is that an early play like this, when well directed, designed and performed, can appeal to anyone who loves the theatre. Not only is this Fulgens and Lucres a window into the past but a joyful feast of entertainment for the present.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) title page of an early edition of Fulgens and Lucres; Chris Tjujiuchi as Joan; Pneuma (Gavin Dianda, Eleanor Verrette and Tricia Postle). ©2014 PLS.

For tickets, visit http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/plspls/.

Circle Jerk

Sun, 9 Nov 2014 14:51:14 -0500

✭✭✭✩✩
by Scott Dermody, W.J. Colford, Brandon Crone & Justin Haigh, directed by Joanne Williams, Jakob Ehman, Brandon Crone & Justin Haigh
Soup Can Theatre, safeword and Aim for the Tangent Theatre, lemonTree studio, Toronto
November 7-23, 2014

“Four Writers Rub One Out”

Circle Jerk is an evening of four plays presented under the combined auspices of three independent theatre companies – Soup Can Theatre, safeword and Aim for the Tangent Theatre. As with any quadruple bill, some plays will be better than others. In this case Maypole Rose by Brandon Crone stands head and shoulders above the others both in writing and in acting. Yet, it, like the other three, also suffers from a lack of editing. The strange constraints that the three companies agreed to have forced the companies to present the four plays in an uncongenial order so that the otherwise upbeat sequence ends on a downer. Thus, just as most of the plays eventually outstay their welcome, so does the entire production.

Last summer members of the public were invited to submit original bits of dialogue that the participating playwrights would have to use as the opening and closing lines of their new creations. After receiving almost 300 submissions, four intriguing lines were selected and assigned to the writers: “Subtlety is not your specialty”, “What’s Bulgarian for slut?”, “I think it’s time we talked about your filthy rituals” and “I fucking hate potatoes”.

As an added twist, each of the lines of dialogue was assigned to the playwrights in order to serve as both the closing line of one play and the opening line of the following play. This structure with the first play starting and the last play ending with the same line puts the “circle” in Circle Jerk. The parlour game aspect of this process may provides challenges but they are pointless ones that militate against the production of serious work. As the production demonstrates, the linking of beginning and ending lines is no guarantee that the themes of the plays will be linked or that will form a cyclical or even satisfying sequence.

First up is Dust Peddling: Part II by Scott Dermody directed by Joanne Williams for Soup Can Theatre. With a mattress as the only prop, Dermody enters and proceeds to perform sun salutations in yoga after which he readies restraints for his arms. Lisa Hamalainen enters and at first appears to be some sort of dominatrix. What the two say to each other is unclear both in terms of the writing and in terms of the actors’ diction. Why for a play like this should a character have to read out the Wikipedia article defining “orgasm” as if that, rather than experience were the ultimate source of information? What we can only guess from their movements that they are preparing for a sexual encounter in a room with an audience (that’s us) of voyeurs. The joke of the piece, since this is more of a comic skit than a play, is that for all the disrobing and sensual foreplay, the two turn each other on not by physical contact but be reciting poetry.

The following short play, Sex and This by Wesley J. Colford for Aim for the Tangent, is more substantial. Tiffany Deobald and Carys Lewis play two twentysomethings who are supposed to be going to a costume party. Their argument about whether to go is interrupted by a phone call telling them that the host of the party has died of a drug overdose. What follows is a satire of how the present generation for all its savviness with maintaining virtual lives online is completely stumped when having to deal with a brutal fact of real life. Both young women tie themselves in knots over how to tell this information to their friends, what the appropriate platform would be and how to say something that will have an irrevocable effect on those who hear it. The two immediately rule out posting the news on the dead woman’s Facebook page, but neither can muster the courage to have an actual phone call with anyone about it. They try to let themselves off the hook by convincing themselves that they really didn’t like the woman anyway, but to no avail.

Colford wants to show how the two women go in circles in dealing or not dealing with what should be a simple duty, but to do so inevitably involves repetition of the same information and ultimately the show goes on long after it has made its point. Though Colford wants to focus on the two women’s self-imposed agonizing, it is not clear why they are the ones who have to spread the information of the woman’s death. After all, someone phoned them about it at the start. Will people at the party not notice that the host is not there? Despite these basic questions, Sex and This with its redundancies edited out could be a very smart critique of a generation so ill prepared to deal with life, and even less with death. Though Deobald is the clearer speaker of the two, both Deobald and Lewis are excellent at expressing not only their characters’ cluelessness but their frustration with their own cluelessness.

The hit of the evening is the third play Maypole Rose by Brandon Crone for safeword. This is probably the most realistic glimpse into the lives of an ordinary gay couple I’ve seen on stage. The play is hilarious, not because the couple happens to be gay, but because their interactions as a couple are so well detailed. Alexander Plouffe plays the breadwinner of the two who has a job with regular but long hours. G. Kyle Shields is his artist partner who spends most of the day at home. To relieve the stress of the day the breadwinner wants to have wild sex with the artist as soon as he gets home. Their argument, though, is that Plouffe’s character wants to get high beforehand because he thinks it makes sex more intense, while Shields’ character wishes his partner could have sex without smoking up.

Eventually the artist gives into the breadwinner with the disastrous result that when high all he can think about is eating rather than having sex. Once the artist’s high wears off, the two engage in the most imaginative gay sex scene involving a banana that I’ve ever seen in the theatre. You may think you know all that a banana can represent, but, this scene will change your mind.

Maypole Rose is the best of the four in terms of the sharpness and naturalism of its writing and its creation of characters who sound and behave like real people. Yet, even this playlet has its flaws. The breadwinner’s predilection for speaking in a coarse, misogynist fashion to the artist, despite the artist’s displeasure at this, is never resolved. Just when we think the action is winding down, Crone has the artist bring up a new topic that Crone doesn’t have the time to explore adequately. The new topic also completely alters the mood from comic to serious. Then, just when that play is about to end, Crone does it again, by having the artist bring forth even more new information.

To deal with the artist’s two important revelations, Crone really needs a Maypole Rose, Part 2. Let’s hope he is contemplating that because these two characters are ones we would like to know better. Plouffe and Shields have an amazing chemistry and lack of inhibition and their sense of intimacy with each other seems so real we almost feel like we’re illicitly peeping into the other people’s private lives.

The surge of energy generated by Maypole Rose is dissipated immediately by the final play, The Session by Justin Haigh for Soup Can Theatre. Haigh’s play is the most tightly written of the four but it is also the most conventional.
In it the safety supervisor for a nuclear power plant (Allan Michael Brunet), who has shown some disturbing behaviour, is sent for counselling with the company’s resident therapist (Matt Pilipiak). At first the supervisor’s truculent attitude seems due to anger management problems, but it eventually becomes apparent that he thinks therapy is a waste of time for an entirely different reason.

Haigh tries to begin the play with a comic tone with the newcomer therapist totally out of his depth with such a difficult client. Eventually, the utter earnestness of the supervisor destroys any attempt at humour and the action stomps on to its melodramatic, not entirely believable conclusion. A prime difficulty with the play is the shift in interest from the plight of cheery therapist to the off-putting character of the supervisor. To tell the supervisor’s story, Haigh devolves the therapist’s role from that of a quirky character to simply the supervisor’s story-prompter. Haigh is not interested in the therapy session as a battle of wills between two people as much as he is at depicting the total domination of the therapist by his client. Brunet and Pilipiak are well cast in their roles, but we are sorry to see the comedy, at which Pilipiak is so adept, is completely sidelined by the depressing tack of the play.

As if four plays were not enough, each play is preceded by an original musical composition for a classical chamber ensemble. All four of these are enjoyable and cohere to a far greater extent than do the four plays. The first and fourth pieces, by Marla Kishimoto and Patricia Stevens respectively, are both fun examples of humour in music. In her piece Kishimoto uses an unruly clarinet that wants to shine in its own riffs despite what the others are playing while in the other piece Stevens features an uncooperative pianist.

Overall, the evening feels too long and in need of someone with general oversight to give it shape and structure beyond the parlour game stunt that led to its creation. If Wesley Colford could edit down Sex and This and Brandon Crone either shorten or expand Maypole Rose, this collaboration of three theatre companies will have helped create at least two plays that could have a life beyond that of mere components in a quadruple bill.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Alexander Plouffe, G. Kyle Shields; Lisa Hamalainen, Scott Dermody; Tiffany Deobald, Carys Lewis; Alexander Plouffe, G. Kyle Shields; Matt Pilipiak. ©2014 LV Imagery.

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

Talking Heads

Sat, 8 Nov 2014 12:54:21 -0500

✭✭✭✭✭
by Alan Bennett, directed by John Shooter
Precisely Peter Productions, Campbell House Museum, Toronto
November 7-23, 2014;
November 3, 5, 7 mat, 8 mat, 10, 12, 14 mat, 18, 20 & 21, 2015

“Bennett’s Very British Inferno”

First thing to know: Talking Heads is not about the new wave band of the same name of the 1980s. Second thing to know: Talking Heads is a wonderful evening of theatre. The show is made up of three monologues each lasting about a half hour written by acclaimed British playwright Alan Bennett, most famous perhaps as the author of The Madness of George III (1991) and The History Boys (2004). In 1988 and 1998 Bennett wrote a collection of twelve monologues for BBC television known under the collective title Talking Heads. The monologues along with a thirteenth from 1982 have since been staged in various combinations. Just last year those lucky enough to see it got a taste of these wry, tightly written pieces in the form of Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet, a monologue first broadcast in 1998. The three that director John Shooter has chosen are altogether much darker and more unsettling than Miss Fozzard, but all three are riveting and superbly performed.

Each of the three monologues Shooter has chosen is a kind of mini-mystery. As we listen to the speakers we begin to notice a disparity between the façade they would like to present and the facts of their story. The characters emphasize certain details of the story and de-emphasize or even omit others until we see a pattern emerge. All three endings have twists that in two cases make the characters’ stories even more disturbing that we thought they would be.

Shooter’s triple bill begins with The Outside Dog from 1998. On entering the dining room of the Campbell House, we discover Naomi Wright playing the central character Marjory, who is obsessively cleaning items and placing them on a set of shelves. Marjory’s chief complaint is her husband’s dog who barks whenever her husband is not at home. Since the dog is quiet when he is home, her husband doesn’t believe her complaints about the barking.

Marjory tells us that she has had to train her husband, who works in a slaughterhouse, to a level of cleanliness that she can put up with although the level he finds acceptable is still far below hers. As Marjory tidies, mops and folds laundry she becomes increasingly tense while she speaks and we try to figure out what is driving her obsessive compulsive behaviour. Is her marriage unhappy? Does he find her husband’s work objectionable? Or is it because there is a serial killer on the loose in her neighbourhood? I can say no more except that only at the very end to we realize why Bennett has given this monologue its specific title.

We descend to the kitchen of the Campbell House for the second monologue, Playing Sandwiches from 1998 set in a park. Jason Gray as Wilfred is raking leaves as we enter. Wilfred’s story at first seems idyllic. He tells us about how he loves working outdoors and even though he doesn’t like some of the things he has to clean up, he enjoys keeping the park tidy. His employer is happy with his work except that he can’t find any records to verify the past work history on Wilfred’s resumé. Wilfred enjoys seeing children playing in the park and gets to know a young girl named Samantha, whose mother even lets Wilfred look after Samantha when she is too busy. The title refers to a game Samantha likes to play with Wilfred of putting one hand on top of the other. Already made uneasy by what happens in The Outside Dog, we hope that the pattern we see emerging is wrong since Wilfred seems like such a humble, harmless guy.

For the final monologue, A Lady of Letters from 1988, we ascend to the ballroom on the second floor where Alex Dallas as Irene Ruddock is seated in an armchair staring out the window. We find she is observing with disapproval the new people who have moved in across the way. Irene, or Miss Ruddock as she prefers to be called, now living alone since her mother died, has taken it upon herself to be a one-person health, safety and morality monitor for the entire neighbourhood. For every infraction she notices – a hair in her sausage, men smoking outside a crematorium, a faulty step, dog poop near Buckingham Palace – Miss Ruddock fires off a letter to the appropriate authorities or more if they do not respond quickly. But when Miss Ruddock starts to badger the police about the situation she thinks she sees going on across the street, it seems she has gone too far.

Some critics consider Talking Heads Alan Bennett’s masterpiece and each of the monologues Shooter has chosen is a perfect gem of the form. To perform them Shooter has assembled a cast of actors all of whom I wish we would see more frequently on stage in Toronto. In The Outside Dog, Naomi Wright subtly shifts the emphasis from Marjory’s outward activity to her inward agitation that incrementally grows worse throughout her scene. The tension she creates between what is said and unsaid is almost unbearable.

Jason Gray, whom I’ve previously seen only in comic roles, is extraordinarily moving in the serious role of Wilfred. From the first he gives Wilfred a feeling of background anxiety that doesn’t match the calmness of his speech or the pleasures of work that he speaks of. It is this expert ability to communicate two emotions at once that makes us look for the real story behind the one he tells us. The innocence that Gray brings out in Wilfred makes the ending of Playing Sandwiches as heartbreaking as it is disturbing.

The Lady of Letters provides some comic relief from the intensity of the previous two monologues. Alex Dallas perfectly captures Bennett’s extremely dry wit. Dallas’s Irene has no idea that the more she confides in us the more ridiculous she makes herself look. The higher the moral ground her Irene stands on the lower our opinion of her. Yet, at the same time Dallas suggests another, more sympathetic side to this busybody. Dallas helps us see that writing letters of complaint is virtually Irene’s sole contact with other people and establishes a feeling of connectedness to counter a loneliness she can’t admit.

In these three monologues out of thirteen, Shooter has chosen those with related themes. All three concern crime and punishment. All three speakers cherish the all-white England of the past and have not come to terms with the diversity of the present. All three speakers are obsessed with tidiness, whether indoors like Marjory, outdoors like Wilfred or in other people’s lives like Irene. While Shooter’s choice makes for a satisfying evening it also does not quite suggest how wide the range of moods is in Bennett’s Talking Heads series.

Shooter’s idea of staging the monologues in the Campbell House is brilliant. In moving from room to room where each of the speakers is ensconced, we feel like Dante moving from one circle to the next in a kind of domestic, very British Inferno, where the inhabitants are only too glad to unburden themselves of their stories. In some ways, at the end you feel you are leaving a house haunted by the spirits of the unintentionally guilty.

With such rich material, so well directed and performed, all theatre-lovers should seek out Talking Heads. You will be so impressed that you are bound to hope John Shooter and Precisely Peter Productions will give us more.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a copy of the Stage Door review of Talking Heads in 2014: The cast and creative team are the same.
Photos: (from top) Naomi Wright as Marjory; Jason Gray as Wilfred; Alex Dallas as Irene. ©2015 Vincente Marana.

For tickets, visit http://talkingheads2.brownpapertickets.com.

Spoon River

Wed, 5 Nov 2014 15:10:53 -0500

✭✭✭✭✩
music by Mike Ross, poetry by Edgar Lee Masters, directed by Albert Schultz
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
November 4-15, 2014;
March 7-April 2, 2015

Lucinda Matlock: “It takes life to love Life”

Mike Ross’s musical adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology is likely to be one of Soulpepper’s biggest hits. Masters’ collection of epitaphs spoken by the deceased inhabitants of the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois, was a huge success when it first appeared in 1915 painting as it did a portrait of small town midwestern life in all its variety and unravelling the interconnectedness of everyone who made one special place their home. In this it looks forward to Thornton Wilder’s portrait of the fictional Grover’s Corners in Our Town of 1938 and to Dylan Thomas’s portrait of the fictional Llareggub in Under Milk Wood of 1954. Through Ross’s careful selection and arrangement of 50 of Masters’ 246 poems, through his joyous musical setting of poems with key themes of the series and through Albert Schultz’s imaginative direction, Masters’ collection of epitaphs comes alive with a message to live life to the fullest, a message as pertinent to the present as it was in Masters’ day.

Schultz’s directorial conceit, perhaps rather overdone, is to make audience members feel they have entered another age when they set foot in the Young Centre, where much of the modern furniture has been replaced with Victorian settees, divans and armchairs, rugs and lamps. You do not enter the Baillie Theatre by the usual doors, but go down a corridor decked out like that of a funeral parlour, with a ledger to sign and even a body in a coffin to view, before you head over the stage to find seats in the auditorium.

The frame Ross and Schultz have given the show concerning the burial of a young woman and her welcoming to The Hill by its residents makes the action seem like an extended version of the funeral scene for Emily Gibbs in Our Town. It may useful to give the show a frame borrowed from another play, especially one Soulpepper has staged so often, but since Masters preceded Wilder it might have been more interesting to find a structure related to Masters’ own. Masters’ willingness to discuss such topics as adultery, murder, rape, abortion, prostitution and racial prejudice set his Spoon River far apart from the cozy but whitewashed world of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

Diego Matamoros as the only elder available in the absence of the minister, presides and tells the story that many visitors to The Hill at night think they hear the sounds of a country band playing dance music, a band made up of the souls buried there. These words set up the premise of the whole evening and specifically the first song, a raucous music setting of “The Hill”, the introductory poem of Masters’ anthology. The poem follows the ancient ubi sunt theme of the transience of life with the question:”Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley” and the answer, “All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill”. The intentional humour of Ross’s bluegrass setting is that the stomping accompanying the music is enough to wake the dead.

And I suppose it does, because for the next 90 minutes we meet selected occupants of The Hill who speak or sing us their stories. Ross has collected the epitaphs in various groups – drunks, spouses, workmen, the town Don Juan (Stuart Hughes) and the women he seduced. Ross’s style varies from folk and bluegrass to hymns and even Kurt Weill. While his choral songs are rousing, his quieter songs are the most affecting. The song he has written for “William and Emily” (“There is something about / Death Like love itself!”) to lead off the collection of spouses is exquisite and is beautifully sung by Gregory Prest and Raquel Duffy. Unlike William and Emily most of the spouses are hilariously unhappy, like the prim Mrs. Benjamin Pantier (Nancy Palk) and her husband (Prest) who prefers his dog to her.

In his most imaginative grouping, Ross pairs two women, Emily Sparks (Nancy Palk) and Elsa Wertman (Duffy) with two sons Harry Wilmans (Colin Palangio) and Hamilton Greene (Gordon Hecht). Both women have lost their sons – Emily to an unknown cause, Elsa because he was adopted since he was illegitimate. Harry dies in the Spanish-American War in the Philippines and Hamilton becomes a member of Congress never knowing who his real mother is. Ross’s song for Emily, “Where is my boy, my boy”, becomes a touching lament for both mothers and, indeed all mothers.

While the show as a whole is strong, the cast is uneven with a distinction noticeable between Soulpepper veterans and many of the newcomers. As one might expect, Diego Matamoros, Nancy Palk, Gregory Prest and Raquel Duffy are strong in their several roles and clearly distinguish one from the other. Stuart Hughes has fine moment as the drunk Oscar Hummel beaten to death by the intolerant A.D. Blood and as the proud conservative politician Thomas Rhodes. Oliver Dennis as the comic philosopher Roger Heston, who is done in by his own view of free will, and as the more serious philosopher Fiddler Jones, who voices a view that sums up the lives of those on The Hill: “The earth keeps some vibration going / There in your heart, and that is you”.

Newcomers who make a strong impression include Colin Palangio, both as the soldier Harry Wilmans, disgusted with the true nature of war, and as the arsonist Silas Dement, whose song “It was a moon-light, and the earth sparkled” leads to one of Ross’s wildest songs with the fire-bell’s refrain “Clang! Clang! Clang!” Miranda Mulholland who sings while she accompanies herself on the violin and Hailey Gillis who soulfully sings the final epitaph help give the show energy and depth. Neither Brendan Wall nor Frank Cox-O’Connell is new to Toronto theatre, but both are newish to Soulpepper and make noteworthy contributions.

As director, Schultz follows up on the practice of using props in inventive ways. Ladders become a bench, windows, a prison or, frighteningly, railroad tracks. Two door-sized planks under Ken MacKenzie’s lighting become coffin bottoms where we see, standing up, the various spouses buried side by side whether they wished it or not. All this takes place on MacKenzie’s moulded thrust stage to suggest The Hill, in back of which is a birch grove and a full moon.

Mike Ross has been an invaluable asset to Soulpepper, both as an actor and musician, since he first joined the company. Spoon River is an impressive achievement and will likely remain a Soulpepper favourite for years to come.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Colin Palangio, Mike Ross, Brendan Wall, Frank Cox-O'Connell, Gordon Hecht and Diego Matamoros; Mike Ross (on coffin) and the Spoon River ensemble.. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.

