Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
Toronto:
This year saw the passing of two much-loved figures of theatre in Toronto – Jon Kaplan and Martin Hunter. Kaplan’s genial personality made him that rarity of rarities – a theatre critic who is liked and respected by the entire theatre community. Writing for NOW Magazine from its inception, Kaplan documented the boom in Canadian theatre in the 1970s and championed new Canadian actors and playwrights throughout his career. He was a voice of wisdom and experience gone too soon. Martin Hunter wore many hats throughout his lengthy career but the highpoint of his life and the highpoint for theatre in Toronto was his tenure as Artistic Director of Hart House Theatre in the 1970s when that theatre was the only classical theatre company in the city whose productions were regularly reviewed by the city’s major newspapers. Many actors during Hunter’s tenure like Rod Beattie, Robert Joy, Peter Krantz and R.H. Thompson went on to major professional careers of their own.
In alphabetical order here is my list of the ten best productions in Toronto in 2018. As usual, I have excluded productions that have previously appeared on this list such as the Canadian Opera Company’s remount of Götterdämmerung, even though the remount starring Christine Goerke and Andreas Schager was even better this time than in 2006. I was very tempted to include Americandream.ca, parties 1 et 2 by Claude Guilmain for Théâtre la Tangente, one of the few plays to tackle head-on the essential question of the nature of Canadian identity as it exists in relation to the United States, but I think I must wait for Partie 3 of this projected trilogy to see how Guilmain concludes this epic work.
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The Aliens by Annie Baker, Coal Mine Theatre. Mitchell Cushman’s insightful direction revealed that Baker’s play about three inarticulate male losers is beneath its seemingly inconsequential surface concerned with the eternal themes of love, life, death, art and the pain of isolation. Under Cushman’s direction all three actors sank so deeply into their characters we felt as if we were observing real life.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens, David Mirvish. Marianne Elliott provided Stephens’s sympathetic adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel about an autistic boy Christopher’s search for a dog’s killer with dazzling staging combining high tech and physical theatre often depicting the outside world from Christopher’s point of view as indecipherable chaos.
Five Faces for Evelyn Frost (Cinq visages pour Évelyne Frost) by Guillaume Corbeil, Canadian Stage/Théâtre français de Toronto. To write about the nature of social media addiction, Corbeil created a new form of choral drama that perfectly reflected his five characters’ distancing from themselves and each other. Able to perform the play in both English and in French, the fantastically talented ensemble’s acting melded with the design, lighting and projections to create a striking new form of theatre piece.
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange, Soulpepper Theatre Company. One might think that Shange’s plotless “choreopoem” from 1976 about the varied experiences of seven African-American women would have become dated. In fact, it shines as even more relevant and director Djanet Sears molded the work into a statement of the women’s passage from innocence to experience, from dependence on men to independence, that was both deeply emotional and life-enhancing.
John by Annie Baker, Company Theatre. This year two theatre companies introduced Toronto audiences to American Annie Baker’s singular, pause-filled style. Four totally committed performances turned what seemed like an innocuous stay by a couple in a B&B near Gettysburg into a study of isolation, paranoia, theatre and humankind’s place in the universe. So immersed did one become in Baker’s slow-moving world one lost all track of time.
Life After by Britta Johnson, Canadian Stage/Musical Stage Company. If we omit the large-scale Come From Away, Johnson’s is the most sophisticated Canadian musical to emerge in a decade. Johnson was author of its smart book that combined a study of grief with a mystery, writer of its witty, pithy lyrics and composer of its inventive Sondheimian score. Fine performances from the entire cast proved this is a musical that will last.
Macbeth Muet by La Fille du Laitier, Toronto Fringe Festival. This two-person company from Quebec presented one of the most imaginative shows I’ve ever seen at the Fringe. In only 35 minutes it wordlessly related through mime and object manipulation not only the story but flashbacks to their notion of the backstory to Shakespeare’s Scottish play without negating the play’s serious intent. The abundant laughter derived simply from the audaciousness of the troupe’s inventiveness.
The Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Opera Atelier. This year Opera Atelier accomplished the major feat of making one of the most performed operas in the repertory seem entirely fresh and new. Never before have the plot lines and the characters’ changing motivations been presented so clearly and forcefully. OA has mounted Figaro four times before, but this time every element of the opera musically, dramatically, emotionally, felt exactly right.
Musik für das Ende by Claude Vivier, Soundstreams. The most profound theatrical experience of the year came from this first-ever staging of Québécois composer’s 1971 choral work. Vivier (1948-83) intended the worked to be staged but it did not even receive a concert performance until 2012. An immaculate ensemble of ten singers presented isolated individuals urgently attempting to make some contact with others, to achieve some sense of community, in the brief span of time before death silenced them all. The impact of Musik, preceded by a short play and Vivier’s final composition, was overwhelming.
Unholy by Diane Flacks, Nightwood Theatre. In a time when flames of misogyny and religious hatred and were being fanned across the globe, particularly south of the border, Flacks found an ingenious format to treat this phenomenon that would present the points of view of atheist Christian, Jewish and Muslim women and yet also be an entertaining play. Her brilliant idea was to show the public and private side of women participating in a TVO-like televised forum on women and religion where tensions among the speakers were not restricted to differences in religion. The play became essential viewing to ground a person in a world of discord.
On the other hand ...
There were many plays this years that really should not have made the leap from page to stage. Perhaps the most disappointing of these was Breath in Between by Anton Piatigorsky at Crow’s Theatre. Audience’s expecting another witty, erudite dramatic work like Piatigorsky’s Eternal Hydra of 2009 were extremely disappointed. Rather than characters, Piatigorsky gave us mouthpieces for philosophical points of views and left the action to be entirely and aridly symbolic.
Stratford:
The 2017 Stratford Festival produced several fine shows this year finally including a Shakespeare among them. The quality for the offerings was uneven primarily due to the casting of inexperienced actors in roles they were not yet ready for. The three best shows were:
Tartuffe by Molière, translated by Ranjit Bolt. Religious hypocrisy has never disappeared, making Molière’s 17th-century play continually relevant. Director Chris Abraham used Ranjit Bolt’s up-to-the-minute modern translation and set the action in the present drawing focussed performances from the entire cast who never forgot how close Molière’s great comedies come to tragedy.
Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare. In its theme of money and its strictly binary structure Shakespeare’s cynical play can feel uncannily modern. Stephen Ouimette who last directed Timon in 2004 directed it again and brought a further depth of insight to the work that revealed it as a kind of non-familial King Lear with a central character who tragically moves from one extreme to the other without experiencing the moderation that might make life bearable.
The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Director Antoni Cimolino has shown a sympathy for Restoration and 18th-century plays like The Beaux’ Stratagem in 2014. Here with Sheridan’s 1777 comedy he does so again in this tale of a good husband who tries to ween his sparkling young wife from the influence of a group of malicious gossips. Luckily Cimolino allowed us to infer the parallels of the plot to the influence of social media today and left the gorgeous production happily in its period setting.
The worst show was:
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Though this is one of the most-often staged plays by the Bard at the Festival, it has not come off well since 1984 when it starred Colm Feore and Seana McKenna in the title roles. This year director Scott Wentworth decided to turn the Prologue into the leader of a cabal of “Widows” representing Fate in the mistaken belief that this would make us see Romeo as just as great as Macbeth. The effort in fact diminished the play and the miscasting of the two leads and dismal performances from the rest meant the Festival had yet another failed Romeo on its hands.
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Niagara-on-the-Lake:
Tim Carroll’s first season as Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival created a general sense of unease among longtime patrons. Except for a 1930s musical, there were no plays by any of Shaw’s contemporaries and no play resulting from the Festival’s famed “literary archeology” as former AD Jackie Maxwell put it, where undeservingly neglected plays were revived – discoveries that have often led to revivals of these plays elsewhere. Indeed, Carroll has explicitly thrown out the Festival’s mandate and now claims: “Inspired by the spirit of George Bernard Shaw, the Shaw Festival creates unforgettable theatrical encounters in any way we want. The Shaw Festival, home to Two-Way Theatre, is a place where people who are curious about the world gather to share the unique experience of live theatre”. Since all theatre is already “Two-Way”, Carroll is simply saying that the Shaw Festival produces live theatre. In getting rid of the original and even the revised Shaw Festival mandate, Carroll has removed the one aspect of the Festival that made it unique in the world. By shifting his focus to modern plays, he has also thus allowed the Stratford Festival to go unchallenged as the only classical repertory theatre company in Canada. What damage this will do remains to be seen.
