May 2013 - Page 2 of 3 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Miss Caledonia: A one-woman show about her mother’s teenage dreams during the 1950’s

By Patrick Langston | May 19, 2013

A Lunkamud (Toronto) production

Photo. National Arts Centre

OTTAWA — If you passed 15-year-old Peggy Ann Douglas on the street, you likely wouldn’t even notice her. Wearing jeans and a nondescript shirt, she’d look like any other teenager: slump-shouldered, a bit confused, wholly focused on her own struggle to figure out who she is and where she fits in the world.

But let Melody A. Johnson inhabit that young woman, and you can’t take your eyes off Peggy Ann as she travels her funny, bumpy and occasionally poignant journey from hemmed-in farm girl to singing, baton-twirling beauty contest contender who’s convinced that becoming Miss Caledonia will springboard her to her true destination: Hollywood stardom. After all, she reasons, if it happened to Singin’ in the Rain star Debbie Reynolds, why not to Peggy Ann Douglas?

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Miss Caledonia: 80 Delightful Minutes

By Capital Critics Circle | May 19, 2013

Photo. NAC English Theatre

The NAC English Theatre is closing out its season with a production in the Studio of MISS CALEDONIA, written and performed by Melody A. Johnson. Directed by Rich Roberts and Aaron Willis with musical direction and subtle violin accompaniment by Alison Porter, MISS CALEDONIA is based on the true story of Miss Johnson’s mother, Peggy Douglas. Set in the mid-50s, it chronicles Peggy’s effort to escape the drudgery of life on the farm by becoming a movie star. The first step on the journey is her attempt to win the local beauty pageant.

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Miss Caledonia: funny, warm and convincing, a truly unforgettable character

By Rajka Stefanovska | May 18, 2013

Photo. Barbara Gray

It is sometime in the middle of the 1950s on a remote farm in Ontario where teenager Peggy Ann Douglas lives and daydreams about a shiny future as a movie star. Inspired by Hollywood success story Debbie Reynolds, she envisions herself in the role of a big, new discovery that is coached by Bing Cosby himself. So, dreaming about the fabulous world of fame while labouring through farm chores and domestic goings on, she decides that the road leading to her goal runs through local beauty pageants. To win, she decides to attend classes teaching beauty, charm and poise in a local charm school, but not before she gets around a stumbling block in form of her feet-firm-on-the-ground farmer father first. Fortunately for her, she finds all necessary support in her mother.

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Miss Caledonia: A beautiful way to get off the farm

By Iris Winston | May 18, 2013

Photo, Barbara Gray

Melody A. Johnson

Winning a beauty contest is a way to escape farm living and extreme poverty. At least, 15-year-old Peggy Ann Douglas hopes this will be her path to a new life, which at the very least will include indoor plumbing. (It was the route to stardom for movie actress Debbie Reynolds, so why not for a teenager from rural Ontario?)

Based on her mother’s history, Melody A. Johnson tells the story of how a gawky teenager in the 1950s transformed herself into a confident baton-twirling/singing beauty queen.

Johnson is a fine storyteller and comedienne, delivering clear and often amusing sketches of Peggy’s parents, assorted neighbours and acquaintances.

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A Flea in her Ear: Kanata theatre presents a crowd pleaser

By Iris Winston | May 18, 2013

Georges Feydeau’s 1907 farce, La Puce à l’oreille — A Flea in her Ear — has frequently been cited as one of the best examples of the genre and the model for many later comedies, incorporating sexual innuendo, mistaken identity, frantic ction, doors and more doors.

The style requires precise timing, fast movements and character changes and must never slow down enough to allow an audience to consider how ridiculous the plot is.

For the most part, under the meticulous direction of Jim Holmes, the fast-paced Kanata Theatre production meets the criteria in its whirlwind presentation of A Flea in Her Ear.