What I learned from a decade of fear

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:40:29 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Beatriz Pizano, Trevor Schwellnus & Lyon Smith, directed by Trevor Schwellnus
Aluna Theatre, Aluna Studio, Toronto
October 30-November 30, 2014;
The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St. West, Toronto
January 21-24, 2016

“The challenge of maintaining our humanity in trying times”

Aluna Theatre’s new show, like all good political theatre, has the explicit goal of raising awareness of our situation in the world. Co-created and performed by Beatriz Pizano and Trevor Schwellnus, the same team behind the brilliant Nohayquiensepa of 2011, along with Lyon Smith, What I learned from a decade of fear examines what has changed in our thinking and behaviour since the “War on Terror” began in 2001. What Pizano, Schwellnus and Smith find is shocking in two different ways. First, the play forces us to acknowledge that the war on terror has gone on for so long that we have begun to take it and all its human and financial costs for granted. Second, the play makes us see that rather than making us in North America feel safer, it has in fact completely eroded the trust that used to bind people together.

The play begins in the tiny Aluna Studio*, a room that seats only 30 audience members, with Beatriz Pizano and Lyon Smith alternately writing figures on sheets of paper that are projected onto the back wall of the acting space. Each writes the number, explains what it means, says “thank you” and places the sheet of paper in a pattern among other sheets already on the floor of the acting space. The numbers are all statistics, and they are horrifying. $12 billion = monthly cost of war in Iraq. 350,000 = number of people killed since 2001 due to direct war violence. 3990 = number of American troops killed in Iraq. 82,000 = number of Iraqi civilians killed since war began. 360,000 = US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries. 1892 = number of suicides of US veterans of war on terror. The list continues and is up to date. It includes: 1 = the number of Canadians killed in Canada by terrorists since 2001, a reference to Corporal Nathan Cirillo.

While Trevor Schwellnus serves as stage manager as well as lighting and sound technician and remote camera operator, Beatriz Pizano and Lyon Smith negotiate the stage. We note that although more than half the playing surface is covered with pages of statistics, neither of them steps on one of these pages. In fact, the point is that they both literally step around the facts they have presented. Their careful movement becomes a physical metaphor for how we mentally have come to ignore statistics that we once paid so much attention to when the war on terror began in 2001.

The second phase of the performance involves Pizano playing herself playing an interrogator and Lyon Smith playing an ordinary guy by playing himself. As Schwellnus states in his director’s note, “All our public language now is oppositional, and leads us to look for enemies”. Pizano’s first line of inquiry concerns whether Smith is happy. Her questions pull apart Smith’s ability to perceive happiness in others as well as in himself, thus casting doubt on his abilities of perception. Parallel to the actors’ movements around the facts, her questions also probe whether he can be happy if he knows other people are suffering. The truth, of course, is that he can be. Pizano interpretation is that is he must be callous.

After an excerpt from an old training film about the use of repeated questions in interrogation to trip up the interrogatee, Pizano begins again, this time with a focus on what Smith had for breakfast. Comic and trivial though this may seem, by the end of this section Smith has had to admit that he buys organic bananas because he trusts that the label is true even though he does not know if it is true. His buying of foods marked “organic” is thus a form of belief.

Then there is a disturbing video in which soldiers in a helicopter or perhaps manning a drone get Middle Eastern men carrying weapons in their sights and whoop as they shoot them down as if playing a video game. After this Pizano takes her questioning farther to find out under what circumstances Smith would kill another person. Smith has to admit, as most people would, that if someone were going to harm his children and he had no other recourse to stop them, he would likely resort to violence. By carefully manipulating her questions and playing on half-truths, Pizano succeeds in asserting that Smith, though just an ordinary guy, actually has it in him to kill a major political or religious figure.

In between bouts of questioning, Smith dons an unusual helmet containing a video camera trained on his face. From the outside the elongated section at the base of the helmet makes Smith look like a long-beaked bird. On this “beak” are written the words “Freedom of Speech”. While wearing the helmet of free speech, Smith can speak his mind about his displeasure over the interrogations, but, at the same time, the helmet prevents him from seeing, so that his steps have to be guided by Pizano to keep him from trampling on the facts. The implication seems to be, as we all know from the 24-hour news networks, that freedom of speech does not necessarily entail adherence to facts.

During the performance Trevor Schwellnus proves himself a technical wizard. As director and stage manager his planning of camera angles and switching from shot to shot is masterful. His fading into and out of video footage on the back wall is impeccably done. You could say he plays the visual aspects of the show as a great pianist might play the piano. Lyon Smith’s soundtrack perfectly captures the unsettling mood of the piece. As actors, Pizano’s contributions tend to sound cold and scripted whereas Smith’s are so natural they seem completely impromptu. As we discover at the end, Smith’s responses were just as scripted as Pizano’s.

In only 65 minutes this remarkable performance piece sums up the contradictions in modern life ten years or more since the “War on Terror” was launched. What the piece shows so graphically is how we have become inured to the idea of unremitting violence committed in the name of safety without any evidence that we actually feel safer. In fact, the opposite seems true that the trust people once had in each other or in ideas or institutions has become more fragile if not entirely shattered. The point of the piece is to provoke or a Schwellnus says in his director’s note, to explore “The challenge of maintaining our humanity in trying times”. The play jolts us into realizing that “Lest we forget” is a phrase that should apply to our lives everyday, not just on November 11th.

©Christopher Hoile

*If you are looking for the Aluna Studio at 1 Wiltshire Ave., Unit 124, on Google Maps, it helps to switch to satellite mode to get a clearer view of how to get from Adrian Ave. into the courtyard of the building where the Studio is located.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Beatriz Pizano and Lyon Smith;.Lyon Smith. ©2014 Trevor Schwellnus.

For tickets, visit www.alunatheatre.ca.

The Bakelite Masterpiece

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 16:10:55 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by Kate Cayley, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
October 29-November 30, 2014

Han: “The forger is so in sympathy with the desires of the present, that he creates
exactly what his time would like to believe about the past”

Kate Cayley’s latest play, The Bakelite Masterpiece, now receiving its world premiere at the Tarragon Theatre, is one of those plays that has been surfacing recently at that theatre that is so obviously flawed it is a wonder it made it to workshops, let alone to a full staging. The story of Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), one of the great forgers of the 20th century, is fascinating, but Cayley manages to make his story so full of pretentious earnestness that the play becomes boring despite a running time of only 70 minutes.

In this two-person show, Cayley has both characters serve as narrators. She has Van Meegeren (Geordie Johnson) set up the story using the background of the real forger’s life. Van Meegeren started out as a painter in his own right but his works were criticized as derivative. Van Meegeren decided to make this flaw into a virtue by becoming a forger with the goal of fooling the greatest art critics of his period besides accumulating a fortune. He focussed on forging works of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age like Frans Hals (1582-1666) and Johannes Vermeer (1632-75). He invented a scheme not merely to paint in the style of earlier artists but to make the painting look as if they were 200 years old. To do this he would use canvas from the 17th century and mix paints with the ingredients in the same way painters of the time would have done. His great invention was to add the early plastic phenol formaldehyde (commercially known as Bakelite) to his paints so that when baked they would achieve the hardness that oils do over hundreds of years. He also learned to simulate the cracking and darkening that painting of Old Masters acquire over time.

In Cayley’s play as in history, Van Meegeren is arrested in 1945 after the end of World War II for having sold a painting by Vermeer, thus a Dutch cultural property, to senior Nazi Wehrmacht commander Hermann Göring. To commit such an act was treasonous and carried the death penalty. The subject of the painting was Christ with the woman taken in adultery, which Van Meegeren presented as a newly discovered work from Vermeer’s early (and purely conjectural) Biblical period, before he began painting the everyday contemporary subjects that later made him famous.

In Cayley’s version Geert (Irene Poole), a female Dutch military captain with an art degree is assigned to investigate the case. She is efficient and taciturn and merely wants Van Meegeren to sign a confession she has drafted so that he can be executed. Van Meegeren’s defence, indeed the same one that he later used in his real trial in 1947, is that he is a forger and sold Göring a Van Meegeren, not a Vermeer, and thus is not guilty of selling a “Dutch cultural property”. In history Van Meegeren was detained in prison while his claim was verified. Earlier, in 1945 over the course of four months he painted Jesus among the Doctors in the style of Vermeer in the presence of reporters and court-appointed witnesses.

Cayley takes this historical incident but makes it ridiculous. Geert has been so unsympathetic to Van Meegeren that she will allow him only two minutes to explain himself. Yet, only a few minutes later Cayley has Geert not only agree to let Van Meegeren paint another Vermeer to prove how good a forger he is, but acquires his full list of needs, including a 17th-century canvas, period ingredients including the extremely expensive lapis lazuli and, even more incredibly, gin and morphine to which he has become addicted.

Pushing an already unbelievable plot development into complete implausibility, Cayley has Geert suggest that Van Meegeren’s subject should be herself. How does a person who previously was so concerned with proper procedure and objectivity, suddenly allow such an extensive breech both of procedure and waste of her supposedly valuable time? What is Geert’s motivation, reserved as she is, in having her portrait painted at all? Cayley gives us no explanation for this bizarre turnaround. A Biblical subject such as the real Van Meegeren actually painted and that would not require her presence might make sense. Cayley’s choice leads to the laughable situation of Geert supposedly posing as a typical Vermeer subject and yet, in her capacity as an officer, commanding Van Meegeren to keep painting. How, possibly, can the subject simultaneously maintain the required reflective spirit alongside an actively aggressive stance? Thus, neither the situation nor the character make sense.

Cayley is not primarily interested in character, more the pity since Van Meegeren would be such an interesting case. Like After Akhmatova, her previous play for the Tarragon, Cayley is also uninterested in generating dramatic tension. Rather, Cayley uses the situation in Bakelite to explore various implications of forgery. Thus, if a forged paining makes brings forth real emotions in a person, how important is it’s falseness? She pursues this into the Dutch government’s need to have people to condemn as collaborators. She even wants to give the notion theological implications by having Van Meegeren suggest that Lucifer rebelled against God out of curiosity, just to see if he could get away with it. Any Dutch person would know the story of Lucifer since it is the subject and title of the greatest play (1654) by the greatest playwright of the Netherlands, Joost Van den Vondel (1587-1679). Cayley’s forger trivializes the topic since Lucifer’s sin is not curiosity but pride, and if she wanted to, Cayley could easily have made that Van Meegeren’s flaw as well.

In terms of exploring the topic of forgery, Cayley brings forth nothing beyond what the many novels and plays about forgery have already covered such as William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) or Robertson Davies’ What’s Bred in the Bone (1985). As far as people living on forged beliefs, that idea is no newer than Ibsen’s notion of the “life lie”.

What makes the play watchable are the fine performances of Geordie Johnson and Irene Poole. It is great to see Johnson on stage again. He caresses every word as if milking out all the irony it contains. If the text were by Shakespeare this would be wonderful, but it is not. Yet, his portrait of a self-dramatizing artist is fascinating in its own right. He also carefully distinguishes Van Meegeren when in full possession of his faculties versus his decline after too much gin and morphine.

Cayley has written a thankless role in Geert. Poole draws as much as she can out of it, but since the author has ignored the character’s motivations, there is little Poole can do to bring out what isn’t there. Cayley does give Geert one good moment, when the captain reacts to the finished painting. This Poole does superbly, making one wish Cayley had given Poole more scenes to demonstrate her talent as an actor.

Designer Charlotte Dean and lighting designer André du Toit have combined to create the impression of a Vermeer painting of umber hues that make Geert’s ultramarine dress stand out. Du Toit takes great pains to recreate the kind of soft, revelatory light that Vermeer was so famous for.

Cayley has Geert supply a postscript to the play that directs us to the mystery of what Christ was writing in the earth in John 8:6-8. If Cayley were really interested in forgery as a topic and in Van Meegeren in particular, she misses out a great chance to point of one of the supreme ironies of his career. Van Meegeren’s forgeries became so famous that exhibitions have been organized of them several times since his death. Not only that, despite being forgeries, their fame has caused them to rise in value so that some artists have taken to painting and selling fake Van Meegerens. The story of this Dutch forger is one that is truly stranger than fiction yet more comprehensible than the feeble fiction Cayley has chosen to devise.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Geordie Johnson and Irene Poole; Irene Poole. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.

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

My Treasure Island!!!

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 02:33:38 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Karen Woolridge, directed by Kate Lynch
Johnson Girls, Theatre Passe Muraille Back Space, Toronto
October 28-November 16, 2014

Our Girl: “How can I become the hero of my own life?”

If you could use a good 70 minutes of laughter, then My Treasure Island!!! is just what you need. The play is a stage adaptation by Canadian Karen Woolridge of the novel Treasure Island!!! – no, not by Robert Louis Stevenson (he didn’t use three exclamation points) – but by American writer Sara Levine. Woolridge’s is one of those rare adaptations that has so well rethought the novel for the stage that you could easily believe the story was originally meant as a play. With hilarious performances from Caitlin Driscoll and Gemma James-Smith, this is a show that will appeal to a wide audience.

The conceit of Levine’s 2010 novel and Woolridge’s adaptation is that the central figure, known only as Our Girl (Driscoll), has read Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic boy’s adventure novel Treasure Island (1883) and realized how dull her life has become. She decided that the novel holds the key to improving her situation. Our Girl has graduated from university in humanities, but (surprise!) has not been able to find a full-time job. Having been a gift-wrapper and an ice cream scooper, Our Girl has finally landed a part-time job working for The Pet Library, an unusual shop that lends out pets. Meanwhile, she has become bored with her financially responsible boyfriend Lars because he is so predictable and risk-adverse.

Our Girl’s analysis of Treasure Island has discovered that it promotes four Core Values: Boldness, Resolution, Independence and Horn-Blowing. In deciding to have these Core Values guide her life, Our Girl has found all the justification she needs for saying whatever she wants and being as selfish and unhelpful as she feels. She notes that Responsibility, Consideration and Forgiveness are not among the Core Values.

As part of her Treasure Island kick, Our Girl buys a parrot for The Pet Library but finds that she and the bird never get along since the bird never says what she wants it to say. It is this feature that playwright Karen Woolridge uses to great effect. As Caitlin Driscoll as Our Girl tells her story, she is increasing interrupted by Little Richard the parrot, a puppet manipulated and voiced by Gemma James-Smith. As first Our Girl is annoyed when the parrot imitates other people and begins saying things that contradict what she has just said. Cleverly, Woolridge has the interaction between Our Girl and the parrot segue into the parrot taking on the roles of all the other characters – her sister Adrianna, Lars, her best friend Rena, her mother and Nancy, owner of The Pet Library.

What develops is an hilarious disconnect between the adventure and self-reliance Our Girl thinks she is experiencing and the failure and obnoxious behaviour everyone around her observes. This dissonance between reality and the narrator’s delusions is funny in itself but also serves as a biting critique of the millennial generation who can rationalize staying at home, not working and having no personal relationships as boldness, resolution and independence. (Who knows where the horn-blowing fits in?)

Caitlin Driscoll establishes herself as a sharp comedic actor right from the start. The impression she creates that the audience completely supports whatever her character tells us only increases the humour of the disparity between her version of events and what we see as the truth. Gemma James-Smith is quite amazing as the parrot. Not only is she skilled at making startlingly realistic bird calls and coughs, but she is adept at keeping the various human voices the parrot imitates completely distinct. Both Driscoll and James-Smith have superb comic timing and director Kate Lynch has given the piece a snappy pacing that seems completely impromptu.

There is not as much of Treasure Island in the play as Stevenson fans might like, but playgoers should note the “My” that Woolridge has added to the title. She makes us realize that Our Girl could have appropriated any novel for her purposes, found what she wanted to in it and made it her guide to life. In this way the satire expands beyond a single character and her generation but to self-empowerment movements in general. Woolridge was right when she thought Sara Levine’s book would be perfect for the stage. Her adaptation and Driscoll and James-Smith’s performances are the delightful proof.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Gemma James-Smith and Caitlin Driscoll. ©2014 Johnson Girls.

For tickets, visit www.johnsongirls.ca.

Alcina

Sun, 26 Oct 2014 02:33:25 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by George Frideric Handel, directed by Marshall Pynkoski
Opera Atelier, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
October 23-November 1, 2014

Alcina: “Vi cerco, e vi ascondete? / vi comando, e tacete?”

With Alcina, Opera Atelier, Canada’s baroque opera company, finally produced its first full-length opera by Handel. Because Opera Atelier has primarily focused on operas of the French baroque where dance is such an integral part, Alcina was a logical choice since it is one of Handel’s few operas with extensive ballet music. With Alcina director Marshall Pynkoski took the company a few steps away from its mandate of staging historically informed productions. Musically the performances were on a very high level. Visually, the results were mixed.

The story of Alcina (1735) is based on an episode from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso (1532), which also provided the plots for other operas by Handel and his contemporaries. In this fantasy about Charlemagne’s wars against Islam, the knight Ruggiero has landed on a magic island ruled by the sorceress Alcina and her sister Morgana. Alcina uses her magic to force Ruggiero to believe he loves her. Meanwhile, Ruggiero’s fiancée Bradamante, disguised as her brother Ricciardo, has landed on the island with Ruggiero’s tutor Melisso, who has come armed with a magic ring that allows the wearer to see through illusion. As we discover from Alcina’s general Oronte, who is hopelessly in love with Morgana, Alcina’s island is entirely an illusion built from the souls of her former lovers. While Melisso and Bradamante try to win Ruggiero away from Alcina in the main plot, in the comic subplot Morgana falls in love with Bradamante, not realizing that “Ricciardo” is a woman.

Pynkoski’s central preoccupation in Alcina is twofold: first, the notion that Alcina’s magic island is an illusion, and second, that the illusion is composed of the souls of rejected lovers. To emphasize the first notion, Pynkoski, like many directors before him, most notably the great Herbert Wernicke in 1996, has decided to identify Alcina’s island with the world of the theatre itself. Therefore, during the overture the painted front drop rises, to reveal a stage bare to the very back wall with dancers stretching and stage managers conferring while only one dancer, choreographer Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg dances. Soon Alcina (Meghan Lindsay) enters in character and gestures at the empty space, whereupon a painted backdrop and legs descend creating the familiar stage décor for an 18th-century opera. By the end when Alcina loses her power and the island disappears, the backdrop and legs again expose the bare stage.

Pynkoski has never before used such an overt metatheatrical gesture or one so familiar from the late 20th rather than the 18th. More controversial, however, was his use for the first time of digital film. At its best film projections were used to show the power Melisso’s ring gives Ruggiero to see through illusion. Projections gradually revealed naked male bodies struggling against their confines in temple pillars, a waterfall and even in the moon. At its worst the projections became tiring as in the clouds that constantly scudded past over the backdrop, or in the imagery of plunging past stars into space that looked too much like an computer screensaver called Starfield. Dance conveyed the reawakening of the captive souls so well, the the following photoshopped film of hoards of male bodies shooting up into the sky seemed more ridiculous than marvellous.

Other ill-conceived images of film director Ben Shirinian included the gradual appearance and disappearance of Alcina’s eyes, then mouth, then face, which looked all too much as if modelled on makeup advertising. His idea for the ending was puzzling. In the story, Ruggiero and company board Melisso’s waiting boat and sail away from the island. Shirinian, however, shows us a odd white blob on the horizon that, approaching, looks like it might be the three top sails of a ship, although missing any ship below them. If the image is meant to be a ship, it ought to be sailing away from the island rather than towards it.

In general, Pynkoski seemed to be trying far too hard to overcome the perception of some that an opera seria like Alcina is too static. The complex plot alone should be a sign that the difficulty is not stasis but too many twists and turns. Nevertheless, in overcompensating for this perceived stasis, Pynkoski plays up physical action in the first half of the opera to the point of slapstick. There are only so many times that actors striking, pushing or pulling each other or falling to the ground can be funny. Similarly, Pynkoski overused the image of singers rushing across the stage to hug the proscenium as a sign of emotion.

Pynkoski deals with Handel’s da capo arias in a peculiar fashion. In the first half of the opera, he has the singers come downstage centre to sing the da capo portion directly to the audience with ornamentation to show off the singer’s technique, which was, of course, the original point of such arias. This idea well suited the conscious artificiality of the stage-as-world metaphor that begins the production. Then, in the second half of the opera, the singers perform the da capo sections in character and wherever they happen to be on stage. It seems as if Pynkoski learned in the course of directing that the da capo sections can be used as more than showpieces but can also become useful moments when characters reflect on thoughts they have just expressed.

