Month: November 2014

Some Solid Theatre At This Year’s Extremely Short Play Festival

Some Solid Theatre At This Year’s Extremely Short Play Festival

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Photo.Andrew Alexander.   Mary Ellis and John Muggleton.

Ottawa’s Extremely Short New Play Festival can always be depended on to yield surprises. To be sure, some entries may prove profoundly uninvolving even even though they mercifully last only a few minutes. But there are always others that yield rich dividends.

Such is the case with the 2014 edition, which continues at the Arts Court Theatre until Nov. 30. As always, director John Koensgen and his actors use a bare stage and the simplest of props. As always, there’s a professional flow to the evening, with one play giving way to the next with a minimum of fuss. And most importantly, the playbill again features a quartet of solid actors — Mary Ellis, Gabrielle Lazarovitz, Brad Long and John Muggleton — giving their all to the material and, in the process, demonstrating their versatility.

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More from the Capital Critics’ Circle Awards

More from the Capital Critics’ Circle Awards

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Photo Brie McFarlaine:   Eric Coates, artistic director of the Great Canadian Theatre Company accepting the award for Best Actor: Paul Rainville   from Alvina Ruprecht

MOnday November 17, 2014.

 

 

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Photo Brie McFarlaine.

Ian Farthing accepting the Audrey Ashley award at the Capital Critics’ Circle awards ceremony on Nov. 17, 2014.

Both Fun & Feeling with “A Craigslist Cantata”

Both Fun & Feeling with “A Craigslist Cantata”

If you’re looking for an entertaining evening, “Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata” currently running in the NAC Studio certainly fills the bill. Written by Bill Richardson and Amiel Gladstone with music by Veda Hille, the 80 minute chamber musical is quirky, tuneful, wistful and funny. Entirely sung, the lyrics are taken from or inspired by ads on Craigslist – some bizarre, some outrageous and some surprisingly touching. Not everyone needs a potato cannon or headless dolls, but we can understand the longing to make some kind of connection.

Robin Fisher’s simple set of a light-colored wood floor with a grand piano up left and percussion equipment up right is backed by a flat jungle gym of black piping. Her costumes are good, allowing for just enough minimal changes of costume pieces. Kimberly Purtell’s lighting is excellent, often providing a soft pervasive glow. I especially liked the hanging work lights.

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CCCAwards for the 2013-14 season

CCCAwards for the 2013-14 season

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Photo, Barb Gray.   Best design (Professional) by James Lavoie for The Financier. Winner of the new Cube Gallery award.

 

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Photo Kathi Langston THE CRITICS!!!

 

OTTAWA, November 17, 2014 – The Capital Critics Circle today announced the winners of the fifteenth annual theatre awards for plays presented in English in the National Capital Region during the 2013-2014 season. The winners are:

FEATURES

Ian Farthing  wins the Audrey Ashley award for excellence in his field. His work with the Saint Lawrence Shakespeare Festival opened up a professional Shakespeare Festivalfor all the actors in the area and opened new posibilities for theatre in the area…

Tim Oberholzer  won  the CCC special award for his performance as Hedwig ……in Hedwig and the  Angry Inch

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Photo: Nicole Milne, Cast of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Best professional production:The Avalon Studio’s production of Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet, directed by Geoff Gruson.

Best community theatre production:The Orpheus Musical Theatre Society’s production of Monty Python’s Spamalot, book and lyrics by Eric Idle, music by John Du Prez and Eric Idle, directed by Bob Lackey, musical direction by Terry Duncan, choreography by Christa Cullain.

Best director (professional):Ron Jenkins for Enron by Lucy Prebble, National Arts Centre English Theatre.

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Do You Want what I have got. A craigslist cantata: quiet jibing at human foibles.

Do You Want what I have got. A craigslist cantata: quiet jibing at human foibles.

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Bree Greig and Marguerite Witvoet

Photo: Barb Gray.

Richardson’s occasionally deranged sense of humour and eye for the poignant are well-paired with Hille’s partiality to the offbeat. The combination emerges in numbers like performer Bree Greig’s ode to transience, in which she sings about 300 stuffed penguins that she’d like to dispose of now that she’s finished university and is living, jobless, back at her parents’ home, and is aware that her youth is vanishing over the horizon. It’s a number that starts out funny and ends up wistful.

