Author: Patrick Langston

Patrick Langston is the theatre critic for the Ottawa Citizen. In addition to reviews of professional and the occasional community theatre production, he writes a monthly theatre column and previews of major shows for the Citizen. Patrick also writes for Ottawa Magazine, Carleton University Magazine, and Penguin Eggs -Canada's folk, roots and world music magazine. Patrick lives in Navan.
Well-executed Waitress hampered by poor sound

Well-executed Waitress hampered by poor sound

How do you maim a perfectly good musical? Run the show through an abysmally tuned sound system in the NAC’s Southam Hall, one that, on opening night, cranked the volume but frequently made performers sound like they were singing into soup cans, distorting voices so badly that, except for a couple of quieter numbers, lyrics were incomprehensible.

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Groundbreaking festival of Indigenous theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Where the Blood Mixes

Groundbreaking festival of Indigenous theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Where the Blood Mixes

Courtesy of the National Arts Centre,. Marc Collin and Soleil Launière

 Sometimes it’s only by seeing a new production of a show that you realize what was lacking in an earlier version. That’s the case with Where the Blood Mixes by actor/playwright/director Kevin Loring, now artistic director of NAC Indigenous Theatre.  

A searing, often funny and ultimately semi-hopeful exploration of the intergenerational legacy of residential schools, the play was performed at the National Arts Centre in 2010, a year after winning the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Drama. Directed by Glynis Leyshon, the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre/Belfry Theatre production was vivid, with an on-stage musician and an evocative design that included projections. 

 Then along came director/translator Charles Bender, who reimagined the play in both official languages, stripping it to its essentials and presenting it in the round. Bender’s version, performed in both English and French, was part of Mòshkamo: Indigenous Arts Rising, the two-week festival that rang in the inaugural season of NAC Indigenous Theatre in September. 

Bender’s production, practically devoid of set or props, is immediate and raw in ways the earlier production wasn’t. The intermingled story of the two central characters, Floyd (Marco Collin) and Mooch (Charles Bender) their denial of the damage inflicted by residential schools, their inability to connect with those most important to them, their eviscerating loneliness — leaps unmediated from stage to audience and back to the stage in a kind of dramatic loop that underscores the multiple circles of the play itself, including the hoops of pain, hopelessness and potential healing that help define Floyd and Mooch and the sharing circle that ended each performance.    

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Trace at the GCTC: play effictively traces impact of identity and family through time.

Trace at the GCTC: play effictively traces impact of identity and family through time.

Jeff Ho wrote and stars in trace. “We are women who do what must be done.”So says the cigarette-puffing, mahjong-addicted great-grandmother in Jeff Ho’s one-man play trace, now at the NAC.  The fallout of doing what you must do, especially in fraught circumstances, is the subject of Ho’s taut, chamber piece about three generations of women in his family.

The nimble Ho plays his sharp-tongued great-grandmother, his icy grandmother and his hard-assed mother on a bare of any set except two pianos, which face each other. A scattering of items – lit cigarettes which appear in the great-grandmother’s fingers seemingly from nowhere, a few ashtrays, some sheet music, the clothes on the performer’s back – are the only props.

From this spare assembly of materials and a rich if occasionally confusing script, Ho fashions a textured world in which acute survival instincts, emotional defensiveness and a particularly tough form of love allow the three women to single-handedly raise their families as they struggle for a better life.

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Oleanna’s take on sexual harassment holds up well

Oleanna’s take on sexual harassment holds up well

A scene from Oleanna with Madeleine Julian as Carol and Guy Buller as John. Photo: Erika Scrivens

Oleanna, David Mamet’s then-startling play about sexual harassment and power dynamics, debuted in 1992. So much has happened since then — including, here in Ottawa, allegations of harassment against a city councillor and a former federal senator — that one books a ticket for the current SevenThirty production of Mamet’s play at The Gladstone wondering if the show is going to hold up.

It does. In spades.