Only the necessary but lengthy and laboured set change in Act II brings the action to a grinding halt for too long. (Lighter set pieces that do not require an army of stagehands might have helped here.) The other visual distraction in generally effective sets is the odd colouring of the double doors in the centre of the stage, which gives the impression that designers ran out of paint. …

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Ups and Downs “In the Heights” at the Boston Centre for the Arts

By Jane Baldwin | May 16, 2013

Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo “In the Heights”

In the Heights, the 2010 Tony award winner, is a feel-good, much loved musical about the trials, tribulations, and joys of a group of Latinos living in a barrio in New York City’s Washington Heights. The show’s optimism would seem, at least in part, the product of composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda’s youth when he first conceived it as a student at Wesleyan College in 1999. He wanted to develop a musical about the Hispanic community where he had grown up, drawing on Latin and contemporary musical influences. Unlike the earlier Latino-themed musicals West Side Story and The Capeman, In the Heights is devoid of gang violence. Violence has been replaced by solidarity. While Miranda’s decision to break with clichés is laudable, the result, in this case, is a lack of dramatic conflict and sentimentally drawn characters.

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The drowsy chaperone: Enthusiastic production ultimately misses the mark

By Iris Winston | May 12, 2013

The back-story has all the charm of a fairy tale. But, the Rural Root Theatre Company’s rendering of The Drowsy Chaperone gives no indication of awareness of its history. (A note in the program would be appreciated, as would a more coherent organization of the cast and crew bios.)

Almost 16 years ago, friends celebrated the engagement of Bob and Janet in Toronto by putting together a collection of songs, entitled The Wedding Gift.

The private event was such a success that, renamed The Drowsy Chaperone, it became a popular show at the Toronto Fringe, was then presented in a lengthened format with Bob Martin (the Bob of the engagement party) now involved, in larger houses in Toronto, courtesy of top Toronto producer David Mirvish. From here, the Canadian musical became a Tony-award winner on Broadway with numerous productions in London’s West End, Los Angeles, Australia and Japan, as well as touring across Canada. It became available for community theatre production only recently.

The names of the bride and groom in the show are constant reminders of its origins, while the intentionally slight plot combines a gentle spoof of the musicals of the 1920s with a celebration of the genre. …

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White Rabbit Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour. Where Is The Red Rabbit??

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 8, 2013

Felaki theatre in Cairo, Performed in Arabic by Khaled Abol Naga in April, 2013.

I saw it Wednesday evening with Peter Froehlich but a different actor takes to the stage every evening, The reason will soon become evident as you watch the play. The stage is almost bare. There is a chair, a ladder, a table. Two glasses of water are placed on the table. There is some simple lighting and 65 places for the audience placed in the front half of the Arts Court Library that has been slightly raked. Thank goodness. Catriona Leger comes on stage to thank us for coming and to invite Peter Froehlich to appear. He walks on stage, she hands him a sealed envelope and then exits, leaving Peter standing there with the envelope. He opens it..and starts reading………And thus begins the play.

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Alonzo King Lines Ballet: Resin and Scheherazade. A woundrous state of human bonding that calls up the origins of the human species.

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 5, 2013

Photo: Bruce Barrett

Watching these two performances by the Alonzo King Lines Ballet I felt myself being transported into an archaic world configured by the power of heat, and light, and air and earth, yet drawing our gaze into a world of highly ritualized human movement that has clear links to the present. The two performances, Resin and Scheherazade were very different. Resin had no narrative. It was abstract and yet the music, taken from Sephardi music, Israeli teaching of an alphabet lesson, songs in Yiddish , in Ladino, in Arabic, create a soundscape of Mediterranean non-western tones, produced by sad wailing voices and instruments of multiple origins that prepare us for the exploding of our classical notions of balletic movement. Highly formalistic, this company is bathed in a rethinking of the human body subjected to a rigorous ballet training completely transformed by a new sense of bodily stance and new

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JUSTICE: A tragic event still searching for its stage presence

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 3, 2013

Photo: Bruce Barrett

Playwright Leonard Linklater from the Yukon, and founder of the Gwaandak Theatre, has joined with dramaturg DDKugler on the West coast as well as director Yvette Nolan from the Native Earth Performing Arts group in Toronto to tell us about the tragedy of the two Tagish Nantuck brothers. It appears in two parts. The first part shows the meeting and the killing. And second part becomes the murder trial. The sequence of events is the following. The brothers executed two white gold prospectors during the period of the Gold Rush. I say executed because the deaths were shown to be ritual killings. Other prospectors had accidentally poisoned two native people with the cyanide used for mining the gold. The brother’s did not kill these white men as acts of vengeance but rather as a debt that the prospectors owed to the families of the dead. The killings were therefore justifiable from the point of view of the Native culture.

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