What stories did you create as a kid to help you manage the world? Were you a dragon-slayer? An hypnotically beautiful princess? And, now an adult, what stories help you navigate a smaller but no less puzzling world? Nicolas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman, the creative duo at the heart of Ottawa’s Mi Casa Theatre, invite us to ponder such questions – along with simply reveling in their fantastical style of theatre – in this new work in progress. Using a homemade armoire as the major set piece and enclosing the audience in a rough-hewn space like a child would make for a living room performance, Di Gaetano and Pearlman do what they do best: evoke memories, fragile hope, visions of fantasy and reality, and a profound sadness as they unveil a story about two young siblings. They also make some pretty good whale noises and sing original tunes. Is the new show as good as Countries Shaped Like Stars, their fringe hit of two years ago? It hasn’t yet found that same degree of lightness to buoy up the heavy stuff, but it’s well on its way.

Live from the Belly of the Whale

Mi Casa Theatre

At Saint Paul’s Eastern United Church

Whatever it lacks in acting, musical and production finesse, this sprawling Ottawa creation almost makes up for in spiritedness and determination to show its audience a good time. Eric Kendrick plays Finn Opatowskopoulos, an idealistic neophyte MP devoted to eradicating poverty. Stiff-armed by reality – the show is rife with opportunistic politicians, do-nothing senators and demanding constituents – Finn tries to remain true to himself although that eventually traps him in a politico-moral quagmire. Along the way, the musical spoofs musicals, spotlights a budget speech by a finance minister with hip-hop aspirations, and makes it clear that this is a show by well-meaning but under-rehearsed and directed performers. The musical, which turns out to be a vigorous call to civic engagement by all Canadians, takes pot shots at all political stripes, although Stephen Harper’s Conservatives loom especially large in the crosshairs.

Question Period the Musical

edSpective Productions

At Alumni Auditorium,

A sweet moment of storytelling and a play about “memory”,   written and directed by James FitzGerald and featuring Emma Godmere.  It takes place  in one of the most awkward fringe venues (I hear that the basement of the Royal Oak is THE worst) because when the room is full you can’t see the acting area beyond the fourth row unless you happen to be over 6 feet tall. . Our colleague Patrick Langston has all the luck!

I made myself little in the first row where I always prefer not to be, because I don’t want to risk disturbing the actors with my scribbling.

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When Harry Met Harry has all the qualities of a perfect Fringe piece. With his long lanky legs, expressive arms and fingers no less,  Allan Girod and his style of physical performance  reminded me of the  famous Monty Python character created by John Cleeves  who used to do all kinds of funny things with his extremities…so does Girod. But that’s where the resemblance stops. His material is not as quirky or dislocated  as Monty Python’s. It is much more  psychologically oriented.

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Yes, there was his drug use, restlessness and eventual murder. But the late Canadian guitar legend Lenny Breau was, above all else, a musician, and that’s the focus of this fine show by Vancouver’s Colin Godbout. A masterful guitarist himself, when Godbout finger picks tunes from Breau’s catalogue you’d swear they’re both in the room playing at once. Breau, found dead in a Los Angeles swimming pool in 1984, mixed jazz, country, flamenco and more; Godbout does the same in depicting Breau at his last gig, slipping tunes by Merle Travis, John Coltrane and Breau himself into the blend. Godbout also explores the idea that Nashville guitar great Chet Atkins, Breau’s mentor, put far too much pressure on his younger colleague by insisting he was the “great white hope of the guitar,” pressure that contributed to Breau’s retreat into personal mayhem. Breau’s biography needs more fleshing out, and Godbout is more musician than actor, but for now the guitar tells us most of what we need to know.

The Last Gig of Lenny Breau

By and with Colin Godbout

At Royal Oak Laurier, Saturday, June 18

For the Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, June 18, 2011

Gather five psychiatric patients for their weekly group therapy session, have their shrink mysteriously murdered, and then add a couple of cops to investigate the crime. Result: a play that pretty much flatlines from the get-go. Alana Kainz’s script, potentially interesting and intended to be darkly comic, trips itself up by using stereotypical characters (Susan, a girl who can’t say no to men; Jack, a phobic nerd), bad jokes (“She has more troubles than Donald Trump on a windy day”) and a predictable plotline (did one of these neurotic patients do the doc in?). Kainz knows the horrors that unchecked mental illness can produce: her first husband, CJOH-TV newscaster Brian Smith, was gunned down by a paranoid schizophrenic man in 1995. But she doesn’t incorporate nearly enough reality into her script to make it engaging. Paul Dervis directs the show which features, among others, an overacting Jerome Bourgault as the damaged Len and a funny Charlie Ebbs as the narcissistic Antoine.

Home/Accueil

Padre X

Looking Glass Productions

For the Ottawa Citizen, June 18, 2011

War, Padre X tells us, is “the closest thing to hell a human being can experience on this earth.” Actor and writer Marc Moir stares into that hell, and we along with him, in his true story of a Second World War chaplain whose two greatest obligations were to God and his fellow soldiers. At the centre of this compelling show is the catastrophic Allied invasion of Dieppe, where countless men lost their lives and Padre X discovered the meaning of his. Moir’s depiction of the chaplain from small-town Ontario is nuanced and satisfying, a mix of the decent men once portrayed by film actor Jimmy Stewart and the memorable cadences of CBC Radio storyteller Stuart McLean. The show is too long, and the short intermission — feeling so out of place in a fringe performance — breaks the momentum, but Padre X’s story, like the legacy of the war, resonates deeply.

A subject matter that has attracted social workers and social scientists of all disciplines from around the world:  research into the world of the sex trade, the sexual slavery of women and the trafficking of women. The subject matter, which is not new, has been the object of plays, films and many studies. Yet, in spite of all the interest and the outrage, the practice continues.

Since that is the case, what is the aim of another play about the same subject? What does this team want to capture. What do they want us to feel or see or understand?  That is the real question here. Why this play?

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