To place so much emphasis on the sheer number of Alcina’s previous lovers undercuts the important point that Ruggiero is the first person Alcina has truly loved. It is Alcina’s experience of this truth, rather than illusion, that causes her to lose her powers and call on the gods in vain “Vi cerco, e vi ascondete? / vi comando, e tacete?” (“I look for you and you flee? I command you and you are silent?”) (Act 2, Scene 13). This is long before Ruggiero and Milisso destroy her magic kingdom in Act III. Pynkoski’s emphasis makes it difficult for Meghan Lindsay to generate much sympathy for Alcina in the second half of the opera. Lindsay uses her hard, slightly chilly soprano to great effect in the first half to create an imperious, diabolically charming figure. Yet, when Alcina reacts to Ruggiero’s betrayal in “Ah! Mio cor! Schemito sei!” and in her subsequent laments, Lindsay can not win us over to Alcina’s side despite her exquisite singing and expressivity.

Allyson McHardy is superb in the trousers role of Ruggiero. In acting she convincingly adopts the walk and gestures of a male. In singing, her warm amber-coloured contralto only grows in power and richness until a fantastically vital, swaggering account of “Sta nell'ircana pietrosa tana” filled with thrilling runs seals her triumph in the role. It deservedly won the longest ovation of the evening.

Mireille Asselin is an absolute delight as Morgana, her bright, diamantine soprano ideal as the spritely foil to darkness, both vocal and psychological, of Lindsay’s Alcina. Of the soloists Asselin showed the greatest variety in ornamentation in the da capo sections of her arias, with the Queen of the Night-like staccato embellishments of “Tornami a vagheggiar” a particular highlight.

Wallis Giunta gives a vivid account of Bradamante, playing up the comedy of trying to thwart Morgana’s advances while capturing the ardour of the woman’s joy seeing Ruggierio finally released from Alcina’s enchantments. Giunta’s mezzo-soprano lies comfortably between the brightness of Asselin’s voice and the darkness of Lindsay’s. Unaccountably it acquires a matteness in the rapid runs of “Vorrei vendicarmi”, only to emerge in richness and beauty in a more lyrical aria like “All’alma fedel”.

To have tenor Krešimir Špicer, who has sung the title roles in La Clemenza di Tito and Der Freischütz for OA, sing the role Oronte was luxury casting. His voice with its splendid combination of heft and nimbleness was equally effective in bringing out the comedy of spurned love in “È un folle, è un vil affetto” as well the depth of requited love in “Un momento di contento.”

To bring the opera in under three hours, Pynkoski cut the subplot involving Oberto. Nevertheless, it was a pleasure to see Alcina with all of the ballet music Handel wrote for Marie Sallé. Lajeunnesse Zingg led the corps de ballet as Sallé would have done, creating graceful patterns of period-style footwork. For the entrapped soles of Alcina’s lovers, Lajeunnesse Zingg employed the more-floor-oriented style of modern dance.

Under David Fallis, the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra emphasized the wide range of dancelike rhythms that animate the entire score. Opera Atelier’s first foray into the use of film left one with the question of how theatre of the period would have produced the same effects. It’s more than ironic for an Opera Atelier production to pose such a question since until now OA has so imaginatively provided the answer.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photos: (from top) Corps de ballet with image of Meghan Lindsay as Alcina; Wallis Giunta and Allyson McHardy look at the moon; Allyson McHardy, Mireille Asselin and Wallis Giunta. ©2014 Bruce Zinger.

For tickets, visit www.operaatelier.com.

The Skriker

Fri, 24 Oct 2014 01:12:42 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Caryl Churchill, directed by Daniel Pagett
Red One Theatre Collective, The Storefront Theatre, Toronto
October 23-November 2, 2014

Skriker: “If she can’t guessing game and safety match my name then I’ll take
her no mistake no mister no missed her no mist no miss no me no”

Daniel Pagett certainly chose a tough play for his directorial debut. Caryl Churchill may be one of the great British playwrights of the last century, but The Skriker (1994) is a play even fans of Churchill find puzzling and some have called “impossible” to stage because of its unusual demands. Pagett has devised a way of staging the play that works well in it own way even if it leaves the central dynamics of the action unclear. The principal actors give such excellent performances that anyone with an interest in Churchill or in modern drama should see the show while they can.

The last time Toronto saw The Skriker was in a workshop production staged as part of World Stage in 1998. The play is so difficult that the group assigned to do it managed to stage only a selection of scenes. The rest were simply read from the script. That’s why the current production is so important. It is really the first complete staging of the play in Toronto.

In approaching The Skriker, the first difficulty is deciding what in the world the play is about. It mixes a hodgepodge of supernatural beings from English folk tales with the story of two teenaged sisters. One, Josie (Suzette McCanny), has been put in a mental asylum for having killed her 10-day-old baby. The other, Lily (Perrie Olthuis), is pregnant and expects to give birth soon. Once Josie has been discharged from the asylum, Lily offers to have her stay with her in London until she is ready to face the world again.

The world in this play, however, is extremely bizarre. It is not too different from the world in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the first of which was published three years after The Skriker. In both Churchill and Rowling, every fantastic or supernatural creature of myth or folktale actually does exist. In both ordinary humans cannot see these creatures even though the creatures may affect what people do. In Rowling only those humans with magical powers can see them. In Churchill only those who are mad can do so. As a result, Lily is aware of a world filled with terrifying beings of all sorts, while Josie, who is initially unaware of them, gradually has to learn to identify them beneath the disguises they we wear.

The play does not begin with Josie and Lilly, whose real-world problems and tensions we can understand. Instead, it begins in the Underworld with a long prologue spoken by the Skriker (Claire Armstrong) herself. Churchill’s notes identify the Skriker as “a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged”. This phrase is a key to understanding Churchill’s use of the supernatural. A “skriker” (literally “shrieker”) is specifically the Lancashire name for a spirit generally known as the Black Dog. It is this ghostly spirit that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). In Churchill’s play it represents the supernatural realm that used to dominate Europe before human beings and their machines took over. It is damaged both because of lack of man’s lack of respect for nature and lack of belief in the supernatural.

Central to the structure Churchill’s play, however, is that the Skriker is a shapeshifter. During the course of the action we meet a host of fantastic beings – a kelpie, a spriggan, a brownie and many others – who appear in the underworld, or we might say the otherworld scenes with the Skriker. Most important is that the nine other humanoid beings with whom Josie and Lilly interact are all different forms of the Skriker. Thus the play essentially has only three characters – Josie, Lily and the Skriker.

Pagett knows this as his cast list shows by marking down nine members of the cast both as whatever being or object they play and as “The Skriker”. The difficulty that Pagett faces like others before him is how to show that the Skriker is transforming herself into these other characters. Pagett’s approach is fascinating but ultimately does not solve the problem.

His concept is to give an already confusing text a metatheatrical twist by presenting the play as if it were an entertainment in the underworld for the creatures who inhabit it. Holly Lloyd has decorated the entire acting space and parts of the seating area of the The Storefront Theatre as a kind of fairyland made out of junk. Discarded items of all kinds have been artfully piled up and arranged to remind us of trees and banks of flowers while at the same time looking like the detritus they are. This is eminently suitable both for a fairy world that humans no longer believe in and for the habitat of nature where these beings once lived but that man has destroyed.

Audience members gathered in the theatre lobby are led in groups into the strange world by the Spriggan (Karen Knox). Across the back wall of the acting space are two red curtains as if salvaged from a theatre. The Skriker who has been asleep on the floor is eventually awakened by an assembly of the fantastic creatures to perform. Clad as she is by Kendra Terpenning in a bowler hat and black jacket, she looks less like a supernatural being than a decrepit master of ceremonies.

To reinforce the theatrical metaphor, Pagett could have had the Skriker present throughout to introduce each scene, but he doesn’t do this. Instead, he has us follow the two girls’ adventures unaided as they meet in turn each of the supernatural beings who each have taken on human form. We know they are supernatural because of distressed clothing and gothlike makeup they wear. Josie can see what they are because she is mad. Lily has to distrust what she sees.

The problem with this approach is that, without glancing at the programme (which will still confuse anyone who doesn’t already know the play) the audience will most likely think it is a series of separate creatures who are tempting or annoying the two girls rather than that all these false humans are really the Skriker. The impression Pagett’s approach gives is that not just the Skriker is seeking revenge upon her chosen targets but that the whole supernatural realm is against them. On the one hand, this approach makes the world the girls inhabit frightening and distorted since nothing is really what it seems. On the other hand, suggesting that the whole supernatural world is opposed to the girls obscures the already hard-to-discern narrative thread of one supernatural creature seeking revenge on two human beings. When this aspect is emphasized the action has greater tension since we can see more clearly how the Skriker uses ploy after ploy to attain her goal of stealing Lily’s firstborn baby. In fact, when seen from this point of view, it is likely that the Skriker may previously have taken Josie’s child.

Claire Armstrong gives a fantastic performance as the Skriker, both comic and malevolent all at once. Here is a sample of the punning Finnegan’s Wake-like language this creature speaks that may refer to having stolen Josie’s baby: “But one day I’m in the market with b and put it in the oven helping myself and she sees me and says how’s your wife waif and stray how’s the baby? And I say what eye do you seize me with? This eye high diddley, she says. So I point my finger a thing at her and strike her blind alley cat o’nine tails.” Armstrong speaks this complex language of the unconscious so beautifully that we feel we understand what she means even if we don’t understand word-for-word what she is saying.

Suzette McCanny gives a powerful performance as Josie. She plays Josie’s deep depression in such a way that it can be seen both as postpartum depression and as the madness of someone who experiences the otherworld all around us. In a terrific scene, Lily wishes that Josie were not mad, whereupon McCanny instantly switches into an excess of grief for her dead baby. The sight is so painful that Lily quickly wishes Josie mad again. From this we see through the precision of McCanny’s acting how madness actually provides Josie with comfort since she can locate her feelings of guilt on the “other” rather than in herself.

Perrie Olthuis is well cast as the innocent who tries to find her way in this weird world. While we are happy to have at least one “normal” character to follow through the action, we are constantly fearful that she will fall into one of the many traps the Skriker sets for her. In what is probably the most comic scene in the play, Lily meets an American woman (Sam Coyle) in a bar who drunkenly insists that Lily explain to her how a television works. The humour that Olthuis captures so well is that Lily, like any ordinary person, doesn’t really know how it works. Churchill’s point, of course, is that we live in a world where things might as well run by magic. In a parallel scene later on, Lily becomes attracted to a young man (Luke Marty), who seems normal enough until he asks Lily to explain what sleep is and how people go to sleep. Olthuis comically shows how difficult it is to describe such a common phenomenon, while Marty subtly shifts his character from appearing safe to dangerous.

There are many other standouts. Elise Beauman as the Little Girl who appeals to Lily for food and a home expertly walks the thin line between neediness and creepiness. John Fleming in a brief appearance as a Brownie, shows that he has mastered skriker-speak just as well as Armstrong. Andy Trithardt deserves praise for creating live the otherworldly score. And Jakob Ehman earns admiration for his energy and invention in playing The Passerby, a human character who silently dances throughout most of the play’s 90 minutes.

The play will always be unusual among Churchill’s works because, as an ecological parable, it uses such overly elaborate means to tell such a relatively straightforward story. Though Pagett’s notion of adding a theatrical metaphor only makes a difficult play more difficult, his ability to draw committed performances from the entire cast shows that The Skriker is not the “impossible” play that some critics make it out to be. Indeed, now that supernatural content has become so widespread in popular media, it may be that we are more prepared to accept and understand the play than were audiences in 1994. The Red One Theatre Collective deserves our thanks for daring to take on such a profound and complex play and to show how well it blooms on stage.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Tim Walker, Perrie Olthuis, Suzette McCanney and, Claire Armstrong; Claire Armstrong as The Skriker. ©2014 Zaiden.

For tickets, visit www.redonetheatre.com.

The Art of Building a Bunker

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:23:16 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by Adam Lazarus and Guillermo Verdecchia, directed by Guillermo Verdecchia
Factory Theatre and QuipTake, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
October 16-November 2, 2014

Cam: “Find out the meaning of this hectic life we call life”

The Art of Building a Bunker may have been a hit when it premiered at SummerWorks in 2013, but it’s an uncomfortable piece of work. The play is billed as “a viciously funny and tragic story”. If so, it’s a comedy that punishes you for laughing and a tragedy where you care nothing for the central figure. As a solo show it highlights writer/performer Adam Lazarus’s quirky talent, but it feels like an hour-long sketch that has been padded out to 90 minutes.

The premise is that Elvis Goldstein has been required to pass a course in “sensitivity training” or lose his job. What he did to merit this training is never stated. Neither do we know what the other members of the course may have done. The five others are the ever-questioning Peter and a sex-obsessed subcontinental male plus three stereotypes – a sexy Spanish woman, a racist South African man and a quiet Chinese woman. The name of this last is “Laura”, although Lazarus confuses Japanese with Chinese and has her call herself “Raura”. If you think this is funny, it is only the tip of the bad taste iceberg Lazarus and co-author Guillermo Verdecchia have set afloat.

The only genuinely comic character Lazarus plays is the sensitivity trainer, Cam, whose language is a mixture of New Age speak, political correctness, made-up words like “understandingness” and an overarching set of metaphors about the journey of the spirit that amount to a grandiose way of saying “paddle your own canoe”. He speaks down to his class as if they were kindergarten students and is insensitive enough to think he can appropriate First Nations imagery simply because he took a course in North American shamanism.

A key point that writer Lazarus and Verdecchia need to make clear right from the outset is that Elvis approaches the course with no intention of learning anything. As he sees it, his goal is to figure out how to outwit Cam into believing he is trying to change. Lazarus and Verdecchia, however, show Elvis complaining, floundering and failing in class and worrying about it so much that it rather obscures the point that he is determined that the course will have no influence on him.

Lazarus and Verdecchia take us through Cam’s various class assignments after which Elvis retreats to the bunker he is building in his basement signified by Camellia Koo’s set of interconnected plastic pipes. We don’t, in fact, realize this is the bunker of the title until Elvis’s very last speech. Cam’s final assignment is for the participants to address the class about what they have learned and how they intend to modify their behaviour in the future. Elvis’s agonizing over what to say is the most extended scene in the play, so painfully extended that we begin to wonder when it will ever end. Lazarus can be a very engaging performer, but even obvious ploys to provoke laughter like Elvis’s undressing to his underwear, playing the ukulele or rubbing himself with roast chicken lose their intended effect when they lead nowhere.

Finally, the big day arrives and Elvis delivers his speech. At first it seems that he has actually intended to comply with the course guidelines. But after he finishes his assigned speech, Elvis cannot prevent himself from taking it all back and revealing his true colours as a racist, bigot and sexist driven by an overwhelming paranoia that he has to save himself and his wife and child from the evil that pervades the world. Lazarus and Verdecchia have updated Elvis’s speech so that he now buys into the media-spread hysteria about Ebola and fears ISIS will take over the globe. But the speech so carelessly mingles world events with minor incidents on the TTC that it’s clear that Elvis needs professional psychiatric help much more than simple sensitivity training.

With this final speech, the strategy of Lazarus and Verdecchia is evident. They have had us side naturally with Elvis in his opposition to his patronizing, hyper-politically correct sensitivity trainer. This has helped us ignore the casual bigotry of Elvis’s everyday remarks. Compared to the subcontinental male, Elvis seems moderate since he is offended by the fellow’s gross sense of humour. Compared to the South African male, Elvis seems moderate since he is offended by the fellow’s overt racism.

Yet, until his final speech, Lazarus and Verdecchia give us no clear idea what Elvis really thinks or why he is building a bunker beneath his house. We learn that Elvis is Jewish and has married out of the faith causing some of his friends to accuse him of contributing to a second Holocaust. But is that the primary reason for his paranoia, one of many contributing factors or not relevant? We never find out.

The speech comes as a shock because in it extremism and looniness it isn’t remotely funny. If we had had any sympathy with Elvis, we lose it at the end. Dramatically, the speech is also a shock because we realize how the writers have manipulated us. To achieve this revelation of Elvis’s true nature they have had to deliberately hold back information about him for 85 minutes of the 90-minute show even though Elvis is the narrator of the action. This helps explain why there are so many time-wasting scenes in the centre of the play that lead nowhere. Even with this revelation, the writers give us no explanation why Elvis should react with extreme paranoia to the same news that everyone else is exposed to.

It’s frustrating to have followed a character for an entire show only to find we still don’t know him or why he has become the way he is. The result of the writers’ manipulation may leave us feeling surprised but also leaves us deceived and unsatisfied. You don’t need sensitivity training to know that’s not good.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Adam Lazarus, ©2014 Dahlia Katz; Adam Lazarus, ©2013 Hugh Probyn.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.

Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 00:37:01 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Sébastien Heins, directed by Karin Randoja
b current, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
October 16-25, 2014

“60 Minutes of Charisma”

I have a clear message for anyone who has not seen Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera – Drop everything and go see it now! You don’t have to like hip-hop. You don’t have to like opera. All you have to like is a young, multi-talented performer named Sébastien Heins, who radiates megawatts of charisma.

Brotherhood does use hip-hop but it also uses music from Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson. Heins fuses the music with theatre, mime and dance to such an extent that the show is above all physical theatre where the solo performer also happens to speak and sing. During the show’s hour-long running time, Heins plays 15 different characters, including men, women and children and certain characters at different ages. Heins’s ability at keeping all of them distinct, switching from one to the other with a simple turn or change of posture, is simply fantastic.

With only one chair as a prop, Heins makes his own sound effects and uses mime so precise we almost feel we can see the invisible objects he manipulates on stage. His performance is so physical that it is very difficult to say when mime ends and movement and dance begin. Heins’s body is in almost constant motion throughout the show and physically illustrates and magnifies whatever themes he covers. In one particularly virtuoso section, Heins wordlessly depicts the rise of his two main characters from poverty to street-performing to signing their first contracts, all the while portraying both his main characters and multiple passers-by.

Heins’s play tells the story of two brothers, twins born just two minutes apart, who rise from nothing to the heights of stardom as hip-hop performers only to fall out and be separated forever by tragedy. The brothers are Eliot and Julian, whose hip-hop aliases are CashMoney and MoneyPussy. The plot is the familiar tale of the corrupting power of fame and fortune which causes Eliot to want to pursue a solo career and forget the bonds of brotherhood. The separation happens but not as Eliot had hoped. This causes him to reflect on the past and allows Heins to portray how the twins’ parents met, had children and how their relationship decayed to the point that the two boys fled their home. In Heins’s physical portrayal of the twins, Julian is upright while Eliot is hunched over as if deformed by greed. As Eliot begins to reclaim his dignity and a sense of what is most important in life, Heins gradually straightens Eliot’s posture and bearing.

Besides the deft contrast between the twins as adults Heins also shows us how the twins interact as children and he creates several memorable characters such as Eliot’s sassy girlfriend Chrysanthemum or the angel of the twins’ mother who speaks with a soothing Jamaican accent.

Heins’s performance style is so engaging that the two panels of Anahita Debonehie’s set where Jonathan Inksetter’s projections are shown are hardly necessary, especially since projections are used only sporadically. The idea of having different local hip-hop artists perform as an opening act every night is also not a good idea since it creates a false impression of what the following show will be like. Not only does Brotherhood tell a complex story, but Heins’s use of hip-hop always has a satirical edge to it. After all, the first song is “Havin’ A Threesome With My Bro”.

In tone, Heins accomplishes something very difficult in that he is able to send up the clichés of his story while still portraying moments of pain or joy with authentic emotion. As a performer Heins could not have crafted a better showcase for his numerous talents. It’s no wonder when Heins performed the show at United Solo Theatre Festival in New York in 2012 he was given the award for Best Emerging Artist. Well, Heins has now emerged and his show runs only until October 25. Don’t miss it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Sébastien Heins; Sébastien Heins. ©2014 Dakota Arsenault.

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

Concord Floral

Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:26:50 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
written by Jordan Tannahill, directed by Erin Brubacher, Cara Spooner & Jordan Tannahill, Why Not Theatre presents Suburban Beast, The Theatre Centre, Toronto
October 16-26, 2014;
• National Arts Centre, Ottawa
March 29-April 9, 2016;
• Canadian Stage presents the Brubacher/Spooner/Tannahill Production, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
October 6-16, 2016

Greenhouse: “10% of people are cruel. 10% of people are merciful”

Of the three plays I’ve seen by Jordan Tannahill, Concord Floral is by far the most successful. Here he fully masters a style he has been pursuing that one might call surreal suburban gothic. The style and some of the themes of Concord Floral were evident in Post Eden (2010), but here he is in complete control of both. The effect is profoundly unsettling. The is written for and performed by teenagers and it is clear that Tannahill’s writing helps them express the amorphous sense of dread that has begun to characterize their generation.

The title of the play refers to a million-square-foot abandoned greenhouse located just above Highway 7 in Vaughan. The actual greenhouse it is based on was demolished in 2012. Over the years it had become a hangout for neighbourhood teens to have parties, take drugs or have secret assignations.