Dmitry Chepovetsky gives us a total scammer who offers, for a fee, to care for the pets of those who believe they’re going to be carted off to the ever-after in the coming Rapture. Chepovetsky, who’s a pleasure to watch, also depicts the just plain weird side of human desire when he sings an ad looking for someone to sit in a bathtub of noodles (cooked noodles, mind you) in a one-piece bathing suit. What part of the brain, you ask yourself, births such fantasies?

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Do you want what I have got? A Craigslist Cantata; Witty Cyber Hi-jinx at the NAC.

Do you want what I have got? A Craigslist Cantata; Witty Cyber Hi-jinx at the NAC.

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Bree Greig  Photo: Barbara Gray

Fans of the Cantata singers of Ottawa might wonder what the relation is between Craigslist and their own style of singing and musical accompaniment but they should be reassured that this is much closer to Cabaret . This collage of musical numbers that work to different degrees, brings together various popular rhythms , dance music, Kurt Weill ”ish” sounds of discordant and dramatic moments, musical parody and a lot more. A generally good musical score underlies this quirky musical event bringing to life a musical and physical interpretation of the nature of that web site that advertises everything, that seeks anything at all . It accumulates ads and letters that don’t connect, that don’t allow for any kind of traditional dramatic thread. In other words, at first glance it all appears to be pure chaos, projecting a cyber-microcosm of people searching for everything and anything and then wondering if anyone is listening, or if anyone cares! At least the musical plays heavily on that theme. Each musical number is an independent moment of its own and each number stands alone, some more strongly than others. Each one reveals the most intimate needs of the voices on line, transformed into musical sound expressing the most intimate desires, the most special lifestyles, the most inhabitual objects one searches for or needs to get rid of. And it all moves about on Robin Fisher’s set that shows rows of compartments along the back, representing the many categories that construct the site in space.

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Ashes to Ashes: Unicorn Theatre does justice to the haunting work

Ashes to Ashes: Unicorn Theatre does justice to the haunting work

On particularly dark days when I have binged too long on depressing world news or, as I am wont to do, taken a tumble down the darker holes of historical reading, a rather grim mood settles over me. In such cheerless moments, optimism becomes harder to summon and thoughts about the way we live and our never-ending ability to hurt one another start spinning. At first glance, Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes seems like the wrong play for me. A layered, disturbing work that touches obliquely on the Holocaust and, by extension, all of human history, it seems downright depressing. However, as horrifying as references to “babies being ripped out of their mother’s hands” by one of the main characters are, plays like Ashes to Ashes are a secret weapon against depression and pessimism. This is because Ashes to Ashes, while touching on the horrors of history, is at its core a play about our ability, whether innate or through an artistic medium such as theater, to empathize with our fellow humans, even if we haven’t suffered as they have. The more ability we have to understand others, the less of a chance there is that we will continue being the victims of history. Directed by University of Ottawa MFA Directing Candidate James Richardson and supervised by Dragana Varagić, Unicorn Theater’s production is haunting and stays with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Two characters, Rebecca and Devlin, confront each other in a lamp lit room. Their relationship is intentionally murky (is he a lover? therapist?) as he interrogates her about a violent, sexually dominant past lover. Rebecca’s answers are elliptical and often seem meandering. She answers his questions with more questions or non-sequiturs. Of course, when critiquing a production of Ashes to Ashes, it is imperative to remember that this isn’t a play about characters, but about ideas. Devlin and Rebecca are concrete entities which serve to house abstract ideas. Devlin, as mannered as he is, represents the aggressor through his relentless questioning. History for him is something entirely separate from himself, something to be compartmentalized, academically understood, and dragged from Rebecca if necessary. Rebecca, on the other hand, represents history’s empathetic subject. She identifies with both its victims and aggressors through her empathy, becoming an echo for its horrors as she slips in and out of memories that strongly suggest the deportation and interning of Jews in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Rebecca’s experience culminates as she is transformed into one of the women whose children are torn away on the train platform, while Devlin’s aggression grows until his apex echoes the violent actions of her former lover.

