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.
At the Mountaintop there is doubt, uncertainty and humanity

At the Mountaintop there is doubt, uncertainty and humanity

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Photo Andrée Lanthier

First published on Artsfile, January 29  2019

One of the first things we learn about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in The Mountaintop, Katori Hall’s play about King’s final night before his assassination on April 4, 1968, is that he has a hole in one of his socks. He’s just entered his no-frills room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., the motel where he’ll be shot the next day. Tired, frustrated but still seized by his endless battle for social justice, King shucks his shoes, and his left big toe pokes out of his sock for all the world to see.

It’s a moment of vulnerability, of imperfection in a man who – in Hall’s take on him – knew he was imperfect but whose great challenge is to accept that fact. …

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Lungs a piece of stripped-down theatre with a fully packed message

Lungs a piece of stripped-down theatre with a fully packed message

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First published in Artsfile.ca January 7, 2019

Megan Carty and Matt Hertendy star in Lungs at Arts Court.

What do you do when you’re rehearsing a show that has no set, no props, no costume changes and no miming but does have a storyline that unfolds in multiple locales at different times?

Clearly, you head to IKEA.

At least that’s what Megan Carty and Matt Hertendy did to rehearse one of the scenes in Lungs, Duncan Macmillan’s two-hander about a young couple struggling with whether to have a child in a consumer-driven world dogged by climate change. The show, a remount of Carty and Hertendy’s award-winning 2018 Ottawa Fringe Festival production, is at Arts Court starting Jan. 10. …

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The Seventh Season: Artistic Director Eric Coates remaking GCTC one play at a time

The Seventh Season: Artistic Director Eric Coates remaking GCTC one play at a time

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Article first published on Artsfile.ca January 2  2018

Eric Coates is the artistic director of the Great Canadian Theatre Company.Now into his seventh season as artistic director, has Eric Coates remade the Great Canadian Theatre Company in his own image?

GCTC needed, if not a re-making, at least a firm hand when Coates took on the job in 2012.  The ebullient Coates, coming from a nine-year stint as artistic director of the popular Blyth Festival in southwestern Ontario, seemed to bring with him a fresh perspective and a sharp sense of what sells which was essential for the organization. The GCTC has been around since 1975 but was still carrying a capital debt of more than $500,000 because of the move from its old home on Gladstone Avenue to new digs on Wellington Street West.

The question of refashioning GCTC in his own image seems not to have occurred to Coates. “My personality and taste show up, absolutely. Does it show up consistently? I don’t know.” …

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Bed and Breakfast a rom-com romp with a hint of reality at the GCTC

Bed and Breakfast a rom-com romp with a hint of reality at the GCTC

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Photo André Lanthier

Mark Crawford and Paul Dunn in a scene from Bed and Breakfast now running at the GCTC. Photo: Andrée Lanthier

The plot sounds formulaic as all get-out, doesn’t it?

Two gay guys, tired of big city Toronto, move to a small town and open a bed and breakfast in an old house. They encounter a mix of acceptance and hostility in their new surroundings, struggle with everything from an endless reno to guests from hell, and have to make a momentous decision a year after opening their business. …

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The Hockey Sweater: Building a better musical with a little help from the Creation Fund

The Hockey Sweater: Building a better musical with a little help from the Creation Fund

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Patrick Langston on artsfile.com

Photo Leslie Schechter

What happens when an existing show suddenly gets $200,000 in funding for expansion and fine-tuning? If it’s The Hockey Sweater: A Musical, very good things occur, according to the show’s co-writers Emil Sher and Jonathan Munro.  The musical is an adaptation of Roch Carrier’s beloved short story about young Roch, whose universe is knocked sideways when he mistakenly receives a Maple Leafs sweater from Eaton’s instead of a Habs No. 9 jersey, like Maurice Richard’s.