Tannahill’s story focusses on two girls, Rosa Mundi (Jessica Munk) and Nearly Wild (Erum Khan), who go to Concord Floral one night to smoke some pot. Neither has brought weed, papers or a lighter and in searching their pockets, Rosa drops her phone down one of the many treacherous holes in the floor. When Nearly uses the flashlight function of her phone to peer down the hole, the two are horrified to see the dead body of another teenaged girl. Afraid the police will wonder what the two were doing in Concord Floral, the girls resolved to tell no one about what they found.

Nevertheless, the story leaks out and soon all the students at high school know about it. Matters take a turn for the worse when Nearly begins receiving phone calls from the dead girl Bobbie (Jovana Miladinovic). Most students, including Rosa, assume Nearly is staging the phone calls to draw attention to herself and thus begin to shun her. Other teens, however, like Forever Irene (Melisa Sofi) and Just Joey (Liam Sullivan), who have their own secrets, notice that Nearly’s light is on at night and that she can’t sleep. For Irene’s brother John Cabot (Theo Gallaro), an amateur ornithologist, Nearly’s situation (and by extension, the situation of all the teens at school) is like that of a bobolink that once flew in the cafeteria window and kept bashing itself against the closed windows in a panic to get out.

Tannahill’s tale tips from the gothic into the surreal when we hear this story told by the Bobolink himself (Troy Sarju), who also mentions how worried he is about news that the greenhouse will be torn down since that has been the mating and nesting area for his kind for generations. Tannahill also lets us hear from a Fox (Eartha Masek-Kelly), who uses the greenhouse for refuge. Moving from the animate to the inanimate, Tannahill has an old Couch (Sahra Del) tell us the scenes of debauchery that have happened on her cushions. Indeed, the narrator of the story is the Greenhouse herself (Rashida Shaw), who introduces the scenes and places her existence as a building in a larger historical context.

Tannahill clearly uses surrealism not to pursue strangeness for its own sake, but to universalize the teens’ experiences. The animism inherent in talking animals and objects links up perfectly with apparent survival of Bobbie’s spirit.

As the 80 minutes progress the question changes from the specific torment that Nearly is suffering due to Bobbie’s phone calls and visits, to the general sense of dread that begins to infect Nearly’s entire class. As the mystery unfolds it turns out that the entire class was responsible in some way for the disappearance of their classmate the previous year.

Tannahill says in his “Playwright’s Note” that one inspiration for the play is The Decameron (1370) by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75). In it ten teenagers – seven women and three men, the same make-up as Tannahill’s cast – flee Florence where the plague is raging to seek shelter in a deserted villa. The Decameron consists of the 100 stories they tell while waiting for the plague to pass. In Concord Floral, Tannahill has his Grade 10 students studying Boccaccio’s masterpiece in class. The only real parallel between the two works is that the ten teens in Boccaccio and in Tannahill use a deserted building as a refuge. The significant difference is that the greenhouse now provides no refuge from the plague but rather becomes the source of the dread that plagues the teens.

A workshop production of Concord Floral made extensive use of video backgrounds. Thankfully, all of that has been scrapped. The story is made much eerier simply through Kimberly Purtell’s lighting to create squares of brightness in the midst of darkness and Christopher Willes’s highly effective score of real-world sounds. The stage action takes place entirely on a large square swath of artificial grass, inhabited by all except the actor playing Bobbie.

The three directors – Tannahill, visual artist Erin Brubacher and choreographer Cara Spooner – work together in such harmony, you would assume the production were the product of a single mind. It is absolutely right to cast teenagers to play teenagers, even though their skills as actors vary widely. Even though they are all miked, enunciation is no one’s forte. Too often words we would love to hear are spoken too rapidly or pass by in indecipherable mumbles. The four actors most successful at avoiding this flaw are Khan, Miladinovic, Munk and Sullivan.

As in Post Eden, Tannahill is fascinated by the negative effect that growing up in the rootlessness of suburbia has on is young inhabitants. In Concord Floral, he also shows that despite the supposed interconnectedness made possible by modern social media, growing up as a teenager is still characterized by loneliness and that teens do not hesitate to mock the loneliness of others that they feel inside themselves. This journey into cruelty as an expression of self-hatred is what makes Concord Floral so powerful. We would like to believe the assessment of the Greenhouse that “10% of people are cruel. 10% of people are merciful”, but Concord Floral shows us a group of young people who discover they can find no mercy for themselves.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive. For the productions in Ottawa and Toronto in 2016 some of the cast changed. Some like Theo Gallaro, Jovana Miladinovic, Jessica Munk, Melisa Sofi and Rashida Shaw were still in the cast and the creative team is the same, though Jordan Tannhill is no longer the co-director. At the Bluma Appel Theatre the staging had significantly changed.
Photos: The cast of Concord Floral; Jessica Munk and Erum Khan. ©2014 Erin Brubacher.

For tickets, visit www.theatrewhynot.org, http://nac-cna.ca/en/event/11730 and www.canadianstage.com.

Helen Lawrence

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 02:27:49 -0400

✭✭✩✩✩
by Chris Haddock, directed by Stan Douglas
Canadian Stage, Arts Club Theatre Company (Vancouver), The Banff Centre, Stan Douglas Inc. & The National Arts Centre (Ottawa), Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
October 16-November 2, 2014

“Noir Envy”

Vancouver must have some strange noir envy. There was no renowned crime writer of the time to immortalize it as a location as San Francisco had in Dashiell Hammett. And there was no film industry in the country to envision noir stories set in Vancouver as San Francisco had in The Maltese Falcon (1941) or The Lady from Shanghai (1947). How else do we explain this fascination with making Vancouver a noir setting after the fact as in Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr’s Tear the Curtain! seen here in 2012 or in Stan Douglas and Chris Haddock’s Helen Lawrence now playing at Canadian Stage?

Where Tear the Curtain! at least used its faux-noir set-up to pose the question of whether film or theatre was the superior genre, Helen Lawrence simply tells a noiresque tale simultaneously mingling theatre and film without bringing up the question of genre. The show’s goal is seemingly to be both at once. In reality, it winds up succeeding as neither.

The action takes place on a blue-screen enclosed stage. Live actors are filmed in black and white by video cameras while Stan Douglas’s digital designs fill in the scenery. The two are mixed and projected onto a scrim covering the entire stage opening. Douglas has lighting designer Robert Sondergaard shine a yellow light on the actors so that we see them through the scrim. The reason for doing this is obvious but also points out the central flaw in the entire enterprise. Without the yellow light allowing us to peer through the black and white film on the scrim we would not know that the “movie” was being created live behind the screen. We would thus have gone to the theatre to see a play and wound up seeing a movie.

Seeing what the live actors are doing and how they are being filmed is interesting, but the more one looks at that the less one looks at the big screen. Ultimately, viewing the live actors through the scrim is distracting. It’s like having to watch a “Making Of” documentary picture-in-picture while trying to watch the movie itself.

All this technical ingenuity might be exciting if the story told were at least interesting, but it is not. Chris Haddock may be known for writing television scripts but storytelling techniques are certainly deficient on stage. Haddock tells his story in such a roundabout way that it’s almost halfway through the show’s 90-minute running time before we know which of the many plots he sets in motion is the most important. If Helen Lawrence were a real film noir playing on television, an ordinary person would have switched it off after a half hour.

The main plot, in fact, is very simple. Helen Lawrence (Lisa Ryder) and her lover Percy Walker (Nicholas Lea) murdered Helen’s wealthy husband, but Percy left Helen to take the rap. She pled insanity and did time in a mental hospital. Now she has traced Percy north to Vancouver and wants revenge.

Percy is now running a bookmaking operation out of the old Vancouver Hotel. It is 1948 and the hotel is reserved for returning servicemen, but Helen so charms the hotel manager Harry Mitchell (Hrothgar Mathews) that he lets her stay there while setting his eager jill-of-all-trades Jo (Haley McGee) to learn all she can about the mysterious guest.

Haddock’s task is to prevent Helen, who is staying in an all-male hotel, and Percy, working in the same hotel, from meeting until the very end. To do this he basically pads out the story with three secondary plots that have little or nothing to do with the main plot. All have something to do with the once-infamous Hogan’s Alley, a den of vice in ‘40s Vancouver. The most substantial of these subplots involves the corrupt Police Chief James Muldoon (Ryan Hollyman), who in order to be re-elected wants to be seen to clean up Hogan’s Alley, even though he receives regular kickbacks from its businesses. The last major business to clear out belongs to Buddy Black (Allan Louis) whose speakeasy he wants Buddy to transfer to his brother Henry (Sterling Jarvis) to make it look as if Buddy has left the area.

Meanwhile, prostitute Rose George (Emily Piggford), has a fling with Muldoon’s equally corrupt Sergeant Leonard Perkins (Greg Ellwand) and manages to steal his officer’s badge. She, nevertheless, thinks that the right man in the person of a French-Canadian may have come along. At the same time, down-on-his-luck ex-serviceman Edward Banks (Adam Kenneth Wilson) keeps begging for money from the other characters, not knowing that his German wife Eva (Ava Markus) needs money for an abortion and has sought the cash from Mary Jackson (Crystal Balint), the woman Buddy is living with.

All these might be interesting if the show had been set up as a portrait of postwar Vancouver society, but it hasn’t. It’s been set up as a film noir but the several subplots keep us wondering what connection, if any, they have to the main plot since none of them move it forward. Helen Lawrence as a story is unsatisfying not just because it lacks any of the tension or suspense one associates with its chosen genre, but also because Haddock simply casts out the subplots when they have served his purpose of delaying the ending. One subplot ends with an accidental killing and Haddock simply does not provide the conclusions of the other two.

All this being said, the cast does a terrific job of acting and, as it happens, filming the show. Given the nature of Douglas’s concept the actors have to be judged on how they act for the camera since they do not act directly for the audience. The best performances for the camera come from Balint, Jarvis and Louis, who are the most adept at conveying emotion carried through in film. Close behind them are Markus, McGee and Piggford, with McGee at least given the chance to enliven the show with comedy. As the title figure, Ryder too often seems to be striking a pose rather than playing a real person, let alone one who had been interned in a mental institution.

One could say that the show was a triumph of style over substance. Indeed, scenery designer Kevin McAllister and costume designer Nancy Bryant have the 1940s look down perfectly. As film, however, four mobile video cameras and two stationary ones, can’t substitute for the myriad of angles and cuts that film allows. The resulting attempt at a ’40s film noir looks more like filmed live television in the 1950s than an actual film. The repeated use of reverse angle shots for conversations is pedestrian, views of body mics over actors’ ears looks cheesy and actors’ heads casting shadows on speaking actors’ faces is simply inept.

While it is good to experiment with the integration of film in theatre, Helen Lawrence is an example where the show succeeds neither as film nor as theatre. The show I’ve seen that most successfully integrated the two media is still La Belle et la bête (2011) by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon. If the idea of using film is to help in rapidly changing scenes, the solution for that was discovered more than 400 years ago. Elizabethan playwrights played on empty stages since they trusted their words and the audience’s imagination to set the scene. The creators of Helen Lawrence seem to trust neither.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Lisa Ryder and Hrothgar Mathews; Crystal Balint and Allan Louis. ©2014 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.

Marilyn – After

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 14:14:56 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Nonnie Griffin, directed by Peggy Mahon
Crazy Folk Productions and Fern Densem, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
October 10-19, 2014

Monroe: “I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was
talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or
anyone else”

If Marilyn Monroe were alive today she would be 88. If you want the experience of getting to know Monroe as an elderly woman, you need merely to see the show Marilyn – After, written by and starring Nonnie Griffin. To hear Monroe recount her horrific childhood and the degradation of playing the “Hollywood Game”, it’s amazing that Monroe survived as long as she did, let alone achieved such lasting fame. Griffin does not suggest that Monroe’s life is a feminist parable, but the view she gives presents the obverse side of Monroe’s status as a sex symbol. Treated as an object rather than a person, she was a woman victimized by men her entire life.

The premise of Griffin’s solo show is that Monroe’s wish has been granted to be reincarnated as an older woman. She made that wish because she never had the experience of being an older person and she always liked and admired older people throughout her life. Monroe has also asked to come back in to have the chance finally to tell her own version of her life story. She also has an even more important reason for wishing to return that she reveals at the very end of the show which I will not reveal except to say that it is touching and, from what we learn of Monroe, has the ring of truth.

Marilyn Monroe was born as Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, to Gladys Baker and Martin Mortenson, address unknown. Since Gladys was both poor and mentally unstable, Norma Jeane was placed with foster parents with whom she lived until she was seven. Griffin has Monroe recall the horrifying incident when a crazed Gladys turned up at Norma Jeane’s foster home and tried to kidnap her.

Norma Jeane was declared a ward of the state and Gladys’s best friend Grace, whom Norma Jeane calls her “Aunt Grace”, became her guardian. Grace loved movies and passed this love on to Norma Jeane. Unfortunately, when Grace married, she discovered that her new husband kept trying to sexually assault his foster daughter. To thwart her husband’s evil intentions, Grace had Norma Jeane sent to live in an orphanage, even though she was not an orphan. This led to her being sent to live in more than a dozen foster homes before she was finally taken in by her “Aunt” Ana.

Realizing that Norma Jeane felt insecure about having dropped out of high school and seeing that the girl had a true thirst for knowledge, Aunt Ana drew up a reading list of the world’s greatest books – including novels byTolstoy, Dostoevsky and Proust – that Norma Jeane continued to read throughout her life.

Griffin discusses Norma Jeane’s famous nude calendar, her name change and her determination to get into movies. The “Hollywood Game” Monroe refers to turns out to be even worse than the casting couch. Young women even hoping to be considered for a role in a movie were expected to provide sexual favours for higher-ups in the studios. Here Griffin has Monroe reveal one of the many paradoxes about this sex symbol – namely, that she never enjoyed sex and never had an orgasm. One might say that with her history of sexual abuse and with the prostitution required for a film career, her difficulties with sex and self-worth were completely understandable.

Griffin takes us through the peculiar bits parts Monroe landed, including one in a Marx Brothers movie, until her talent was finally noticed in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and All About Eve (1950). We learn of her success following Niagara (1953) through The Seven Year Itch (1955) during which Monroe attained fame but also became typecast as a dumb blonde.

Griffin seamlessly integrates Monroe’s childhood and her stardom under the single theme of a woman seeking respect – first as a person, second as an actress. To achieve this second goal Monroe enrolled in the famous Actors Studio under Lee and Paula Strasberg. She finally gained acclaim for her acting in Bus Stop (1956) and was encouraged to form her own production company to ensure she would have serious roles to play in subsequent films. The first of these was The Prince and The Showgirl (1957), in which she played opposite Laurence Olivier. Since Monroe loved Shakespeare, one of her many surprising plans was to produce a series of films of based on Shakespeare’s plays.

Throughout the show Griffin shows that no matter how Monroe tries to prove that she has a brain as well as a body, men who in her time still held all the keys to power are too blinded by her beauty to understand her. This group of men includes her four husbands and eventually John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. In moving from the circle of power in Hollywood to the circles of power in Washington, D.C., Monroe and her search for respect finally puts her mortal danger. The President and the Attorney General may have thought they could use and discard her, but they came to realize when she threatened to call a press conference that she would not keep quiet about the brothers’ series of immoral activities which could jeopardize JFK’s re-election.

In relating the events of Monroe’s death, Griffin closely follows the most recent investigation of the evidence laid out in The Murder of Marilyn Monroe: Case Closed (2014) by Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin. Here there is no question of Monroe committing suicide as was reported at the time. Rather, Griffin has Monroe tell us that Robert Kennedy wanted the little red book in which Monroe kept notes on the activities of JFK and RFK. When she refused to give it to him, she was murdered in a way to make it look like a drug overdose, even though the pathologist at the time found no evidence of the drug being ingested. In the context of Griffin’s play, Monroe’s death thus becomes the ultimate example of Monroe’s abuse at the hands of men.

In playing Monroe, Griffin has adopted Monroe’s signature manner of delivery and gestures so that you soon succumb to the uncanny feeling that if Monroe had reached 88 this is exactly how she would be. She has the breathy voice and Monroe’s odd habit (explained in the play) of over-enunciating her words. Every time Griffin would have Monroe humorously punctuate a story by raising her shoulders and coyly glancing over one of them, I felt a chill of recognition. Griffin also enlivens Monroe’s narration by imitating the voices – more than 25 in all – of people Monroe speaks with. Given Griffin’s vocal versatility it’s too bad someone thought it necessary for her to use a mic in such a small space as Buddies’ 100-seat cabaret.

This is a play not just for Monroe fans but for anyone who wants to know exactly how poorly women were treated in the 1940s though ‘60s. It’s a period that has grown popular now but the ethos of inherent male superiority and its attendant objectification of women is not one for which we should feel any nostalgia. Griffin’s play leaves you with even greater respect for Monroe’s struggles and her gifts.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Nonnie Griffin as Marilyn Monroe. ©2014 Yuri Dojc.

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

Madama Butterfly

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 03:17:31 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Giacomo Puccini, directed by Brian Macdonald
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
October 19-31, 2014

Pinkerton: “Sono in questo paese elastici del par, case e contratti”

The Canadian Opera Company is currently presenting the fourth remount of its beloved production of Madama Butterfly directed by Brian Macdonald and designed by Susan Benson. First staged in 1990, it is a production that never fails to impress. Characterized by simplicity and restraint, it deemphasizes the exoticism inherent in the setting to evoke the timelessness of tragedy. Lead by Patricia Racette in her COC debut, the cast on opening night, with one exception, is superb.

Macdonald and Benson’s concept for the design derives from the discussion between Goro and Pinkerton at the start of the action about the nature of Japanese houses: “Vanno e vengono a prova / a norma che vi giova / nello stesso locale / alternar nuovi aspetti ai consueti” (“They can be moved around however you like so that you can alternate the room design whenever you need a change of scenery”).* Rather than have Goro merely show Pinkerton Cio-Cio San’s house, Macdonald has servants construct it of separate elements before our eyes. In this subtle way, Macdonald both suggests the impermanence that Pinkerton derides and also underlines the theatricality of the opera with Goro functioning as a kind of stage manager. The discussion of the impermanence of Japanese houses leads Pinkerton to expand it callously to all things Japanese including (marriage) contracts: “Sono in questo paese elastici del par, case e contratti” (“In this country both houses and contracts are elastic”).

Benson avoids the riot of clashing colours that would have characterized Japanese dress of the Meiji period of early 20th century and instead employs a sober palette of greys tinged with the same orange colour that will appear in the sunset created by lighting designer Michael Whitfield. While the outlines of the costumes are undeniably Japanese, the muted palette links the Japanese characters to the landscape depicted in a hazy grey backdrop behind the set. Not only does the colour scheme for the Japanese characters prepare us for the sombre mood of tragedy, but it makes the blacks and whites of Pinkerton and Sharpless stand out to underscore how out of place their characters are in this foreign land. Butterfly’s white wedding kimono, symbolic both of her marriage to a foreigner and her adoption of a foreign religion, similarly sets her apart from all her neighbours.

Just as the colour scheme is characterized by restraint, so is Macdonald’s direction. The Japanese characters move in small steps and make slow, formalized gestures. Such restraint only heightens any break from the pattern as when the Bonze (Robert Gleadow) strides in to chastise Butterfly, when Suzuki beats Goro or when Butterfly rushes in with her son.

Patricia Racette delivers the most nuanced performance of Butterfly this reviewer has ever seen. Her Butterfly displays notable growth in painful experience from Act 1 when she is only fifteen to Act 2 when she is eighteen – youthful idealism having given way to doubt, vivacity having given way to care. Racette has an unusual voice, clear but rather cool. She has a vibrato that frequently threatens to go out of control though it never does. In fact, Racette uses this vocal trait to characterize Butterfly with the natural tension of her vocal production mirroring the conflict within Butterfly between emotion and constraint. Racette’s account of “Un bel dì” epitomizes Butterfly’s internal struggle to retrieve her former idealism despite her newfound doubt, an interpretation that only increases the aria’s shattering effect.

Unlike most stagings of the opera, Macdonald does not have Butterfly leave the stage during the “Humming Chorus” and subsequent orchestral interlude while she waits for Pinkerton to arrive. Rather he has her stand with her son Trouble and Suzuki downstage centre during her night vigil. As Whitfield’s exquisite lighting vividly depicts sunset, moonrise and a chill sunrise, Racette’s face clearly registers the train of Butterfly’s thoughts from hope to despair to fear.

Elizabeth DeShong, with her sonorous, authoritative voice, is a much more forceful Suzuki than usual, visibly repressing her growing anger at her mistress’s situation until she finally lashes out at Goro. Goro himself, well sung by Korean-American tenor Julius Ahn, clad in kimono jacket, hakama trousers and a bowler hat, played up his role as go-between, not just between men and women, but East and West. American Dwayne Croft uses his expressive baritone to create a deeply sympathetic portrait of Sharpless, whose sorrow at Pinkerton’s betrayal of Butterfly visibly weighs down his spirit.