Of the offerings in 2017, the three best were:
Me and My Girl by Noel Gay, L. Arthur Rose and Douglas Furber. It was good to have a change from the dark modern musicals set in Shaw’s lifetime to experience a bubbly musical from the 1930s with a seriously silly plot, pun-filled dialogue, great songs and fantastic dancing. Director Ashlie Corcoran* got the tone just right and revealed the show as pure escapist fun done up in high style.
Middletown by Will Eno. Perhaps the most emotionally powerful show this year was Will Eno’s 2010 response to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) that constantly depicted how American society has changed for the worse from the nostalgic view of small town life that Wilder portrayed. Director Meg Roe drew intense performances from the entire cast in this study of human isolation and people’s inability or fear of real communication.
Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw. Tim Carroll directed a powerful if abstract production of one of Shaw’s greatest plays with Sara Topham resplendent in the title role. Unlike some productions that view the Epilogue as an impediment to tragedy, Carroll’s direction kept the prospect of Joan’s eventual sainthood in view from the very beginning.
The worst show was:
Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw. Much as Saint Joan showed off a good side to Tim Carroll, Androcles revealed a frivolous and far more troubling side. Androcles is a play about religious intolerance that in Shaw’s prescient fashion has much to say about the subject today. Declaring the play a “mishmash”, Carroll threw away any seriousness to the play’s comedy and turned it into a forum for drama school-like fun and games where the audience was allowed to interrupt the play at any time, thus making listening to a play not done at the Festival since 1984 impossible. If Carroll is one of the many Brits taught to look down on Shaw, except for Saint Joan, one wonders why he was chosen to head a Festival named for the playwright.
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Elsewhere in Ontario:
This year at least ten productions seen outside Toronto, the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival deserve special mention:
The most remarkable was:
Honk! by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, St. Jacobs Country Playhouse. This, the first professional production of the Olivier Award-winning musical, showed us a musical imbued with wit and cleverness in its book, lyrics, music and design. This retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Ugly Duckling” made you laugh out loud at its extraordinary inventiveness in recreating barnyard life without ever resorting to animal costumes or masks. The top-notch cast made this a musical to cherish. One viewing is not enough to take in the richness its creators’ imagination.
The rest in alphabetical order were:
The Amish Project by Jessica Dickey, Green Light Arts, Kitchener. Director Matt White decided to stage this American play about a mass shooting in a Mennonite schoolhouse in a Mennonite schoolhouse in St. Jacobs. In a tour de force of acting, Amy Keating played not only the female victims of the shooting but the killer’s wife, the killer himself and a male expert on Mennonites. What outraged outsiders was that the Mennonites forgave the killer, making the play an exploration of what living by New Testament Christian dictates actually means.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Robert Chafe, Grand Theatre, London. The Grand Theatre hosted this brilliantly directed play about the rise of Joey Smallwood, the man who brought Newfoundland into Confederation. It was a pleasure to see Canadian history taken seriously for a change and to get caught up in the machinations behind the scenes that led to Smallwood’s victory. The cinematic stagecraft and the impeccable acting from the entire cast made this a must-see in Southwestern Ontario.