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Bad Jews: A Savagely Funny Play About Religion, Family, and Identity

Bad Jews: A Savagely Funny Play About Religion, Family, and Identity

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Photo: Craig Bailey. The actors are l. to r. Allison McCartan, Victor Shopov, Gillian Mariner Gordon.

Josh Harmon’s hilarious comedy Bad Jews at Boston’s Speakeasy Theatre deals with a serious, and for many, uncomfortable issue, secularism vs. religiosity. The play pits two extreme adversaries against one other. Formidable and pious Daphna (formerly known as Diana) a senior at Vassar, with plans to move to Israel, join the Israeli army, marry an Israeli boyfriend, and become a rabbi is at odds with her cousin Liam, an aggressive and decidedly non-religious graduate student in Japanese cultural youth studies, who intends to marry his WASP girlfriend. Two other characters, Liam’s brother, Jonah, performed with sensitivity by Alex Marz, who builds his characterization around being unobtrusive, and Liam’s girlfriend Melody, peacemaking and naïve, round out the cast. Through most of the performance, the latter two appear to be the play’s losers.

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LAURÉATS DES PRIX DE LA CRITIQUE | SAISON 2013-2014: Montréal et Québec.

LAURÉATS DES PRIX DE LA CRITIQUE | SAISON 2013-2014: Montréal et Québec.

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Christian Lapointe à Ottawa/Gatineau (Koltès :La Nuit juste avant les forêts ) _

Montréal, le 10 novembre 2014 – Les lauréats des Prix de la critique remis par
l’Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre (AQCT) pour la saison 2013-2014
sont…
Dans la catégorie « Montréal » :
OXYGÈNE, de Ivan Viripaev, traduit par Élisa Gravelot, Tania Moguilevskaia et Gilles Morel, dans une mise en scène
de Christian Lapointe, une production du Groupe de la Veillée.
De cette partition pour le moins vertigineuse, dix tableaux cristallisant les paradoxes de notre époque, juxtaposant les
propos et les tons les plus contrastés, Christian Lapointe a su déployer le sens avec maestria. En renouvelant le
rapport entre la scène et la salle, en gardant le spectateur captif sous une vaste tente, en forgeant un langage gestuel
fascinant, aussi expressif que mécanique, le metteur en scène s’est avancé sur un nouveau territoire des plus fertiles.
Les membres de l’AQCT tiennent également à saluer l’audace dont Carmen Jolin a fait preuve en invitant Lapointe à
créer sous la bannière de la Veillée.

Les autres finalistes étaient :
PIG, de Simon Boulerice, dans une mise en scène de Gaétan Paré, une production d’Abat-Jour Théâtre;
TU IRAS LA CHERCHER, de Guillaume Corbeil, dans une mise en scène de Sophie Cadieux, une production d’Espace
Go.

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Young Lady in White: History and Memory That Don’t Connect!

Young Lady in White: History and Memory That Don’t Connect!

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An impressive set by Patrice-Ann Forbes immediately arouses our curiosity; it exposes levels of an old house in Berlin with  a photo lab, dark room, sleeping areas and a rooftop space where one can watch the world go by.  The place is “haunted” by a living negative, a young girl, played by a perky, passionate and strong Catriona Leger, whose picture was taken by an anonymous photographer in 1932 at a resort on the Baltic Sea.  The subject of the picture returned to England but her photo was never developed…and so the living negative wanders through the house like a ghost, visible only to the audience. Thus begins her story which she performs  with her  white hair and  black dress,  waiting for someone to come along, reverse her negative appearance,  develop her , bring her back to her paper reality, so she can become herself in that  beautiful white dress she was wearing when the photo was taken. The enigma of the photographer, the quest for a developer, the memories of that girl who sees the world passing, from 1932 to the present, create layer  upon layer of narrative levels that  build up this monologue.   Catriona Leger  is a strong presence, shifting her tone, her rhythms, moving about the stage with much ease, capturing all the nuances entrenched in that text .  Yes it is a captivating performance because of the difficulty of the monologue and the complexity with relation to her gaze on history.  Projected images move across the back to illustrate what she captures through her seeing eye window as she peers into the street. watching history roll by.

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