The show is a Segal Centre production. It premiered in Montreal last year and plays the National Arts Centre starting Dec. 5. Between the two runs, it got $200,000 from the NAC’s National Creation Fund, which was launched in 2017 to help develop ambitious new Canadian works. Over the next several years, the fund will invest up to $3 million annually in theatre, dance, music and other productions. …

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Drowning Girls a chilling portrayal of misogyny and murder

Drowning Girls a chilling portrayal of misogyny and murder

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Drowning Girls  Photo Andrew Alexander

Katie Ryerson, Sarah Finn, Jacqui du Toit in The Drowning Girls. Photo: Andrew Alexander

There’s not much on the stage. Three bathtubs, a metal dress form and shower head hanging above each, a backdrop of panelled walls: That’s about it.

Designed by Brian Smith, it’s an apt setting for The Drowning Girls, a ghost story about three British women who, all murdered by the same man in the early years of the last century, were considered – and considered themselves – insubstantial. Insubstantial, that is, until their murderer charmed them into marriage, thereby making them, as one of the trio says, “a useful member of society.” …

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Peter Hinton’s return to the NAC Stage

Peter Hinton’s return to the NAC Stage

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October 12, 2018   Artsfile.ca

When Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell opens at the NAC, it will mark a significant occasion for director Peter Hinton. Although Hinton directed the revisionist opera Louis Riel in Southam Hall last year, Silence is the first time he’s been back with NAC English Theatre since 2012, when he completed his seven-year tenure as its artistic director.

Trina Davies’ play about Mabel Hubbard Bell, the deaf wife of Alexander Graham Bell explores the story of a strong and remarkable woman who had a major influence on her famous husband but whose life is little known to most of us. Notably the production also features a blend of deaf, hard of hearing and hearing performers.

Coincidentally, Mabel was honoured this summer when the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada unveiled plaques commemorating both her and Beinn Bhreagh Hall, the Bells’ summer home in Cape Breton.

Hinton is delighted to bring the show about Mabel to his old stomping ground. …

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Fierce offers a believable portrayal of loneliness

Fierce offers a believable portrayal of loneliness

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Patrick Langston 
October 4, 2018
0Arts file 

Pandora Topp as Maggie and Emmelia Gordon as Jayne in a scene from Fierce. Photo courtesy of Black Sheep Theatre.

Ultimately, we’re all orphans, aren’t we?

Sure, we carve out a place in the world, cultivate relationships, maybe try shielding ourselves from the truth of our loneliness with drugs or booze. But in the end we’re each of us alone.

At least that’s the position of Maggie in George F. Walker’s new two-hander Fierce now at The Gladstone.

Turfed from her home at a tender age to grow up on the streets – “discarded” is how she describes it – Maggie (Pandora Topp) is a tightly wound therapist with an apparent grip on her life. But an undermining sense of abandonment and alienation has never left her. “I don’t really know who I am,” she says at one point. …

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The Virgin Trial speaks clearly across the centuries to our time

The Virgin Trial speaks clearly across the centuries to our time

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Anie Richer and Lydia Riding in a scene from The Virgin Trial. Photo: Andrew Alexander.  Posted on Artsfile.ca

At one point in The Virgin Trial, Kate Hennig’s fleet, modern-day crime drama about Queen Elizabeth I as a teenager, the future monarch proclaims, “I can be anything I set my mind to.”

It sounds like a variation on that silly bromide, “You can be anything you choose to be.” However, in the case of young Bess, as she’s known to all and sundry, it’s a fact. Indeed, a young woman’s resolute creation of herself in the face of gargantuan odds – read, a power structure embedded in older, predatory males – is what gives Bess’s story as told by Hennig its sharp, contemporary urgency. …

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GCTC: Playwright tracks the Tudors and our fascination with sexual power

GCTC: Playwright tracks the Tudors and our fascination with sexual power

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  By Patrick Langston
September 7, 2018 . first posted on Artsfile.

Lydia Riding and Attila Clemann in a scene from Kate Hennig’s The Virgin Queen. Photo: Andrew Alexander

We can’t get enough of the Tudors, can we? From movies and historical fiction to the television series The Tudors, the tumultuous times of Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I, in particular, have long held us in thrall.
…

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