Given the sensitive, committed performances of the rest of the cast, Italian tenor Stefano Secco’s Pinkerton is a disappointment. Secco seems to have unlimited lung power to propel his heroic Italianate voice over the orchestra, but he makes no effort to colour it in response to the text or even to vary his dynamics any more than between forte and fortissimo. His face remains impassive no matter what he sings and his acting is confined to a small set of generic arm gestures. Needless to say, Secco was unable to make “Addio, fiorito asil”, Pinkerton’s aria of regret, sound even remotely sincere.

German conductor Patrick Lange positioned the score midway between Wagner and Debussy so that one perceived both the architecture of Puccini’s music as well as its lush detail. After five stagings, this production by Macdonald and Benson, so beautifully lit by Whitfield, has only grown in stature to become one of the most insightful, as well as the most successful productions the COC has ever commissioned.

The cast of the opening night discussed above sings again October 15, 18, 21, 24 and 30. A second cast take over principal roles on October 11, 19, 22, 26, 28 and 31. In this cast American soprano Kelly Kaduce sings Butterfly, Italian tenor Andrea Carè is Pinkerton and Canadian baritone Gregory Dahl is Sharpless. Consult the COC website for any variations at www.coc.ca/PerformancesAndTickets/1415Season/MadamaButterfly.aspx.

©Christopher Hoile

*Translations by Harry N. Dunstan (2010).

Note: A version of this review will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photos: (from top) In front row, Elizabeth DeShong, Patricia Ractette and Stefano Secco; Patricia Racette as Madama Butterfly. ©2014 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 02:28:56 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Christopher Sergel, directed by Allen MacInnis
Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
October 9-November 2, 2014

Atticus: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view”

Young People’s Theatre has taken a bold step in presenting its production of To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 1960 may be one of the most frequently taught novels in American high schools and it may have been made into a multi-award-winning film in 1962, yet the book has always stirred up controversy. It has been a permanent fixture on the American Library Association’s list of banned and challenged books in US libraries. In the period 1990-99 it was number 41 on its list. One might think that over time people would become more accepting of an acknowledged American classic, but in the period 2000-2009, Mockingbird actually moved up to number 21.

The depiction of racism, the use of racial epithets, the discussion of rape, a girl who chooses to dress in boy’s clothes – those are all among the reasons why the book has been challenged. Those are also reasons why it’s a book young people need to read. Christopher Sergel’s 1987 stage adaptation makes it a story that a group can experience and discuss together. Normally, Sergel’s adaptation runs about two hours. The YPT version directed by Allen MacInnis runs only 90 minutes. To reduce the running time, MacInnis has cut out secondary characters like two of the Finch family’s neighbours, Miss Maudie and Miss Stephanie, Tom Robinson’s wife and the Court Clerk. Most importantly, he has cut the character of Jean Louise Finch, the older version of Atticus’ daughter Scout Finch who narrated the story. This job is assigned to Scout Finch herself.

The result of this cutting means that the story loses one of its story-lines. The first story we encounter is how Scout, her older brother Jem and their friend Dill try to get the mysterious “Boo” Radley to come out of his house where, according to legend, his father has kept him chained up for 15 years. The second story is how the lawyer Atticus Finch takes on the case of black man Tom Robinson, who has been accused of rape by the lower class white girl Mayella Ewell, daughter of Bob Ewell, the town drunk. What’s lost is the overarching story of how these two incidents had an impact on Scout by preventing her from ever having such an innocent view of the world again. The mockingbird of the title is a symbol of innocence in the novel and its killing can refer both to what happens physically to Tom Robinson and what happens psychologically to Scout. Even though the young Scout narrates in the YPT production, the emphasis on a change of attitude is clearer in Jem and Dill than it is in Scout.

This shift of emphasis might be considered a flaw in a production geared to adults, but in a production directed at young people from ages 11 and up, it’s more important to emphasize the children’s ostracism of Boo and society’s ostracism of African-Americans and allow the confrontation with these story elements to occur within the audience rather than via an onstage narrator. Besides this, MacInnis’s abridgement condenses Sergels overlong exposition, gives the play greater focus on the issues at stake and tightens the ending.

Jeff Miller gives an understated Atticus Finch, who always keeps his emotions in check. Miller gives us the feeling that a life of seeing the worst elements of society has taken a toll on his character and that he would like to preserve his children’s innocence for as long as possible. Yet, he is nothing if not realistic and knows that innocence cannot last forever. His emphasis in the trial scene is completely on determining what most logically happened and in his summing up we almost feel he has too much faith in the power of reason to remove ingrained prejudice.

MacInnis directs Mark Crawford as the prosecuting attorney Mr. Gilmer in exactly the same way. Crawford, his character confined to a wheelchair, does nothing to play to the (unseen) jury’s emotions or to suggest that Gilmer himself is prejudiced. Crawford, who also plays Boo Radley, creates a great difference between the two characters by both voice and gesture.

With the younger Scout as narrator it’s not surprising that she should feel that everything changed during the summer of the trial without being to explain what that change actually was. Caroline Toal brings out all the enthusiasm and excitement of a girl imbued with an overwhelmingly positive view of the world. Yet, Toal also shows how the events of the trial begin to cloud that view. The clouds don’t stay for long but Toal gives the impression that Scout will only realize their impact later on.

In contrast Noah Spitzer as Jem and Tal Shulman as Dill register their outrage immediately at what they see as a miscarriage of justice. Perhaps because they are older they can better articulate the anger they feel. All three actors, all adults, are excellent at playing children without any clichéd behaviour. Spitzer conveys the two sides of Jem’s character – the one who takes his protective role as Scout’s big brother seriously, and the other that is still a little boy just as impressed with rumour as she is. Shulman plays Dill as the kind of intelligent nerd who is a bit too anxious to prove he is just a regular kid like the others.

As the accused man Tom Robinson, Matthew G. Brown’s unpretentious dignity and plainspokenness ought to be enough to convince any reasonable person that he is absolutely telling the truth. The problem is that we are not dealing with reasonable people. Jessica Moss, as his accuser Mayella Ewell, presents a chaos of conflicting emotions held together only by fear of her father and fear of what society will say if she tells the truth. Hume Baugh as Mayella’s father Bob, is frightening in his fury and blatant prejudice.

Providing emotional and social support for Atticus are his housekeeper Calpunia and the sheriff Heck Tate. Lisa Berry shows that the mutual respect between Atticus and Calpurnia runs deep. Calpurnia may be paid as Atticus housekeeper, but she has become his children’s de facto mother and is comic only because she cares so much for them. W. Joseph Matheson plays Heck Tate as a man of few words, but Matheson makes those few words count for much showing sympathy for Atticus in taking on a defence he knows he will lose and in allowing accidents of fate to stand in for the lack of formal justice.

Dana Osborne’s set is a model of imaginative simplicity. Four pillars are topped with cut-out designs that suggest both trees and the wooden fretwork of 19th-century houses, both of which make up the environment where Scout grows up. Lesely Wilkinson’s lighting is essential in transforming Osborne’s set from indoor to outdoor locations and for creating the feeling of humid days and spooky nights.

Allen MacInnis’s direction presents the two incidents in Scout’s life with such clarity that that it positively invites discussion about how such injustice regarding Robinson and Boo comes to pass. MacInnis’s restraint in depicting Atticus’ emotions versus the wildness seen in the Ewells and in the lynch mob aptly expose the clash of two forces, reason and emotion, that lie at the heart of the action. It would be nice to think that Harper Lee’s story depicted a situation only of her own time. Yet, the YPT production has such an uncomfortable resonance with current events, that the play can serve as a springboard for discussions not just about the past but about our own time as well.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Jeff Miller and Caroline Toal; Matthew G. Brown, Mark Crawford and Jeff Miller. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.

Rebel Without a Cosmos

Thu, 9 Oct 2014 02:29:55 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Ashley Botting, Sarah Hillier, Etan Muskat, Allison Price, Connor Thompson, and Kevin Whalen, directed by Reid Janisse
The Second City, Toronto
October 2, 2014-January 31, 2015

“Sleep, Sex, Snack”

Second City’s new show Rebel Without a Cosmos will likely please those who are simply looking for an hour-and-a-half of easy live entertainment, but that’s not really what Second City is best known for. The troupe’s website claims that “Second City boldly journeys to hilarious new dimensions” in its fall show, but that is, more often than not, just what the new show fails to do. Instead, unlike Sixteen Candles, its hit show earlier this year, the writers of Rebel have fallen back on too many antique set-ups for sketch comedy as if they had exhausted their imagination in the previous show.

Some sketches arrive long after public focus in the topic has peaked, such as the skit about a young woman (Sarah Hiller) who has travelled to Venice to “find herself” because she has read a book modelled on Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (2006). The funniest thing about the skit is the parodic title of the book, Sleep, Sex, Snack. Another sketch is a satire of the Buck Rogers radio show, as if anybody in the audience had memories of radio shows, much less of Buck Rogers. To enliven the antiquated idea, the cast invites a volunteer on stage to be the omniscient robot for “Tuck” (Etan Muskat) and his female sidekick (Hiller). The fun is that the cast has to play along with whatever answers the robot gives about the dangers of the planet. That fun also seems like it would be more suited to the improv section of the evening rather than the scripted section.

One sketch about a middle-aged man (Kevin Whalen) talking to one of the “geniuses” (Muskat) in an Apple store would be funny if the humour didn’t appear aimed at a non-computer-literate crowd. The genius has to explain to the customer what “LOL” means and that an iPhone has more uses than as a phone. Then there is the sketch based on the ancient premise of a 13-year-old boy (Whalen) sent to talk to his priest (Muskat) about his bad habit of masturbation. The skit is very well acted even though we feel we’ve seen it all before. The writers try to give the premise a twist my making the priest a wannabe hip guy, but unfortunately nothing comes of it. Drunk-driving teens approaching a RIDE stop and sex via Skype also feel overly familiar.

The show does have several high points. The funniest skit of the evening is about Canadian content in porn, but it’s over in less than a minute. Of the long-form sketches the winner is clearly the one about a college guy (Whalen) taking his girlfriend (Hiller) to see his home tome of Owen Sound. There sitting on the steps of a downtown store is the same loser (Connor Thompson) who was there when the college guy was in high school. At first the “loser” seems to be an idiot savant since he amazingly has the driving routes memorized to anywhere in Canada. But, as the girl discovers, he is just as precise about telling people their routes in life. Not only does Thompson give a fantastic performance rattling off his long complex lines in a single breath, but the notion of his character is intriguing and the satire of what is a “loser” is more ambivalent.

A second, edgier long-form sketch involves a no-holds-barred argument between a husband (Thompson) and his wife (Ashley Botting) about when they each will finally sign the divorce papers sitting right there on the table. When both do sign, each to spite the other, they immediately regret it. Unsettling as it is, we come to realize that they both have become so inured to conflict they couldn’t be happy without it.

Several cast members have fine solo turns. Etan Muskat makes a sincere plea to his unseen beloved that their love can overcome their differences – until the list of their differences starts to become quite extensive. Ashley Botting sings what at first seems to be a folksy tribute to Canadian folksinging astronaut Chris Hadfield, until she gets to her innuendo-laden refrain, “Take me on a starry moustache ride”. In a similar vein, Allison Price sings what seems to be a lesbian love song to Botting about finally finding the right yoga partner, though her characters is blissfully unaware that the subject of yoga is capable of more double entendres than a downward-facing dog.

Some sketches misfire, like the one about a children’s entertainer (Thompson) having to make up a song for a Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa. Some are just so-so. Yet, director Reid Janisse does try to link more sketches together than is usually the case. His cleverest idea is to frame the show with a critique of individuals who nowadays view themselves as the centre of the universe. At the top of the show, these people are all the varieties of rude people one encounters in everyday life. At the end these people are members of a therapy class of adults with behavioural problems who are trying to learn to be “normal”. Janisse’s frame perhaps too subtly poses the question of what difference there is, if any, between habitual rudeness and diagnosable behavioural dysfunction.

While the level of invention is below that of Sixteen Candles, the show is still enjoyable. One might say that this time Second City has become a victim of their own past history of setting the bar for comedic excellence so high.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Connor Thompson (face covered), Allison Price, Kevin Whalen, Ashley Botting, Etan Muskat; Connor Thompson and Sarah Hiller. ©2014 Racheal McCaig.

For tickets, visit www.secondcity.com/performances/toronto/nowplaying/.

Falstaff

Sun, 5 Oct 2014 18:58:46 -0400

✭✭✭✭✭
by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Robert Carsen
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
October 3-November 1, 2014

Tutti: “Tutto nel mondo é burla. L'uom é nato burlone”

The Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Falstaff is a delight from beginning to end. Famed Canadian baritone Gerard Finley, long resident in Britain, returns to the COC for the first time in 20 years to sing the title role in Verdi’s great opera. Not only that, but in a wonderful display of home-grown excellence, the entire cast is Canadian. And to top it all off, the production, directed by renowned Canadian director Robert Carsen, is both gorgeous and witty in its own right. This may be only the first opera of the season but it is definitely one not to miss.

Falstaff was Verdi’s final opera, first produced in 1893 when the composer was nearing his 80th birthday. His librettist Arigo Boito, a composer in his own right, based his libretto on Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, first performed sometime prior to 1597 along with parts of Shakespeare’s history plays Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I requested that she wished Shakespeare to write a play about “Falstaff in love” and Merry Wives was the result. In doing so Shakespeare transported a character who would have died sometime before 1415 and placed him Elizabeth’s own day.

Similarly, in the new COC production – a co-production with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Teatro alla Scala, Metropolitan Opera and Dutch National Opera – Robert Carsen and his design team have relocated the action from the first Elizabethan era to the beginning of the second, i.e. sometime during the 1950s. The transposition works very well and adds to the humour by emphasizing the ethics of a period where people a least paid lip service to maintaining strict moral codes.

Paul Steinberg’s set design changes Falstaff’s hangout, the Garter Inn, into a grand oak-panelled hotel. When the opera opens, Falstaff’s gluttony is made comically obvious by the presence of at least a dozen soiled room service tables littering his room where his cohorts, Bardolfo and Pistola, are hiding. Carsen and Steinberg relocate the second scene of Act 2 from a generic garden to the lavish hotel dining room where Mistress Quickly, Alice and Nanette Ford and Meg Page are having a ladies’ lunch stage right. While a team of extras keep the huge room realistically busy, Ford, Dr. Caius, Bardolfo and Pistola enter to have their own business lunch stage left. No reason is given in the opera why Ford prefers Dr. Caius to Fenton as a match for his daughter Nannetta, except that Caius is presumably rich and Fenton is not. To illustrate this, Carson has the brilliant idea of showing us the income disparity between the two by making Fenton a waiter in the dining room.

The set audiences will enjoy as much as the hotel dining room, is Alice Ford’s enormous 1950s-style kitchen, all in pastels, with a dinette set and accoutrements that are all period-perfect. It is, of course, unrealistic to have a kitchen as wide as the stage, but that is necessary for all the action that occurs there. This is because Carsen stages the most chaotic, mess-making search for Falstaff in Ford’s house that I have ever seen. Not only does Ford empty out all the dirty linen from the powder blue laundry hamper where Falstaff later hides, but the chorus of men Ford brings with him empty out the contents of the myriad cupboards of the kitchen onto the clothing. It’s a gleeful reversion of order into disorder.

The prime difficulty of using such massive, detailed sets is that it takes rather too much time to change them. On the whole it seemed that the annoyance of waiting for the set to be changed was immediately dissipated by the pleasure of seeing the new scene. This difficulty occurs only before intermission which comprises the four scenes of Verdi’s Acts 1 and 2. After intermission, the problem is avoided by a smooth transition from the “piazzale” near the Garter Inn, reconceived as a stable, to Windsor Great Park, where the meeting place of Herne’s Oak is reimagined as the oaken walls outside the hotel. Carsen does not do away with the iconic image of the Shakespeare’s play of Falstaff dressed as Herne the Hunter wearing a huge headdress of stag’s antlers. What he does change is to have costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel dress all the “fairies” who attack Falstaff, except Nannetta, also as Herne the Hunter. While one misses the fun of home-made fairy costumes that this scene can provide, Carsen is clearly thinking of what happens during this scene, where not only Falstaff is made a fool but so is Ford. Carsen thus makes the scene look forward to the concluding chorus of the opera: “Tutto nel mondo é burla. / L'uom é nato burlone” (“Everything in the world is a hoax. Man is born a fool”).

Inhabiting Steinberg’s beautiful sets and filling out Reiffenstuel’s delightfully evocative 1950s costumes is a remarkable all-Canadian cast. You may not think yourself especially patriotic but to see Canadians as the ten soloists standing across the stage, all of whom do excellent work, is a sight to make any Canadian proud of the artists this country has produced. One could hardly ask for a better group of singers than Gerald Finley as Falstaff, Colin Ainsworth as Bardolfo, Robert Gleadow as Pistola, Michael Colvin as Dr. Caius, Russell Braun as Ford, Lyne Fortin as Alice Ford, Lauren Segal as Meg Page, Frédéric Antoun as Fenton, Simone Osborne as Nannetta and Marie-Nicole Lemieux as Mistress Quickly.

Finley has a a beautiful baritone voice – warm, deep, rounded and full. His special virtue is the absolute clarity of his diction and his attention to nuance with every word. In Falstaff’s great Act 1 aria “L’Onore!”, Finley increases the comedy by repeating each “non” of Falstaff with exactly the same emphasis and tone. This attention to the text is also a sign of a great actor and Finley is marvellous as Falstaff. Trim and fit in real life, Finley treats the fat suit he wears and the prothetic double chin as extensions of Falstaff’s personality. Indeed, when Falstaff sings of his girth, “Quest'é il mio regno. Lo ingrandirï” (“This is my kingdom. I mean to increase it.”), Finley makes us fully believe in Falstaff’s vanity. His comic timing is wonderful, especially in Falstaff’s scene with Mistress Quickly and in the laundry hamper scene. We have to hope that singing with the COC will prove a positive enough experience that Finley will visit us more frequently.

Among the women, Lyne Fortin and Marie-Nicole Lemieux are especially good. Lemieux makes Quickly’s seduction of Falstaff in his gentlemen’s club absolutely hilarious, knowingly using the sexual allure of a middle-aged woman to draw Falstaff into the plot of Alice Ford and Meg Page against him. Lyne Fortin, renowned in Quebec but surprisingly making her COC debut, is in excellent form vocally and dramatically as the wily Alice Ford, ready to make fools of the two men in her life – her husband and Falstaff.

Of the men, Russell Braun is as dependable as always. He is especially funny in his disguise as Fontana, here depicted as a rich Texan, attempting to lure Falstaff into a trap, yet privately infuriated with his success. Both Colin Ainsworth and Frédéric Antoun have sung lead roles with Opera Atelier, so it is luxury casting to have them in secondary roles here. Antoun’s ardent, Italianate tenor is perfect for the lovesick Fenton, while Ainsworth’s high, pure tenor and nimble acting is well paired with Robert Gleadow’s agile bass as Falstaff’s two thieving cronies, Bardolfo and Pistola, who can’t keep their sticky fingers away from silver of any kind.

This is the most deeply satisfying production of Falstaff I have ever seen. Carsen makes the connection between Falstaff’s gluttony, vanity and his sexual desires perfectly clear. He sees Falstaff as exactly the comic personification of vice that Shakespeare does when he has Prince Hal address him as “Thou globe of sinful continents” in Henry IV, Part 2. At the same time Carsen knows that the story is headed toward the revelation that not just Falstaff is a fool, but so is Ford and, indeed, so is everyone – an insight that gives the farcical action its depth.

Johannes Debus conducts the COC Orchestra with great sensitivity and doesn’t miss any of Verdi’s musical humour or allusions to Elizabethan dance. Falstaff makes a great opening to the COC’s new season and introduces us to a co-production that we will be happy to see again – one hopes with another all-Canadian cast.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Colin Ainsworth, Robert Gleadow and Gerald Finley; Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Lyne Fortin, Lauren Segal and Simone Osborne. ©2014 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.

The Boy with Tape on His Face

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 15:32:07 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Sam Wills
David Mirvish and James Seabright, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
October 2-19, 2014

“Transformation through Imagination”

New Zealander Sam Wills does something to an audience of adults that few other performers can do – he makes them feel like kids again. He does so because he has not lost a childlike, and sometimes childish, view of the world and he has enough charisma to free his audience from the shackles of sensible behaviour to see that same world view. The Boy with Tape on His Face has won awards and played sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe since it first appeared at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival in 2007.