The production, directed by John P. Kelly, does get off to a sluggish start as we watch a pedantic professor of education named John (Guy Buller) and Carol, a vulnerable student played by Madeleine Julian, circle around Carol’s inability to understand what her professor is going on about in class.

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GCTC’s Bang Bang a fast-paced, funny satire

GCTC’s Bang Bang a fast-paced, funny satire

You think you have a handle on the messy business of appropriation? Then you haven’t seen Kat Sandler’s quick-witted Bang Bang, now at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in a solid homegrown production.

Consider this: Sandler, a white playwright with a taste for nuance, has written a play in which an obtuse white playwright with a taste for social justice has written a play inspired by a real-life (well, real-life within Sandler’s play) shooting of a young black man by a black female police officer.

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Moshkamo :Historic opening for NAC’s indigenous theatre in Ottawa

Moshkamo :Historic opening for NAC’s indigenous theatre in Ottawa

No two ways about it: Opening night of Marie Clements’ play The Unnatural and Accidental Women at the NAC was significant.

It marked the revival of a respected writer’s story about murdered Indigenous women that, including its premiere in 2000, has had only a couple of previous productions (yes, alarm bells did chime at that infrequency). More importantly, it was the first show in the inaugural season of NAC Indigenous Theatre, a much-anticipated landmark in Canadian theatre.

Expectation and goodwill had the audience buzzing on Friday.

Kevin Loring, the passionate artistic director of the new Indigenous theatre department, greeted us, as did Jillian Keiley, Loring’s counterpart in NAC English Theatre (the show is a co-production by the two departments).

Algonquin elder Annie Smith St. Georges, who’s been welcoming NAC English Theatre audiences to traditional Algonquin Territory for some time, spoke before the show, concluding her introductory remarks by saying, “Miigwech, and have a great time.”

And there’s the rub.

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Odyssey Theatre’s Bonds of interest unmasks flawed humanity with panache

Odyssey Theatre’s Bonds of interest unmasks flawed humanity with panache

Bonds of interest  Photo Barb Gray

Deep into the show, a piece of sweet, wistful recorded music begins, a signal that, even in the world of The Bonds of Interest, tenderness and grace may have a foothold.

That’s reassuring — at least a little bit. Because everywhere else in Jacinto Benavente’s 1907 comic play, here newly translated by Catherine Boyle and Laurie Steven, duplicity, cynicism, greed and violence call the shots. Whether that flicker of musical hope — we learn that it’s a song called The Kingdom of Souls, suggesting a community of like-minded goodness — stands a chance of surviving, let alone triumphing, remains an open question.

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Company of fools: No foolin’. This Romeo and Juliet is a capering classic.

Company of fools: No foolin’. This Romeo and Juliet is a capering classic.

Romeo and Juliet  Photo JVL Photography

A Company of Fools presents Romeo and Juliet. Photo: JVL Photography

Has A Company of Fools rediscovered its mojo? After a series of hits and misses, including last summer’s unfocused Twelfth Night, and an apparent struggle over just how much of their beloved foolery they want to inject into their shows, the Fools have bounced back to form with a Romeo & Juliet that’s adventurous, carnival-like and ultimately serious.

Exuberance defines the show. That’s in keeping with the storyline about young, upstart love. But it also reflects this production’s timely championing of those who, fed up with oppression, challenge power, tradition and entitlement.

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Ottawa Fringe: reviews by Patrick Langston from Artsfile.ca

Ottawa Fringe: reviews by Patrick Langston from Artsfile.ca

Magnificence of Fringe is Entangled with Pinter, Magic Mike & 52 Pickup

These performances were reviewed June 16. The Ottawa Fringe Festival continues until June 23 at various downtown venues. Tickets & information: ottawafringe.com, 613-232-6162. Pinter Stew (Third

Four on the floor at the Fringe

God is a Scottish Drag Queen (Mike Delamont, Victoria, BC) The world could use a few more laughs these days. Fortunately, God is at hand.

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