A Few Good Men by Aaron Sorkin, Theatre Aquarius, Hamilton. Sorkin is such a hot item in television now that one forgets he began as a playwright. Theatre Aquarius gave Sorkin’s 1989 play a sizzling production and Ted Dykstra fluidly managed the 18-member cast. The play seems even more relevant today than when it was written in its exposure of the use and abuse of power and how those with the most power can feel immune from the ethical guidelines they enforce on those below them.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge. Anyone who wanted a glimpse of what Andrew Lloyd Webber was like before his works became quasi-operatic and pretentious need only have dropped into this Joseph given a effervescent, kid-friendly production by Drayton Entertainment. Director Max Reimer found exactly the right balance between the show’s jokiness and seriousness with Danielle Wade and Jamie McKnight ideally cast as the Narrator and Joseph.
The Last Christmas Turkey by Clive VanderBurgh and Dan Needles, Theatre Orangeville. The pairing of Dan Needles, creator of the much-loved Wingfield plays, and Clive VanderBurgh, a composer for children’s programming, produced a highly enjoyable new holiday musical about a question that does arise on farms: “What happens when kids become so friendly with an animal, they can’t bear to think of it as food on the table?” Thus two adorable kids played by two adorable child actors protect an abandoned turkey from capture and have to resort to criminal activity even though they really would rather be good. With its humorous story, mixture of animals with adult humans and children, its Christmas theme and its tuneful score, this new musical is bound to find success across the country.
The Libertine by Thomas Shadwell, Talk Is Free Theatre, Barrie. Revivals of dramatic rarities are not only to be found in Toronto. Shadwell’s 1675 version of the Don Juan story received a super revival in Barrie that made one wonder why it has languished in obscurity so long. Two main innovations in Shadwell’s version are in making Don John a leader of a small gang of like-minded libertines and especially in not portraying women in Don John’s life as victims but as women prepared to track him down and make him pay for his crimes. Director Jeannette Lambermont-Morey used physical theatre to enhance her production that brought this rarity to vibrant life again on the stage.
Old Love by Norm Foster, Foster Festival, St. Catharines. The second year of the Norm Foster Theatre Festival again brought three Foster plays to the stage, this time two of them world premieres that showed the playwright moving in unconventional directions. If I had to chose one play from the season to represent Foster, I would choose Old Love, a Foster classic, from 2008. As usual in Foster there is an undertow of sadness beneath the superficial hilarity of the events. The play has a built-in theatricality in that the two actors must play not only the central would-be romantic pair, but, in flashbacks, their younger selves and previous spouses. Casting real-life spouses Booth Savage and Janet-Laine Green gave the show an added piquancy.
One for the Pot by Ray Cooney, Huron Country Playhouse II, Grand Bend. Marcia Kash proved once again that she is one of the few directors in Canada who understands how to direct British farce. In a typically artificial plot, Eddie Glen played identical triplets of different nationalities vying for a family fortune but Kash understands that the humour derives from the entire cast taking whatever outrageous event occurs as absolutely serious. It was a fine outing of this 1959 farce that rivalled the production that was such a great hit for the Shaw Festival in 1996.
The Pigeon King by The Company, Blyth Festival. The Blyth Festival has always been home to collective creations based on local history. Its production of the The Pigeon King based on events discovered in 2007 proved that this tradition is still strong and vital. Pigeon farmer Arlan Galbraith goes from nothing to commanding a kingdom extended across Canada and into the States as part of a Ponzi scheme involving the raising of pigeons. The increasingly bizarre story is interspersed with satiric folk songs sung and played by the ensemble. Gil Garratt, Artistic Director of the Festival, gives a great performance as Galbraith never once giving us a clue whether Galbraith set up his scheme knowingly or in ignorance. The show is back at the Festival in 2018 by popular demand.
©Christopher Hoile
*I originally credited Eda Holmes with directing Me and My Girl. It was Ashlie Corcoran (now corrected). Thank you Naomi Wright for pointing out the error. Thank you Ashlie Corcoran for a wonderful show.
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) (from top) Scene from Musik für das Ende, ©2017 Claire Harvey; Joseph Ziegler (centre) as Timon of Athens with members of the company, ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann; Gray Powell as John and Moya O’Connell as Mary in Middletown, ©2017 David Cooper; Nathan Carroll (in grey) as Ugly and company of Honk! ©2017 Hilary Gauld Camilleri.
2018-01-01
Best Productions of 2017