Wills signifies to everyone that this will be silent comedy by the piece of duct tape across his mouth. But that tape not only covers up verbal language but the most expressive part of the human face. Wills therefore has to use not just his eyes to communicate to the audience but his whole body. He enters onto a stage empty except for a few cardboard boxes, a couple of chairs, a couple of stools and a yellow pedal trash can. Slung across his oversized jacket on his slim frame is a cloth shoulder-bag that, as we come to see, holds a seemingly inexhaustible number of props. He is basically like a kid in an attic who has to make all his toys out of the junk he finds around him. Indeed, the entire show is a celebration of the power of transformation through imagination.

Wills deftly combines the skills of clown, mime, improvisation and paper-folding although his medium of choice is masking tape rather than paper. Who but Wills could look at masking tape as material for a flower or a propeller? His rapid series of skits tend to follow a similar pattern. They are often so long in set-up that we struggle to imagine what effect he is trying to create, but once complete, the reveal is quick and over almost too soon. More often than not the set-up leads to a reveal involving a song played over the sound system. When Wills is on his own, what seems to be a random collection of objects suddenly solidifies into a puppet who sings the words to the song with a mouth made from a pair of shoes, an envelope or a computer mouse. When Wills chooses volunteers from the audience (and, be warned, he chooses lots of volunteers!), they will find themselves having to act out or react to the words of the song in ways they did not expect.

In one of the funniest skits, Wills takes a male volunteer on stage and indicates that he should put on overalls, a reflector vest and a construction hat. Wills leaves the man on stage while the lights change to pink and the music changes to bump-and-grind. What does the man do, with the cue from the music and the situation from The Full Monty, but take it off – luckily only the items Wills gave him – but who knows what happens other nights? The key to the humour is first, how easily Wills can communicate what he wants without words; second, the reveal after the preparation; and third, how readily seemingly ordinary folk get into play-acting when given a role and set up on stage.

In another highpoint of the show and one of its longest routines, Wills selects three men to come up on stage and tries to teach each of them a sequence of movements in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion. Wills’ nonverbal instructions are so clear it is hilarious how difficult it is for the three to imitate what he shows them, primarily because the moves require a sense of rhythm and, at least on opening night, the three white men selected lived up to their stereotype. It turns out the three are meant to be the backup dancers for a Michael Jackson song with Wills using found materials to create Michael Jackson. Wills is as mischievous as he is inventive and he readily mocks how badly his volunteers do which only increases the laughter.

We accept this mockery of others because Wills mocks himself on numerous occasions. Twice he sets himself a challenge of performing some stunt, say solving a Rubik’s cube, with suspense music playing, only to resort to cheating to succeed and pretending as if we didn’t notice.

Wills’ level of inventiveness is so high, you can’t help but be enthralled, while his wit is so quick he improvises just the right response to whatever goes badly or especially well on stage. Adults often lament the loss of imagination and sense of play that children have. The great pleasure of Wills’ show is to discover that neither has been has actually been lost. They have just been slumbering until the right circumstance, like this show, comes along to reawaken them.

The Boy with Tape on His Face can be seen either alone or as a package with Julie Madly Deeply. For a full schedule see www.mirvish.com/enews/2014/Edinburgh/edinburgh.html.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Sam Wills. ©2010.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

Julie Madly Deeply

Fri, 3 Oct 2014 13:28:16 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Sarah-Louise Young, directed by Russell Lucas
David Mirvish and James Seabright, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
October 2-19, 2014

Maria: “Somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good”

Julie Madly Deeply is billed as “a love letter to Julie Andrews”, but it’s difficult from that description to know what kind of show it is. British actor Sarah-Louise Young, who has a voice very similar to Andrews, traverses the star’s greatest hits interspersed with facts and anecdotes about her life. But rather than being reverential and dull, Young’s show is incredibly funny. This is because Young knows there are peculiar aspects to being a Julie Andrews fan and her adulation is tempered with a comic self-awareness.

The show begins with Young’s indefatigable piano accompanist Michael Roulston playing a medley of Andrews’ hits from various eras. Following a grand fanfare, Young enters wearing an outfit reminiscent of Andrews as Maria Trapp and launches into her own medley of tunes. At this point we don’t know what to make of the show until Young stops in mid-song to tell us, “I’m not Julie Andrews”. The implication that we must be thinking she is some Andrews-obsessed nutter sets the tone of comedy immediately. To reinforce this Young tells us that when Andrews had to be absent from the Broadway production of Victor/Victoria for two weeks, Liza Minnelli was her understudy. This leads to an utterly hilarious imitation of Minnelli and an example of what an Andrews classic would sound like if Minnelli had her way with it.

It turns out that telling Andrews’ life story gives Young an excuse to indulge her other talent besides singing – namely a real gift for satiric voices and impersonation. We learn that Andrews was born Julia Elizabeth Wells in 1935 to a singer and an unknown father. Her mother later married a Canadian vaudevillian Ted Andrews and the pair put her on the stage with them when she was still a child. This gives Young occasion to impersonate a female vaudevillian commenting on the young Andrews as well as give a terrible impression of a Canadian accent (which she acknowledges as terrible) for Andrews’ step-father.

Though alcoholic and abusive, Andrews’ step-father was responsible for sending her to have voice lessons and encouraging her to go to America to be in her first Broadway show, The Boy Friend. Young gives a great impression of Andrews’ eccentric voice teacher Madame Lilian Stiles-Allen who is so impressed with Andrews’ fully formed larynx and four octave range that she tries to encourage Andrews to become an opera singer. And, indeed, Andrews would make her professional debut singing an aria from Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon.

Luckily for everyone, Andrews knew where her strengths lay and became a great success as Polly Browne in The Boy Friend in 1954. That role led to My Fair Lady in 1956 and that to the television musical Cinderella in 1958. This history leads Young not only to a series of songs from all three, but to impressions of the rasping smoker’s voice of Cy Feuer of The Boy Friend and a deliberately exaggerated Russian accent for Moss Hart, original director of My Fair Lady. It also leads to the first time I’ve ever heard anyone impersonate Audrey Hepburn, which Young nails completely, so we can hear Hepburn’s explanation of why she got the role of Eliza Doolittle for the film version.

Though Young would like to skip over Camelot (1960), because she doesn’t like it, her accompanist won’t let her and gets a chance to show off his pleasant voice by singing “How To Handle a Woman”. Young is only interested in Camelot because of Richard Burton and because it led Walt Disney to cast Andrews as Mary Poppins in 1964.

Young thus ends Act 1 on a cheery note and begins Act 2 on an even cheerier note with tales of Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965). There’s no fourth wall in this show, so Young has the lights go up and asks for audience members’ favourite moments from the film and favourite costumes for attending sing-along showings of the film.

After a quick tour through Andrews’ other film work – The Americanization of Emily (1964), Hawaii (1966), Torn Curtain (1966) and Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) – Young steels herself to recount Andrews’ transition from box office gold to box office poison starting with Star! (1968) and culminating in the film fans are most embarrassed about, S.O.B. (1981), in which Andrews bared her breasts, a fact that Young dwells on in lovingly comic detail. Victor/Victoria (1982) a least helps redeem her from that desolate period and confirm her status as a gay icon, Young says glancing meaningfully at her accompanist. This period allows Young to explore songs we don’t know well, like “Whistling Away the Dark” from Darling Lili and “Could I Leave You” from the Sondheim revue Putting It Together (1993), in which American premiere she starred.

Young also does not shy away from Andrews’ disastrous surgery on her vocal cords in 1997 which left them permanently damaged. Young comically re-enacts the surgery while singing “The Physician”, a 1933 Cole Porter song used in Star! Young, who frequently refers to seeing her idol at her 2010 concert at the O2 Arena in London, gives us a sample of what Andrews sounded like then singing “Edelweiss”.

Julie Madly Deeply is an unusual tribute show that celebrates the heights but does not ignore the lows of its subject. Both are imbued with Young’s delightfully improvisational humour. Much humour is also lurking in Michael Roulston as is evident in the rare moments when he gets to share the spotlight. In singing Andrews’ songs Young gets the singer’s impossibly prim upperclass pronunciation just right. Young is fully aware of the strange implications of being a fan of the embodiment of Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp, knowing how hard and unsuccessfully Andrews fought to avoid the typecasting those roles led to. But it is Young’s awareness of the comic ironies of life that that make this such a strong show and so much more than merely a tribute to a single star.

Julie Madly Deeply can be seen either alone or as a package with The Boy with Tape on His Face. For a full schedule see www.mirvish.com/enews/2014/Edinburgh/edinburgh.html.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Michael Roulston and Sarah-Louise Young. ©2013 Steve Ullathorne.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

Life, Death and The Blues

Thu, 2 Oct 2014 01:40:35 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Raoul Bhaneja, directed by Eda Holmes
Theatre Passe Muraille with Hope and Hell Theatre Co., Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
September 30-October 19, 2014

Brown: “Without roots you can’t have music”

Written by the fine actor Raoul Bhaneja and featuring the sultry, sassy Juno Award-winning singer Divine Brown, Life, Death and The Blues has the potential to be a hugely enjoyable show. Theatre Passe Muraille’s Artistic Director says on the TPM website that the show “argues for us to see The Blues as an international art form that belongs to all of us; an art form that we all need to keep alive”. If only that were true the show would be fine. Unfortunately, Bhaneja has made the two-hour show all about him and his perceived difficulties as a non-black man playing the blues.

Bhaneja, born in Manchester, England, to a Canadian diplomat of Indian heritage and an Irish mother, has loved the blues since childhood. Though primarily an actor, last seen at TPM in 2006 performing all of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a one-man show, he even has his own blues band, The Big Time, which forms the backup group to the show. All that time, however, he has apparently been tortured by the fear that he has somehow appropriated the music of another culture. Perhaps Bhaneja feels this way because grew up during the 1980s and ‘90s at the height of political correctness. But now, when the world has seen a famous black golfer, a famous Chinese basketball player and a famous white rapper, not to mention a black president, it’s exasperating to be dragged back two decades into arguments about what is or is not appropriate to a certain race after examples of individual excellence have shattered those stereotypes.

Bhaneja puts forward his argument in a particularly annoying way. He, playing himself, tells Divine Brown, playing herself, that he is a “natural-born blues man” to which she objects because Bhanjea-as-author has her claim that he doesn’t have the authentic black experience of a history of racial prejudice that led to the blues. Brown herself says that she is interested in pop music, not in reclaiming the blues. Bhaneja nevertheless sets her up as the mouthpiece for his own insecurities about performing the blues. The show consists primarily of his refutation of “her” position that it is background not feeling that determines who can play the blues. It’s bizarre that in a show about appropriation of voice, Bhaneja has no qualms about writing dialogue for a black speaker about what the black point of view is supposed to be.

During the course of the show, Bhaneja gives short bios of his idols and mentors. He starts and ends with Montreal hip-hop artist Paul Frappier known as Bad News Brown (1977-2011), a Haitian immigrant who rose stardom from busking in the subway playing his harmonica. This example follows on Bhaneja’s performance of “Bad Leroy Brown” and the notion that male blues singers adopt a stance of being “bad” to counter their otherwise low status in society.

Another hero is the German Alfred Lion (1908-97), who like Bhaneja fell in love with the blues from the moment he first heard it. Lion organized the first recording of American blues artists in Germany before they were recorded in the US. Eventually, Lion emigrated to the US where in 1939 he became the co-founder of The Blue Note, the blues record label from the 1940s to ‘60s. Bhaneja does not mention it, but Lion is great example of a German who did not agree with the view of the Nazi regime that blues and jazz were entartete Musik (“degenerate music”).

An idol close to Bhaneja’s heart is Paul Oscher (born 1950), a harmonica player who became the first white player ever chosen by Muddy Waters to be a member of his legendary Muddy Waters Blues Band. While it’s an interesting story, Bhaneja is overstating his case in trying to show that white people, or even “beige” people like himself, can be accepted as “natural born blues players”. Indeed, in a bit of self-promotion, Bhaneja tells the story about how he was himself chosen to join a blues band in Montreal when a blues busker asked him to join his band on stage.

Bhaneja’s final hero is James “Super Chikan” Johnson (born 1951) of Clarksdale, Mississippi, who makes blues instruments from recycled materials. Following a film clip of Johnson, Bhaneja proudly produces one of his instruments called a “bojo” and plays it during a number.

Since Bhaneja’s show is so much about him, he unconscionably leaves the wonderful Divine Brown mostly sitting on the sidelines through the first Act of the show. He may give her lines to speak but he the one doing most of the singing. The dialogue Bhaneja has written for them is like the artificial banter one hears from hosts at awards ceremonies.

Luckily, by Act 2 he manages to integrate her talent more fully into his story. Indeed, the two highlights of the show are both performances by her – one a Negro work chant, that clearly points to the origins of the blues, the second a fantastic gospel hymn sung in memory of Bad News Brown, whose murder has never been solved.

Bhaneja leaves Brown alone in the first of these numbers, but in the second, it is incredibly annoying that he feels he has to undercut the emotion of the hymn by commenting on how sexy he finds female gospel singers and how he’d like to feel them up. Can Bhaneja not stand letting someone else be in the spotlight? Is he too embarrassed by the music’s emotion that he has to make such inappropriate comments? If so, then perhaps that proves he is not a “natural born blues man” he thinks he is.

Bhaneja’s own performances, both vocal and on the harmonica, are excellent, but when compared to those of Divine Brown, he comes off as a very talented amateur. Every evening the show closes with a set from a celebrated blues artist. The night I attended it was Paul James, who has played with Bob Dylan and Bo Diddley. James is both white and a renowned blues musician, his mere presence making nonsense of all of Bhaneja’s agonizing over appropriation of voice. His performance, like Brown’s, had a spark in it lacking in Bhaneja’s, making one wonder whether Bhaneja’s hyper-self-consciousness inhibits him from giving his all as professional blues artists do.

Bhaneja’s own blues band, The Big Time – consisting of Jake Chisholm on guitar, Tom Bona on drums and Chris Banks on bass – is a tight, vibrant ensemble. Bonnie Beecher’s lighting helps fade into and out of Cameron Davis’s projections of archival footage that fill the whole back wall. If Bhaneja could only have framed the show as his love letter to the blues rather than as an exploration of his own uptightness, the show would have the sense of celebration its acquires only when Brown or the guest artist performs. The show has been gestating for 15 years. Sometimes after such long period, it’s best just to start afresh.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Chris Banks, Tom Bona, Raoul Bhaneja and Jake Chisholm; Alana Hibbert and Kevin Hanchard; Divine Brown. ©2014 Michael Cooper.

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

And Then There Were None

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 01:22:34 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Agatha Christie, directed by Ron Ulrich
Theatre Aquarius, Dofasco Centre, Hamilton
September 26-October 11, 2014

“Ten little Soldier Boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine”

Theatre Aquarius has opened its 2014/15 season with a stylish production of that favourite Agatha Christie mystery, And Then There Were None. Well-cast, well-designed and well-directed, the show is staged at such a high level it is like getting a bonus Shaw Festival-like show after all the plays there have opened. Indeed, the Shaw Festival did stage the play once back in 1993.

And Then There Were None is Christie’s 1943 adaptation of her 1939 novel originally titled Ten Little Niggers, after the British blackface minstrel song of the same name. Judged offensive, the first US edition in 1940 changed the title to the last line of the song, “And then there were none”. Later, one US revival changed the name to Ten Little Indians, a title many will still associate with the work, but since that title was also offensive, And Then There Were None finally in the 1980s won approval from the Christie estate as the official title of the novel and the play. The ten characters who are so important to the rhyme and to the imagery of the play became “soldier boys”.

The novel is not only Christie’s best-selling mystery but the best-selling mystery novel of all time. The principal reason for this is the novel’s extraordinarily ingenious plot that has since spawned innumerable imitators. It is, therefore, very satisfying to go back to the original which Christie adapted with full knowledge of how to make the book most effective on stage.

Many will already know the story either from the novel itself or from the famous 1945 film adaptation by René Clair. Eight guests have been invited to an isolated island off the Devon coast by a person identified as U.N. Owen. Two new servants have arrived the week before to take care of the house and serve the guests. Once the guests arrive, they learn that their host’s arrival will be delayed. After chatting amongst themselves it transpires that none of them, including the servants, have ever met a Mr. or Mrs. Owen, and none of the eight guests, all from very different backgrounds, have ever met each other. On the mantlepiece in the living room where all the action is set is a group of ten china figurines of soldiers along with a copy of the “Ten Little Soldier Boys” song, wherein, one by one, each of the soldiers dies in a different way.

Once all ten characters have gather in the living room, a recorded voice announces that they have all been summoned to the island to pay for their crimes since each one is guilty of murder. One by one the voice calls the names of the guests and announces details of the murder he or she is guilty of. Naturally, they are all taken aback, though some admit to the circumstances that mysterious U.N. Owen, i.e. Mr. Unknown, alludes to, while other do not. Before the accusations have completely sunk in, the first person dies, starting off a sequence of deaths that imitate the manner of the death of each of the soldier boys in the song. Not only that, but there is no telephone in the house and no boat on the island, so that the ten are trapped together with the unnerving fear that one of them must be the murderer.

This last fact is what makes this particular mystery so theatrical. Christie’s play underscores the piquant mixture of comedy and dread when the microcosm of society on stage is forced to interact despite having lost the sense of trust that makes society possible. Basic questions such as what one eats or when one sleeps become fraught with danger. Though the play is primarily an entertainment, it unavoidably provides a critique of the every-man-for-himself notions of how societies should operate.

In a stage mystery which, like a farce, is more concerned with plot than character, the actors’ main goal is to make an indelible first impression since they may be given little chance for character development. In this mystery especially, actors also have to suggest some trait that could mark them as a possible suspect. In order not to reveal too much about the story, I will discuss the characters in order of their appearance, not their disappearance.

When the curtain rises Michael Lamport as Thomas Rogers and Karen Wood as his wife Ethel are already on stage. The two servants are put out that Mr. and Mrs. Owen will not be arriving and Ethel, who is a cook, is unhappy that there are no other servants so that it seems she and her husband, a butler, will also have to do cleaning and other household chores. Wood shows us Ethel’s irritation shading into unreasonable anxiety from the start, while Lamport lets us know that Thomas is use to the role of calming her down even while he has his own hidden misgivings.

The third character to appear would normally be Fred Narracott, the man to delivers supplies to the island every day. Director Ron Ulrich has eliminated him, likely because he would be an eleventh character, not one of the invitees and has very little to say. The only disadvantage to cutting the part is to allow the suggestion to linger that someone other than the ten on the island is the murderer, but since that is hardly major point it’s just as well to have one less red herring.

The first two guests to arrive are Vera Claythorne played by Andrea Runge and Philip Lombard played by Cameron MacDuffee. MacDuffee, whose character responds to stress through humour, is excellent at presenting an attractive devil-may-care exterior while suggesting that that exterior may only be a façade. Runge makes Vera vivacious but so sincere that she does not project the same double nature as does MacDuffee.

All the remaining guests arrive in quick succession. Tim Funnell instantly makes us view his character Anthony Marston as a callow young man whose predilection for speeding is perfectly in line with his general self-centredness. Kyle Dadd’s performance is problematic. His character is first announced to be a South African millionaire but he soon is revealed to be a local police inspector, William Blore. Dadd’s over-emphatic acting and dodgy South African accent suit his character as the false colonial millionaire but he does little except switch to a dodgy British accent when his identity is discovered, while his acting style remains the same and contrasts with the general restraint of the rest of the cast.

The three most elderly characters enter next – Anthony Bekenn as General John McKenzie, Jo Skilton as the spinster Emily Brent and David Schurmann as Justice Lawrence Wargrave. All three arouse our suspicion but in different ways. Bekenn’s character seems preoccupied from the start. He soon shows that the General’s grief over his wife’s death has started to push him mentally over the edge so that he occasionally mistakes Vera as his wife. Christie doesn’t allow her characters much time to develop, but Bekenn manages to deepen his portrayal by bring poignancy to the General’s loneliness. Skilton’s Emily Brent is just the opposite. Knitting constantly and puritanically commenting on the loose ways of youth today, she seems like Miss Marple’s negative alter ego. Skilton uses Brent’s general uncooperativeness and judgmental nature to make us suspect that like Miss Marple there is more to this old lady that meets the eye. David Schurmann, eloquent as always, is an excellent choice for the Justice Wargrave and like a person who feels himself superior to others makes it perfectly logical that the Justice should organize the others to compare notes and that the others should accede to his authority.

The last to arrive is Dr. Edward Armstrong played by Jacob James. James makes the most of the paradoxical nature of his character – a nerve specialist who himself is plagued by nerves – something the doctor is aware of when he says of himself, “Physician, heal thyself”.

