Month: May 2016

Hello Dolly!: Suzart Production puts on good show in the face of last minute problems

Hello Dolly!: Suzart Production puts on good show in the face of last minute problems

Photo courtesy of Suzart Productions
Photo courtesy of Suzart Productions

Hello Dolly
Book by Michael Stewart
Music and lyrics by Jerry Herman
Based on The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder
Suzart Productions
Directed by Sue Fowler Dacey

Kudos to Suzart Productions for their dedication to the show-must-go-on principle at the heart of show business.

Just a week before opening night, the leading lady fell ill. What do you do when you have no understudy to play Dolly Levi in the musical that revolves around her every move in the business of matchmaking/meddling?

Some companies might have postponed the show. Not Suzart.

Musical director (vocals) Holly Villeneuve stepped into the massive role at the last minute. The cast and crew, particularly the costume department, who made a new wardrobe for the new Dolly, and leading man Gerry Jacques, went into high gear. Hello Dolly opened on May 26 as scheduled and delivered a creditable production that gave no indication of the crisis.

Read More Read More

In Times of Trouble: Underdirected, but funny and touching

In Times of Trouble: Underdirected, but funny and touching

Photo: TooToo Theatre
Photo: TooToo Theatre

In Times of Trouble
Written and performed by Martha Chaves
TotoToo Theatre

Part autobiography, part stand-up comedy routine, this one-woman show is often very funny and, occasionally, even moving.

Telling the story of her life through her alter-ego, Maria, comedienne Martha Chaves describes her childhood in Nicaragua, the earthquake and civil war that forced her and her mother, Gloria, to seek refuge in Guatemala and why her mother sent her to Montreal when Martha/Maria was just 17.

Primarily, In Times of Trouble is a way for Chaves to work through her conflicted relationship with her mother. The “dragon lady” ruled with a rod of iron as she was growing up, says Maria, even reading her diaries — the one she kept for public consumption and the private missive, describing all the details of her sexual encounters.

Read More Read More

Tuneful Patsy Cline in Gananoque

Tuneful Patsy Cline in Gananoque

Tyler Murree, Alison MacDonald and David Archibald; Photo: Barbara Zimonick
Tyler Murree, Alison MacDonald and David Archibald; Photo: Barbara Zimonick

A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline
By Dean Regan
Produced in association with Western Canada Theatre, Kamloops, BC
Directed by Daryl Cloran
1000 Islands Playhouse

I’m not sure what to say about “A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline” by Dan Regan, except that it’s not really a musical. It’s more a terrific concert or night club act.  Loosely structured as a radio show tribute to Patsy Cline, it’s emceed by Little Big Man, played by the energetic and versatile Tyler Murree. We see Patsy, the excellent Alison MacDonald, only in performance, never in her off-stage persona.  A few sparse biographical details are supplied by Little Big Man.  Entertaining diversions are added by the insertion of old radio commercials for Mr. Clean and Ajax, performed by Little Big Man and the great on-stage band.

Ross Nichol’s versatile set has a raised broadcast booth stage right, the 4-piece band is on raised platforms center, and the whole framed stage left by two dimensional giant radios.  There’s a scrim up center on which are projected the names of the various venues where Patsy performs.  Of Patsy’s multiple costumes by Jayne Christopher, by far the most flattering is the Act II long black gown.  Davida Tkach’s lighting is good and Ben Malone’s sound is excellent and well balanced.

Read More Read More

The Shaw Festival Takes Alice Down A Dismal Rabbit Hole

The Shaw Festival Takes Alice Down A Dismal Rabbit Hole

Photo: David Cooper
Photo: David Cooper

Alice in Wonderland

Adapted for the stage by PETER HINTON
Based on the book by LEWIS CARROLL
Directed by PETER HINTON
Musical direction by ALLEN COLE

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. —  Briefly — very briefly — you’re thinking that the Shaw Festival’s expensive new version of Alice In Wonderland will be a thing of wonder and delight.

Director Peter Hinton and designers Eo Sharpe (sets) and Kevin Lamotte (lighting) begin by giving us startling visuals that transform the Festival Theatre stage into a miracle of shimmering, pastoral  beauty. We’re entering the 19th Century world of Lewis Carroll and witnessing the genesis of a classic work of children’s literature. And the  very fact that Carroll (in reality Oxford cleric and mathematician Charles Dodgson) is in a boat, gliding tranquilly through a watery landscape that isn’t really there, provides early assurance that we will, in fact, be entering a truly make-believe dimension.

A pity that it soon proves to be the wrong kind of make-believe.

Read More Read More

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike a sharp-tongued, wistful comedy

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike a sharp-tongued, wistful comedy

Photo: Tony Caldwell
Photo: Tony Caldwell

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
By Christopher Durang
Plosive Productions
Directed by David Whiteley

Can one find sanctuary in Bucks County, Pa., rather than journeying all the way to Moscow? Is it possible to enjoy Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike without knowing the plays of Anton Chekhov?

To answer the former, you’ll have to see Durang’s show, rendered much more satisfactorily in the second than in the first act by Plosive Productions. As to the latter; no knowledge required.

Oh, there are plenty of references to Chekhov in this often sharp-tongued but ultimately gentle, even wistful comedy, set in rural Pennsylvania. Chief among those allusions: The names of the three main, middle-aged characters — Vanya (Chris Ralph), Sonia (Mary Ellis) and Masha (Teri Loretto-Valentik). The siblings (Sonia, as she likes to remind one and all, was adopted) were named by their academic parents after Chekhov characters, and they spend much of the play seeking their own, true identities.

Read More Read More

In the Body of the World: A View of Eve Ensler’s World

In the Body of the World: A View of Eve Ensler’s World

Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva
Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva

In the Body of the World

Written and performed by Eve Ensler

American Repertory Theater

Eve Ensler, best known for her play The Vagina Monologues is, in addition to being a writer and actress, a social activist who has devoted her life and work to battling sexual violence against the female body worldwide. She has visited sixty countries in her efforts to help and empower women. Her latest piece, a one-woman show In the Body of the World, adapted from Ensler’s eponymous memoir, is being premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The play tells stories of female anguish as experienced by Eve Ensler and contemporary Congolese women. It attempts to intertwine Ensler’s experience of cancer with the atrocities committed against women’s bodies in the Congo’s civil war. However, it focuses far more on the details of Ensler’s life with the Congo serving to bookend the piece. Eve Ensler narrates; she plays no other characters.

Read More Read More

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike: A weak script and messy directing offer up few laughs

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike: A weak script and messy directing offer up few laughs

Photo: Tony Caldwell
Photo: Tony Caldwell

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

By Christopher Durang
Plosive Productions
Directed by David Whiteley

Reviewed by Rajka Stefanovska

 Christopher Ferdinand Durang is a playwright whose works, written in the style of absurd comedy, deal with issues such as homosexuality, child abuse and Roman Catholic dogma and culture. While his Brodway commercial success Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is still a comedy, his signature element – absurdity – is definitely missing. The story about three middle aged single siblings, whose lives are full of insecurities, futility and unfulfilled dreams, is suppose to tell us about alienation and the meaningless of today’s society. Although the message is an undeniable truth, the way it is told comes off a bit mild, naïve and too obvious. Its combination of superficial comedic elements, too many quotations from Chekov and a long monologue about numerous old American shows (which makes the play rather local – Durang is performed worldwide) gives the audience enough to laugh at, but certainly not a lot to think about.

Read More Read More

Chekhov through an absurdist mirror – Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

Chekhov through an absurdist mirror – Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

vanya-and-sonia-and-masha-and-spike2
Teri Loretto-Valentik, foreground, who plays Masha in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, now playing at The Gladstone until June 5. (Photo by Tony Caldwell)

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
By Christopher Durang
Plosive Productions
Directed by David Whiteley

Playwright Christopher Durang has referred to his award-winning 2012 absurdist comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike as putting the works of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov through a blender.

It is an apt description. The three siblings of the title are named after characters in Chekhov’s plays (because their scholarly parents loved the 19 th -century playwright’s works.) The three — a brother, a sister and an adopted sister, rather than Chekhov’s three sisters — attempt to cope with Chekhovian misery and insecurity until peace finally descends over their lake and their not-quite Chekhovian cherry orchard. (Whether 10 or11 trees constitute an orchard is a point of discussion throughout.)

Vanya and Sonia (being adopted increases her self-pity and insignificance, as she constantly points out) rely on the sameness of their days in the home they never left, after their parents’ death. They watch for a blue heron (rather than Chekhov’s seagull). Vanya (inspired by the character of Konstantin in The Seagull) writes an odd play in which a molecule is the lead character, read by a young visiting neighbour, named Nina (of course).

Read More Read More

The Shaw Festival Triumphs with Bernard Shaw’s once notorious Mrs. Warren’s Profession

The Shaw Festival Triumphs with Bernard Shaw’s once notorious Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Photo: David Cooper
Photo: David Cooper

Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Written by Bernard Shaw

Directed by Edna Holmes

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — It’s an explosive mother-daughter confrontation — and it’s a lulu.

It happens near the end of the Shaw Festival’s marvellous revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, George Bernard Shaw’s once-banned play about the economic benefits of brothel-keeping. On the one hand, you have feisty young Vivie Warren (Jennifer Dzialoszynski) coming to terms with the knowledge that she owes her   university education and her place in society to her mother’s illicit earnings. In the other corner, there’s Mrs. Warren (Nicole Underhay) defiant in the face of her daughter’s scorn and scarcely able to comprehend that she’s about to be shown the door by her ungrateful child.

It’s a moment of high drama in an outstanding production that shows how pertinent many of the issues raised by this late Victorian play remain today. Director Eda Holmes underlines its continuing relevance through an audacious device. At the beginning we’re in the kind of private men’s club that still exists in today’s London and is notorious for resisting change. The four males we encounter are clearly of the present — there may be an ancient gramophone in the corner of the panelled drawing room (designed by Patrick Clark for this production with a bow to the sumptuous trappings of class and privilege) but this is also a world of text messaging and mobiles.

Read More Read More

The Shaw Festival Delivers a Worthy Uncle Vanya

The Shaw Festival Delivers a Worthy Uncle Vanya

Photo: David Cooper
Photo: David Cooper

Written by Anton Chekhov

Adapted by Annie Baker

Directed by Jackie Maxwell

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONT. —  Jackie Maxwell, the Shaw Festival’s retiring artistic director, has always shown a concern for mood and texture in her productions. To be sure, she’s adept at engineering sharply defined dramatic contrasts, but she also understands the subtle power of an extended moment of silence and — unlike more timid directors — is bold enough to utilize it. There’s a musical sensibility at play here: yes, we can embrace the thunder and lightning of the allegro passages, but let’s also heed the more reflective nuances of the adagio movement.

Read More Read More