Patrick Clark has designed one of the most handsome sets to grace the stage at the Dofasco Centre. It is a spacious Art Deco room, with windows and French doors opening to a sea view at the back. The Art Deco Burgh Island Hotel in Devon was Christie’s inspiration for Mr. U.N. Owen’s house, and one wonders if it was also Clark’s inspiration for his gracious design. The text specifies that there should be a set of ten figurines of soldiers in the room. Clark has emphasized this further by adding an Art Deco-style print of a line-up of ten beefeaters placed over the fireplace. His period costumes admirably suit each character’s personality, and his array of gowns for Vera Claythorne is quite stunning.

Ron Ulrich has directed the action with an unerring sense of pace. The piece builds up slowly until the inevitable conclusion when there are only two people left alive, each assuming the other is out for murder. Ulrich has had the amusingly grim but helpful idea of projecting the verses of the song relevant to the recent demise of various characters on the curtain that descends between scenes.

Since 2008, Theatre Aquarius has opened its season with a play that falls within the mandate of the Shaw Festival. This is has been an excellent idea since people going to the Shaw can easily add a trip to Hamilton and thus add another Shaw Festival-like play to their theatre trip. 2002 was the last year the Shaw Festival staged a conventional mystery, a genre that was one of the Festival’s most popular offerings. Theatre Aquarius can thus, as here, fill in the gap that programming at the Shaw has left and, with the quality as high as it has been, these opening plays serve as an excellent introduction to what Theatre Aquarius can achieve.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Andrea Runge, Karen Wood, Kyle Dadd, Jacob James, Tim Funnell and Anthony Bekenn; Karen Wood and Michael Lamport; Jo Skilton, Cameron MacDuffee and Anthony Bekenn. ©2014 Daniel Banko.

For tickets, visit www.theatreaquarius.org.

Le Passé antérieur

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 14:14:04 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
by Michel Tremblay, directed by Diana Leblanc
Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
September 26-October 5, 2014

Alex: “C’est pas l’amour, c’est l’égoïsme”

Théâtre français de Toronto is currently giving Toronto its second professional production of Michel Tremblay’s Le Passé antérieur (2003). The first was in Linda Gaboriau’s English translation at the Tarragon Theatre in 2006 under the title Past Perfect. The direction by Leah Cherniak was such an impediment to enjoyment at the Tarragon, it’s good to see another production, especially one like this that is close to ideal. When the production itself is praiseworthy, the flaws it the work itself become all too clear. Tremblay may be one of Canada’s greatest playwrights but Le Passé antérieur is far from his greatest play.

The main character of Le Passé antérieur is Albertine, a character who features in several of Tremblay’s novels but is best known from his play Albertine en cinq temps (Albertine in five times) from 1984. In that play Tremblay has five actresses portray Albertine at ages 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70 who interact with each other and with her sister Madeleine. Le Passé antérieur is solely concerned with one evening in the life of Albertine at age 20. The point of this prequel is to fill us in on the missing decade in Albertine’s life, but it does not, in fact, tell us anything we could not have deduced from the earlier play.

The intermissionless 105-minute-long play is set in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Albertine has supposedly recovered from a nervous breakdown brought on when her boyfriend Alex dumped her for her younger sister Madeleine. In fact, she is still consumed with rage and passion and has dressed herself up in her sister’s new dress hoping to meet Alex when he comes by for Madeleine and hoping to win him back. In a series of four one-on-one confrontations, Albertine’s mother, her sister, her brother and finally Alex himself each tells Albertine that her ploy is futile, that she should face reality, that she should listen to others for a change and that her need for constant attention drives people away. To counter them, Albertine insists that no one understands her because her passion is so absolute.

“L’amour passion” is the phrase used to describe the all-consuming passionate love that drives the heroines of Racine’s tragedies like the title character of Phèdre (1677) or Hermione in Andromaque (1667). All four of Albertine’s interlocutors tell her she over-dramatizes situations and Tremblay makes it difficult, if not impossible, to view Albertine’s “love” for Alex as any sort of “l’amour passion”. Instead, we feel her four interlocutors are right when they say she is driven by extreme possessiveness and self-centredness. In fact, Alex says outright of her suffocating “love”: “C’est pas l’amour, c’est l’égoïsme”.

The first problem with the play is this that its central character is not merely unsympathetic but actively obnoxious and does not change in the course of the action. Indeed, Albertine’s primary stance is that she refuses to change. One might think when Alex himself says he does not and never did love her that Albertine might come to her senses, but, no, she insists that he is wrong. All that happens is that she becomes more entrenched in her self-delusion, claiming at the end that she has become a “diamant noir” and that her life is over – “tout est fini avant de commencer”. If Tremblay means Albertine’s statement to hold any profundity, he has already severely undercut it by writing about the next five decades of Albertine’s life.

The second problem is that the play is inherently repetitive. Since Albertine refuses to change, Tremblay essentially gives us the same conversation four times in a row. The reappearance of Albertine’s mother at the end makes it five. Le Passé antérieur has only about 20 minutes of new material to give us about Albertine that Tremblay has padded out to four times that length. Tremblay may be trying to emulate the style of classical French tragedy by staging the play in a series of duologues, but after the highly experimental nature of Albertine en cinq temps, the structure of Le Passé antérieur comes off as conventional and dull.

In the Tarragon production, Leah Cherniak only added a series of directorial misjudgements to the play’s inherent flaws. In the TfT production, in contrast, Diana Leblanc’s direction is so sensitive and nuanced that she very nearly succeeds in making a silk purse of a sow’s ear.

Her main advantage is an excellent cast. As Albertine, Geneviève Dufour gives the impression of a young woman with a brittle personality held together only by force of will. Dufour makes us feel that Albertine cannot compromise because any lessening of her strength of will would cause her to collapse. At the same time Dufour makes clear that Albertine is, indeed, an egotist as everyone claims, to such an extent that only her view of the world is the right one. There’s no way Dufour can make Albertine tragic, heroic or even sympathetic, but she does make us see that Albertine’s pose of tragedy is simply just a pose since, in the long run as En cinq temps shows, her present worldview will be replaced by at least five others.

Patricia Marceau is very sympathetic as Albertine’s mother Victoire. Indeed, we wonder how Victoire can keep her patience with such a perversely willful child. Mélanie Beauchamp is also sympathetic as Madeleine. Beauchamp makes Madeleine’s sincerity so obvious that we know she is telling the truth that she did not “steal” Alex away from Albertine. As with Marceau’s Victoire, Beauchamp’s Madeleine conveys a deep concern for Albertine, who they know is only heading for greater pain by trying to win back Alex.

In terms of the story, there is no particular reason why the play should include an encounter between Albertine and her brother Édouard except to contrast his supposedly “perverse” love with hethe rs. Unlike Victoire and Madeleine, Édouard has nothing to gain or lose through Albertine plot. Unnecessary though his scene is, Constant Bernard makes Édouard a memorable figure – a young gay man who has to make use of wit and humour to make up for his lack of physical attractiveness. Nico Racicot is well cast as Alex, who comes across as a serious, conventional young man who quite understandably has no time for Albertine’s dramatics or her demands for all-consuming passion.

Tremblay has built the idea of theatricality into the play’s structure by having Albertine serve as a narrator between dialogues. While the Tarragon production completely overplayed this aspect of the piece, Diana Leblanc underlines it much more subtly. Glen Charles Landry’s set is a high circular platform backed by semi-opaque curtains. When Albertine begins the play with her narration, Leblanc has the other four characters parade in front of the platform and take seats behind the curtain where Landry’s has them lit just enough so that they are always visible as they watch the action. Initially, Leblanc has Alex walk in front of the platform another two times to reinforce both Albertine’s obsession and her situation of trying to steel herself while she awaits his arrival. Melanie McNeill’s costumes admirably capture the period and, especially in the costumes for Madeleine and Victoire, the privations that people are suffering. Albertine’s stylish red costume with its fanciful attached capelet clearly sets her apart from the others, but links her with Édouard’s own fantasy outfit with fez.

Toronto is unlikely to see a better production of Le Passé antérieur in the near future. Since no one can disguise the thinness of the material or the play’s inherently static nature and repetitiveness, this play would definitely not make a good introduction for newcomers to Michel Tremblay. The play’s main function is to show us the Albertine à 20 vingt ans that Tremblay, wisely it now seems, omitted from his earlier vehicle for Albertine, so far superior in invention and insight. The present production is a fine display of the talents of all involved though all are in service of a work that will ultimately be of primary interest only to Tremblay completists.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Geneviève Dufour and Mélanie Beauchamp; Geneviève Dufour and Nico Racicot. ©2014 Marc Lemyre.

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

American Buffalo

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 16:29:57 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by David Mamet, directed by Luis Fernandes
Unit 102 Actors Company, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto
September 21-October 4, 2014

Donny: “There's business and there's friendship”

Unit 102 Theatre Company’s production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo features some of the finest acting in a Mamet play I’ve ever seen in Toronto. Mamet has been praised for his stylized aggressive dialogue, so-called “Mamet speak”, but Brandon Thomas and Dave Lafontaine as the main characters Teach and Don have completely imbued themselves in it so that it becomes so fully natural it seems the two are improvising. It’s an accomplishment that actors at larger theatre companies in Toronto have yet to master. For that reason and for the incisive direction of Luis Fernandes, this is a Mamet production that deserves a wider audience and a longer run than it will receive at the Unit 102 Theatre.

Mamet has publicly acknowledged his debt to Harold Pinter, even dedicating his Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) to the British playwright. American Buffalo (1975), Mamet’s breakthrough play, is itself closely related to Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960) in that both are three-man plays in which two characters have a pre-existing relationship, disturbed by the fact that one has invited a third to join them. In both one member of the pair tries to convince the other that the third is an intruder. The important difference is that in Pinter the third character Davies actually is trying to encroach on the lives of two brothers, while in Mamet the third character Bobby is not trying break up the friendship of Teach and Don. In both plays the emphasis is on character, not plot, and on the power games that characters play and the verbal methods they use to attack others and defend or advance their position in the narrow world of the play.

American Buffalo is set during one day in Don’s Resale Shop in Chicago. Despite the vague name, what Don runs is a junk shop and designer Adam Belanger has done a great job at making it look as realistically grungy as possible. When the play opens Don (David Lafontaine) has taken a former drug addict Bobby (Aldrin Bundoc) under his wing and is teaching him his philosophy of life. One of the founding principals is “There's business and there's friendship” and the two must be kept separate. The play will go on to demonstrate that none of the characters are able to live by this credo.

Don has had the misfortune of selling an American buffalo-head nickel to a customer for a price that he now realizes was too low. He feels humiliated by his lack of knowledge and to rectify the situation, he wants to steal the coin back. For this purpose he has had Bobby scouting out the building where the buyer lives and reporting when he is out.

When Teach (Brandon Thomas), Don’s colleague in poker and past petty crime, shows up, Teach is furious that Don plans to entrust the break-in at the buyer’s apartment to a kid like Bobby rather than to him. Mamet gives us ample opportunity to observe that Bobby’s brain has been fried since he can barely remember take-out orders that Don gives him or even things Don has just said. All three low-lifes have limited vocabularies, but Bobby’s is noticeably deficient. When asked to describe what someone is wearing, all he can come up with is “things”.

Thus a conflict develops between Teach and Don over Bobby. Don has an almost parental concern for the boy and his trying to give him a better start in the world. Teach views this as a distraction from their “business” and is keen to reinstate himself as Don’s business partner of choice. Even though neither Don nor Teach knows how to break into a building or deal with a safe, Teach is firmly against adding Fletch to the team, even though he has that knowledge. Teach gets his way as far as replacing Bobby and Don gets his way as far as including Fletch, but in Act 2 when Fletch never shows up, Teach takes out his frustration on Bobby to such an extent that Don rejects Teach.

The play is thus both a comedy and tragedy at once. The comedy lies primarily in Teach’s attempts to prove his expertise and insight when every effort he makes demonstrates just the opposite. As will become a typical theme for Mamet in his examination of the American male, Teach’s macho stance and know-it-all attitude presents a cover for loneliness. We see, but Teach does not, that his antagonism toward Bobby is not out of concern for “business” but for “friendship” since Don seems to be the only person that Teach can count as a friend. His desire to exclude Bobby and the never-seen Fletch is an attempt to strengthen the bond between him and Don. The tragedy is that his own actions lead to what may be his permanent exile from Don’s friendship.

Director Luis Fernandes’ keen insight into what lies beneath the characters’ comically inarticulate dialogue means that Mamet’s themes come to the fore in ways they never did in Soulpepper’s revival of the play in 2006. Fernandes is also an expert at pacing the action so that tension between Teach and Don and his protégé mounts until it finally explodes in Teach’s huge tantrum of rage and frustration in Act 2.

As stated in the introduction, the performances of Brandon Thomas and David Lafontaine are beyond praise. They state in the programme that they have always loved this play and that love shows in the nuance they bring to every line. Lafontaine shows us that Don sees the pathetic creature that lies under Teach’s swaggering exterior and has become an expert at how to placate his anger, feed his vanity and disguise his distrust. Thomas gives a tour de force performance as a man propelled through life by egotism tempered with paranoia. His swaggering around the shop is almost like a choreographed act meant to impress others with his personal daring and suavity. His complete meltdown in Act 2 is frightening in its ferocity. In contrast Lafontaine’s Don usually stands motionless, observing Teach’s performance, only ready to attack him when he goes too far in dissing others, especially Bobby. Yet, at the same time he lets us see that Don is all too aware of his own failings. The two actors work superbly together in portraying the funny/sad relationship between the two men where Don has seen through Teach, but Teach is too blind to recognize it.

Under Fernandes, Bundoc’s Bobby goes through the action as if in a kind of daze. This suits the effect of his former addiction and explains his seeming inability to pay attention or retain information. This also sets up Bobby as a completely neutral pawn in the power games between Teach and Don. Yet, it does make the play more interesting if Bobby is allowed a bit more personality to make us wonder, along with Teach, whether Bobby might actually be wily enough to double-cross Don. Bundoc plays Bobby well as a burnt-out kid whose inarticulateness disguises not just the animosity he feels for Teach but the total devotion he feels for Don. Bundoc has Bobby seemingly shut himself off when Teach attacks him as if trying to become invisible.

This is a powerful production. It’s the first I’ve seen that gets the fine line between comedy and tragedy just right. And it’s also the first to make Mamet’s universal themes effortlessly rise out of the superficially inane dialogue of the three verbally challenged characters. Lovers of Mamet, lovers of fine acting, lovers of both, here’s a show you must not miss.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Brandon Thomas as Teach and David Lafontaine as Don; Brandon Thomas as Teach, David Lafontaine as Don and Aldrin Bundoc as Bobby. ©2014 Lindsay Junkin.

For tickets, visit www.unit102theatre.com.

An Enemy of the People

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 14:35:57 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Florian Borchmayer, translated by Maria Milisavljevic, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
September 24-October 26, 2014;
October 7-November 1, 2015

Stockman: “All the sources of our moral life are poisoned and the whole fabric
of our civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood”

The Tarragon Theatre has opened its 2014/15 season with an exciting, highly imaginative production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Florian Borchmayer’s adaptation which has primarily streamlined the action and rephrased the dialogue in a contemporary idiom makes the play from 1882 seem so modern it could have been written yesterday. It’s too bad that director Richard Rose can take no credit for the production’s insights. He obviously admires German director Thomas Ostermeier’s 2012 production of Borchmayer’s adaptation for the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, so much that his production is not merely inspired by it but actually seeks to recreate it for a Toronto audience. In fact, if you are travelling to London, you can see Ostermeier’s original production, now on tour, which plays at the Barbican September 24-28.

The action is set in a small town in the middle of nowhere that has recently become popular as a spa town. It was the idea of Dr. Stockman (Joe Cobden) to create the baths by diverting water from a nearly river, but it was the decision of his elder brother Peter (Rick Roberts), over Stockman’s objections, to place the intake for the baths downstream from local factories, including that of Stockman’s father-in-law Morten Kiil (Richard McMillan). When some recent tourists who came to be healed left with various diseases, Stockman had the water tested by a scientist at the university who found that the water is indeed contaminated. Ibsen doesn’t specify what the contamination is but Borchmayer’s adaptation has merely to mention e. coli for us to see the relevance.

Stockman is naive enough to believe that the town will welcome his discovery so that it can fix the problem. He tells Hovstad (Matthew Edison) the editor of the local newspaper and Billing (Brandon McGibbon), his subeditor, who want to use the discovery to pull down the establishment that dominates the town council. Even the newspaper’s owner Aslaksen (Tom Barnett) is on Stockman’s side. All seems positive until Peter, a town councilman, points out that it will costs $60 million to relocate the intake and force the baths, the town’s main source of revenue, to shut down for two to three years, during which time the baths will have lost their reputation and its clients will have gravitated to other spas.

Peter’s argument persuades Stockman’s former supporters to turn against him. Peter finally gives his brother an ultimatum either to issue an apology for publishing “false” information or to conduct another study that finds the water is safe or else to lose his job as the chief medical offer of the baths of which Peter is the CEO. With a wife Katharina (Tamara Podemski), who is only a part-time teacher, and a baby son, what is Stockman to do?

Ibsen’s play has so many contemporary parallels it is uncanny. Environmental hazards, political coverups, censored scientific findings and corporate-sponsored science are all there in this ancestor of all whistleblower plays. Ibsen has remained a classical author because he goes beyond the specific issues of his play to examine the reasons why a society does not feel morally compromised when it chooses to live with lies rather than face truths. For wider parallels, one need only look at the debate over global warming. Or for a truth-teller reviled by those in power one need only look at the Edward Snowden affair.

In recreating Ostermeier’s production, Rose has given designer Michelle Tracey the unenviable task of reproducing Jan Pappelbaum’s original set design for the Schaubühne. Ostermeier deliberately countered the naturalism of Ibsen’s drama by placing it in a non-naturalistic setting. Pappelbaum’s set consists of a room with chalkboards for its walls, covered in drawings, some of details of the room, some of furniture, some just fantasy images like the shark from the poster for Jaws. The point of the set is to emphasize that Stockman and his friends live in a world of theory and ideas. Borchmayer adds the notion that Stockman and his wife have formed an indie band with Hovstad and Billing, to show how the four are linked by age and, initially, ideals. It’s no accident that the song they sing together is David Bowie’s “Changes” with its highly appropriate chorus “Time may change me, But I can’t trace time”.

It is fitting that the same set serves as the office for Hovstad and Billing, who dream of toppling the establishment. When it comes time for the Act 4 town hall meeting when Stockman is to explain himself, Ostermeier has Stockman’s opponents literally whitewash the walls of the set in, perhaps, an over-obvious physical metaphor for what these characters plan to do to Stockman’s report.

At least Rose has allowed Tracey freedom to design her own costumes for the Tarragon production to reflect North American styles and her own ideas for what is drawn on the walls. Yet, as in Ostermeier’s production, Rose has characters write the name of the location on the wall, a clear reference back to one of Brecht’s so-called alienation effects.

There are peculiarities to Ostermeier’s direction that Rose repeats. The play begins with an excerpt of Stockman’s speech on a scrim in front of the stage before the action begins. Later, we see this speech projected on a “television” drawn onto the wall, long before Stockman gives the speech. Is this meant to undermine the speech as unoriginal? Ostermeier also suggests through a long kiss between Hovstad and Katharina that an affair is or had been going on. Since nothing comes of this, it looks like a feeble attempt to make sure her character is undermined along with all the rest.

Ostermeier and Borchmeyer’s best idea is to have the audience represent the citizens in the town hall meeting that Stockman calls. Directors have done this before but this time Rose via Ostermeier actually encourages audience members to speak out in response to what characters say. This is both exciting and slightly dangerous since we can’t know how off-kilter the audience’s remarks will be. At least on opening night, Rick Roberts, who received the brunt of audience criticism as the most obvious “bad guy”, was superb in deflecting criticism just as his politician character would.

Also remarkable about this scene is how Ibsen allows Stockman to go off the deep end in his rant against society. In the original his speech becomes virulently anti-democratic and he even states that, “The majority never has right on its side”. He says that the (capitalist) economy does not cause problems but is the problem. It is an extremist speech that is meant to disturb people both on the right and the left. In the original Stockman is heckled as a “freethinker”. In this production he is heckled as a “leftist fascist”, which, paradoxical though the term may be, sums up what Stockman says. The image we get is of a good mind pushed over the edge and self-destructing in public. Stockman may think he has nothing left to lose, but the play’s finale shows that there is much more to lose than one can imagine when a person attacks the foundations of a society.

If none of the innovation of the production can be accorded to Richard Rose, he at least must be given credit for having drawn superior performances from his entire cast. Cobden has never taken on so complex a role and succeeds in it masterfully. He guides us through Stockman’s journey from a nerdy, naive scientist to a rabid social critic who suddenly must confront the abyss that opens when everyone, including his friends, abandon him. Rick Roberts is chilling as a brother who turns against his own brother when political survival and financial gain is at stake.

Matthew Edison and Brandon McGibbon reveal their characters as faux-idealists in different ways – Edison cunningly, McGibbon almost unconsciously – both qualmless about betraying a friend. Tom Barnett makes us doubt Aslaksen’s sincerity while Richard McMillan makes us fear Kiil’s power from the moment we first meet both of them. Except for the unconvincing fling forced on Katharina, Tamara Podemski wins our admiration as a woman who stands by her husband during his downfall even though it takes her with it. Borchmeyer, who skillfully combines Mrs. Stockman and the Stockman's’ daughter to create Katharina, makes her plight more difficult by giving her and Stockman an infant son instead of the two sons aged 13 and 10 in Ibsen’s original.

While the notion of the Stockmans being in a band with Hovstad and Billing may be unnecessary, it is surprising how little Borchmayer has to alter Ibsen’s original text to make the action play out as if meant for a world of cell phones, television, radio and computers. The current production demonstrates how thrilling a play by Ibsen can be when a director and cast are alive to all of its complexities. Even if Richard Rose has borrowed his directorial and design concepts from another production, we have to be amazed at how thoroughly this Canadian company has made that production their own.

☛ In the 2015 remount Laura Condlln played Dr. Stockman, David Fox played Morten Kiil, Kyle Mac played Hovstad and Lyon Smith played Billing. Tom Barnett, Tamara Podemski and Rick Roberts returned in their roles. The creative team remained the same.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Joe Cobden as Stockman and Rick Roberts as Peter; Joe Cobden as Stockman and Tamara Podemski as Katharina. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.

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

Aromas

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 21:09:13 -0400

✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Andrew Faiz
The Junes Company, Red Sandcastle Theatre, Toronto
September 18-October 4, 2014

Chanel: “The Kama Sutra is a collection of prayers delivered through the body”

Andrew Faiz’s new play Aromas provides an unusual glimpse into the world of executive level escorts, yet that is not its ultimate goal. Aromas is also about the meaning of sex, identity, fate and choice. If that seems rather much for an hour-long solo show to take on, it is and the play’s greater themes are more often repeated than developed. The show, however, provides an ideal role for Andy Fraser, whose brings out all the nuances of her enigmatic character.

The play begins with Chanel (Fraser) in her apartment taking requests for appointments from prospective clients. In between phone calls, Chanel tells us about her life and how she achieved the status she now enjoys. Her story is told in fragments as she gets dressed to suit each client and, just before she leaves for work, announces “Showtime” before a blackout. Putting together the pieces we receive in non-chronological order, we learn that before she became “Chanel”, she had been Katalin, a Canadian ice dancer touring the world for eight years in a production of Swan Lake where her principal role is that of Odile, the black swan.

When Katalin’s mother first took her to see Swan Lake, Katalin wanted to do nothing else but appear in that ballet. Appearing in it in a vulgar ice-dance version was the closest she could come to achieving that dream, much as it ran against the old-world cultural values of her mother. At the time she saw the ballet, her jaw had been wired shut after Angela, a girl at school, had punched her so hard it broke her jaw. An ironic twist of fate occurs when later Katalin is filmed dancing at a club in Dubai with her fellow ice-dancers and that clip appears in a documentary about nightlife in Dubai that Angela sees on television. Katalin finds out that seeing that clip forced Angela, now a single mother living in a basement apartment in her mother’s house, to reflect on how far her life and Katalin’s had diverged since high school.

Aromas has no plot. It is also unclear whether Chanel is addressing us the audience or some unseen, unspeaking person in her apartment. The latter seems more likely since she interrupts her speeches to answer her phone. But then Faiz abandons the phone calls leading to the costume change and “Showtime” halfway through the play and about five times beyond when the gimmick has lost interest. Since Faiz makes Swan Lake so important, one might think he would use the built-in Odette/Odile, white swan/black swan metaphor it provides, but he seems unwilling to apply it since he doesn’t want to type either side of Katalin/Chanel as “good” or “evil”.

What keeps us watching is mainly to find out how Katalin the ice-dancer became Chanel the top-of-the-line escort. The problem is that we don’t really find out the answer. After generally celebrating her life as an ice-dancer and the family of artists she joined, Faiz has Katalin mention too briefly that the routine of performing the same show and living in anonymous hotel rooms became boring. Katalin allowed a Japanese fan to take her as his companion on a trip to Vietnam, but whether this event is what gave her the idea to become an escort is not clear. In general, we know far too little about Katalin to make us understand why she would make such a controversial career choice.

Faiz is much better at helping us understand Chanel, the persona Katalin created. Chanel’s catch phrase is “Sex is never just about sex”. For Chanel, sex is about faith and her job as a sex worker is akin to that of healer, priest and therapist. She allows men to give up their identities as husband, father, brother or son and simply be human. The most moving part of the play is Chanel’s description of how she was hired by the mother of Charles, an adult son ravaged by muscular dystrophy, to allow him to experience sex.

Angela learns of this but why Chanel would ever speak to her former attacker, much less tell her about this is far from clear. Nevertheless, Angela tells Chanel that helping Charles is something that Katalin would do, not Chanel. This only confuses matters since we don’t know enough about Katalin to judge what Angela is saying.

Besides suggesting that fate was somehow involved in Katalin’s transformation and that sex is a form of faith, Faiz also wants to use the play to explore questions of identity. Chanel’s costume changes before leaving for an assignation suggest that she becomes a different person to suit the individual fantasies of her various clients. We know that Chanel herself is a construction. Only twice, however, does Faiz ever hint that Chanel experiences her constructed identity as a problem. She does say she doesn’t know who she is at times, but she also says she gets over it.

If Aromas were less descriptive and more dramatic, we would come to see a disparity between the cool professionalism that Chanel projects and the agonizing doubts that underlie that façade. That does not happen mostly because Faiz does not want to undercut Chanel’s life as a sex worker with conventional moralizing. Yet, the result is that we don’t experience any tension within the character. Chanel concludes that different choices have different prices, and we have to assume that loss of identity is the price she has paid for her success.

Andy Fraser embodies Chanel/Katalin so perfectly it is difficult to imagine anyone else in the role. She has the ideal worldly-wise demeanour and just the right deadpan delivery of some of Chanel’s more humorous anecdotes. The matter-of-fact way she discusses sex is intentionally similar to the way she discusses clothing. People may think her job is exciting or disgusting, but to Chanel it is simply a job like any other and one she is proud to do well. While Katalin may remain a mystery, Faiz’s natural way with language and Fraser’s equally natural performance make us feel that we have not been watching an actor as much as hearing the life story of a real person.

Brandon Kleiman has created a clever design for the tiny stage at the storefront Red Sandcastle Theatre. Behind minimal furniture and a garment rack with all of Chanel’s outfits, he has made a backdrop of hotel keys hanging above their corresponding room numbers. This image helps link the two halves of Katalin/Chanel’s life – the touring through hotels with the escort calls to hotels. Ed Rosing achieves a greater range of lighting effects from the Red Sandcastle grid than I’ve ever seen there before.

Andy Fraser’s performance is a pleasure as are Faiz’s judgement-free discussions of sex and prostitution. When the play veers into discussions of identity and fate, we feel the structure Faiz has created can’t really support their weight. What Faiz does best is conjure up the modern feeling of placelessness, where endless travel becomes meaningless movement and globalization has made everywhere look equally alike and empty until something like sex, or faith, provides a moment of reality.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Detail of poster for Aromas; Andy Fraser. ©2014 Tim Leyes.

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

Our Country’s Good

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 17:11:11 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
by Timberlake Wertenbaker, directed by Max Stafford-Clark
Out of Joint and Octagon Theatre Bolton, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto
September 17-October 26, 2014

Lt. Clark: “Theatre is like a small republic; it requires private sacrifices for the good of the whole”

In the 25 years since it first premiered, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good has gone from being a radical new play to a standard teaching text in Britain. In 2012 The Octagon Theatre in Bolton and Out of Joint combined to present a 25th anniversary production of the play. The production helmed by Max Stafford-Clark, the play’s original director at the Royal Court Theatre, won rave reviews in London and comes to Toronto as part of its tour.

The last professional production Toronto saw was a fine one by the then-new theatre company Theatrefront in 2001. Those with longer memories may have seen the play in 1989 when the Royal Court Theatre took the original production on tour with George Farquhar’s 1706 comedy The Recruiting Officer, the play at the centre of Our Country’s Good. Overall, Stafford-Clark’s new production lacks the energy and tension that made his earlier production so gripping. Nevertheless, the new production vigorously confirms the play’s status as a modern classic.

The play is based in part on Thomas Keneally’s 1987 historical novel The Playmaker concerning the story behind the first-ever performance of a play in the penal colony of Australia when in 1789 a group of enlightened British officers allowed a cast of convicts to present Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer. The goal of this social experiment, conceived of by Lt. Ralph Clark and sanctioned by the presiding governor of New South Wales, but bitterly opposed by many, is to open the eyes of the convicts to a more refined way of life and self-expression through their acting of Farquhar’s idealized characters and their elegant mode of speech.

This true story is fascinating in itself, but Wertenbaker expands the meaning of this incident to become a celebration of the transformational power of the theatre both for the actors and the audience. Theatre can overcome determinist views of character and class by displaying the multiple possibilities of character within each person and revealing social behaviour as itself a form of acting. The play avoids the sentimentality of this optimistic notion by simultaneously showing how ingrained the opposition to it is and how hard won the victory of Clark and his abused cast of convicts.

The very structure Wertenbaker gives the play reinforces its theme about the transformation in that ten of the eleven actors play at least two very distinct roles. Wertenbaker does this to show that imagination is the primary weapon against type-casting. Thus, Cornelius Macarthy, who plays both an Australian aborigine and an ex-slave from Madagascar, is also cast as Captain Watkin Tench, who does not believe that convicts can be reformed. Similarly, three of the four women playing prisoners are also cast in one scene as male officers and one of the male actors (Sam Graham) plays an officer and a midshipman plus two different convicts, one male and one female. Indeed, the Farquhar play they are rehearsing involves a woman who disguises herself as a man to be near the man she loves. When the subject is broached in the play whether the audience will find this doubling in Farquhar confusing, Clark answers that the audience will not as long as they pay attention and “People who cannot pay attention should not go to the theatre”.

Fortunately, the cast does a superb job of keeping their double, triple or quadruple roles clear and distinct. While this is an ensemble work, there are a number of notably fine performances. Simon Darwen is impressive in both his roles – as Captain Arthur Phillip, the literate, enlightened Governor of the colony who believes in the Enlightenment notion that nurture can bring out the inherent good in man’s nature and as the Jewish convict John Wisehammer, a man in love with words who writes a new prologue for Farquhar’s play. Richard Neale distinguishes his two roles so well you would not think the same person played both. His accent and demeanour as the brutal Scot, Major Robbie Ross, who regards the prisoners as little more than animals, is completely different from those of the convict Ketch Freeman, the meek Irishman, coerced into being a hangman and who is therefore despised by all the prisoners. David Newman’s measured, restrained manner as Judge David Collins contrasts strongly with his comic exuberance as the pickpocket and would-be actor, Robert Sideway, a character based on the real Robert Sidaway [sic] (1758-1809) who would go on, as his character hopes, to open the first-ever theatre in Sydney.

Among the women, Victoria Gee is a delight in her primary role as the convict Dabby Bryant, who has managed to come through the ordeal of transportation with her native wit and enthusiasm for life intact. Anna Tierney brings out all the complexity of her primary role as Duckling Smith, a convict in love with a midshipman but oppressed by his jealousy.

The main difference between Stafford-Clark’s present production and his original is that he has not encouraged as thoroughly detailed performances from actors in principal roles as he had done earlier. Several characters undergo a profound change during the course of the action, but Stafford-Clark only highlights the beginning and end points of their emotional journeys rather than emphasizing the gradations of change in between. One example is Jessica Tomchak in her main role as the convict Mary Brenham, who moves from extreme shyness to a self-confidence she has learned from playing the character Sylvia in Farquhar’s play. Tomchak is excellent in acting both extremes of Mary’s character but we’d like to notice where the breakthrough occurs for her.

The same is true of Kathryn O’Reilly in her main role as Liz Morden, the convict least likely to be redeemed in the colony. O’Reilly gives her a barely suppressed rage that can break out at any moment, yet suggests some undetermined interior trouble akin to mental illness. She maintains this disturbed state with such strength that when she breaks her criminals’ code of silence in Act 2, it seems to come from nowhere as does her subsequent statement of humility as an actress.

Sam Graham does distinguish his four roles, but is much better as the nearly inarticulate Captain Campbell and the enthusiastic convict John Arscott than he is in his main role of Harry Brewer. Former hangman, Midshipman Brewer is frustrated by the silence he receives from his beloved Duckling Smith and is driven to madness by the ghosts of those he had hanged. While his scenes with Duckling are well played, Graham is unconvincing in conveying Brewer’s nightly terrors.

The only actor assigned only one role is Nathan Ives-Moiba as Lt. Ralph Clark, who formulates the idea of presenting a play, becomes its director and eventually must act in it as Silvia’s beloved Captain Plume. Ives-Moiba is excellent at showing Clark’s ludicrously sentimental worship of the girl he left in England, but we don’t see the steps that lead him to fall in love with his leading lady, Mary Brenham, and long for the physical love he had previously considered base.

A major plus in Stafford-Clark’s new production is Tim Shortall’s design. He is fully aware that this is a play about the theatre and so has created a stage-upon-the-stage where all the action takes place. Hanging canvasses serve as the sails of a ship, backdrops for scenes and the curtains for the play-within-a-play. Scene changes occur in half-light, not blackouts, and so do many costume changes. Andy Smith’s soundscape of Australia’s wild world of birdsong is extremely effective in underscoring the strangeness of a land new to Europeans.

If Stafford-Clark does not excel as he did before in delineating all the nuances of the principal characters, he does succeed more forcefully this time in showing how both the convicts and the officers sent to guard them feel they have been exiled from the mother country. Major Ross, the angriest of the officers, states explicitly that he thinks the officers’ assignment to Australia is Britain’s way of punishing them for losing the American War of Independence. Ross’s response to exile is to lash out at others and retreat into bigotry. The more enlightened officers like Phillip, Collins and Clark realize that their exile with the convicts means that they have to help the convicts construct a new, possibly better society than the one they left.

Our Country’s Good is a play as thought-provoking and emotionally elevating now as it was 25 years ago. Even if his emphases have altered, the chance to see a great play directed again by its original director is one that no theatre-lover should miss.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Cast members of Our Country’s Good; Nathan Ives-Moiba as Lt. Clark and Jessica Tomchak as Mary Brenham. ©2014 Out of Joint/Octagon Theatre Bolton.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.

True

Thu, 4 Sep 2014 13:30:47 -0400

✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Rosa Labordé
Criminal Theatre with Aluna Theatre, Citizenry Café, 982 Queen St. West, Toronto
September 3-13, 2014

Ray: “I’ve never done that before ... or have I?”

Rosa Labordé’s sold-out Fringe hit True has returned for a second run. If you missed it before, don’t miss it this time. Labordé packs more ideas into her play’s 75 minutes than most playwrights do in three times that length, and yet these ideas about the nature of memory and of reality arise in the context of perfectly natural dialogue and interpersonal interactions. It is a real achievement that Labordé has created a play that seems so simple and even ordinary on the surface but with such complex implications.

The play is staged in the lovely interior of Citizenry Café at 982 Queen St. West, an unusual combination of coffee shop in front and clothing boutique in back. The show was listed as “site-specific” at the Fringe, but that phrase has a much stricter meaning for Labordé’s play that feels so much as if it were written for this particular site it is hard to imagine it staged elsewhere.

In the play this coffeeshop/boutique is run by three sisters – Marie (Sabrina Grdevich) the oldest, Cece (Ingrid Rae Doucet) the middle child and Anita (Shannon Taylor) the youngest. Marie is married to Franco (Scott McCord), a man she met when they were both in rehab for substance abuse. Into their lives wanders Roy (Layne Coleman), the women’s father whom they haven’t see for years. He has Alzheimer’s and is carrying a note from “A Friend” saying that abandoning a father is the worst sin of all.

Anita is the first he meets and her reaction is to send him away as soon as she can. But she can’t let him wander the streets in his pajamas as he is doing and she tries to find clothes for him in the boutique. Eventually, the rest meet Roy with reactions ranging from Franco’s curiosity to Marie’s outrage.

Halfway through the action a series of flashbacks, signalled by Trevor Schwellnus’s lighting cues, begin that give glimpses into why the sisters hate Roy so much and can’t cope with his sudden return into their lives. Anita, the most compassionate of the three, argues that Roy is not the same person he was. Since Alzheimer’s has erased his memory of the past, why should they keep these negative thoughts about him alive? Her argument, however, is in contradiction to her behaviour we observed earlier in play. Anita refuses to eat Italian food because of something that happened when she was travelling in Rome. It is Franco who argues that Anita is letting her memory of that one incident dominate her life in the present. To be free she should consider that the incident could just as likely not have happened at all.

Franco gives his argument as if it were something drummed into him in rehab. In fact, Franco’s argument derives from the implications of quantum physics. Quantum physic postulates that the path of an electron after a collision only becomes definite if it is measured. In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger realized the paradox this posed and came up with a famous thought experiment now called “Schrödinger’s Cat”, wherein a cat that theoretically could have been poisoned inside a sealed box is deemed to be simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens the box. The solution to this paradox is the so-called “many worlds” hypothesis in which a universe exists that proceeds from every possible result of an experiment, so that Schrödinger’s cat would be dead in one universe and alive in another.

Franco’s view is that we should choose which of various outcomes of our decisions we want to live with. Just as Anita has let an event that happened once in Rome determine her present eating habits, the three sisters have let their past experience of Roy as a drunken tyrant determine how they now regard him, even though he is now clearly a different person than he used to be.

Labordé thus presents us with a wide number of views of memory. Roy has deficits in both short term and long term memory and sometimes mistakes Marie for his deceased wife. Franco envies Roy’s memory loss, stating that he would feel freer if he could be rid of some of the memories of his past. We can see why he is such an advocate of choosing which memories to use as guides. He and Marie practice a ritual, presumably learned in rehab, of “shifting the atmosphere”. If they get into an argument, as they do at the very start of the play, they reverse to where the argument began and restart their conversation to avoid the path that led to the argument. Meanwhile, Cece presents a very different way of dealing with the past by changing it into art. She is a master of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, in which cut flowers that are physically dead live again in the apotheosis of beauty that is a flower arrangement. Labordé has Cece present this as a metaphor for how Cece has managed to transform her own past.

The question Labordé poses is “What then is ‘true’?” Is it what someone like Roy imagined happening in the past? Is it what a person like Franco chooses to have happened? Or, if the past is transformed into art, what is truer – the artwork or the transient elements that were used to make it?

As if Labordé’s play did not already have enough resonance, Labordé is aware that the presence of three daughters and an abandoned father recalls the plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Labordé allows Lear to remain very much in the background as a kind of sounding board for her own play, yet she hints at the link between the two by calling the uncompromising truth-teller of the three daughters Cece as in Cordelia and by calling the father Roy, recalling the Old French spelling of the word for “king”.

The play is well cast and performed. Layne Coleman is painfully believable as Roy by giving him a largely expressionless face across which glimmers of recognition briefly flicker, lighting it up, only to die too soon. Without even knowing what he may have done to so alienate his daughters, his performance draws such sympathy that we long for the daughters to take him back into their lives.

Scott McCord’s Franco has the luxury of viewing the family’s dispute from the outside and he becomes a humorous commentator on the actions and attitudes of the daughters, even though his unstable past and present drug-taking severely undercuts his authority. The best scene in the play is that between Coleman and McCord, where McCord shows us in detail how Franco moves from distrusting this strange old man to finally identifying with him to taking Roy’s part against the daughters and even encouraging him in what may be false recollections of the past.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the Marie of Sabrina Grdevich, whose piercing tone is as unrelenting as her character’s heart. Shannon Taylor, in contrast, has a well-modulated voice and well conveys Anita’s mixed feelings of compassion and anger on seeing her father again. Ingrid Rae Doucet is so docile as the older Cece, it is hard to see that she was once outspoken, but then how she has changed is part of the point.

The final flashback contains so many features new to the story that it is too confusing. That ending aside, Labordé’s play is unusual in being both emotionally and intellectually engaging at once. The success that will likely meet True will mean it will have to be staged in other venues. Therefore, before that happens, see the play while you can in the space where it was meant to be seen.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Ingrid Doucet, Shannon Taylor, Layne Coleman, Sabrina Grdevich and Scott McCord; Layne Coleman and Ingrid Doucet. ©2014 Criminal Theatre.

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