Category: Theatre in Canada

Virtual programme of Odyssey theatre opens in May ..35th anniversary of the ODYSSEY performing season in strathcona park.

Virtual programme of Odyssey theatre opens in May ..35th anniversary of the ODYSSEY performing season in strathcona park.

Odyssey Theatre Cancels 35th Season  Launches A Virtual Odyssey.    

 

With great regret, Odyssey Theatre has made the difficult decision to cancel our Theatre Under the Stars production this summer, due to the global health crisis. We were looking forward to celebrating our 35th anniversary performing in Strathcona Park. But the health and safety of our audiences, artists and staff is our number one priority. We hope you understand that this was a difficult but unavoidable choice.

But now for some great news! Our artists are hard at work creating some amazing theatre you can enjoy from the safety and comfort of your home.   See Odyssey like never before with A Virtual Odyssey – a rich online theatrical series of podcasts, readings, webinars and workshops that offers something for everyone.

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Odyssey theatre cancels Theatre Under the Stars and brings creative magic to the virtual stage!!!

Odyssey theatre cancels Theatre Under the Stars and brings creative magic to the virtual stage!!!

Bonds of Interest   Photo Barb Gray
Arlequin (Mitchel Rose), Crispin (Ross Mullan), El Capitan (Bruce Spinney)

OTTAWA –Odyssey Theatre has made the difficult decision to cancel this summer’s Theatre Under the Stars production in Strathcona Park due to the global health crisis. Rather than going dark, Odyssey will launch A Virtual Odyssey–an innovative digital theatre series to captivateaudiences with creative and interactive online programsfor families, youth, adults and artists.“While we are disappointed not to presentour 35thseason, the safety of our audiences and artists comes first. But I am thrilled to launch an excitingonline theatre series that will bring Odyssey into the homes of our patrons,and reach new audiencesacross Canada. People can help support our artists while enjoyingOdyssey in a whole new way.” says Artistic Director Laurie Steven.

Bringing Professional Theatre Directly Into Your Home Steven, an award-winning director and playwright,along witha talented team of actors, designers and playwrights, are creatingentertaining online programs that will offer something for everyone.Anew podcast seriesis sure to enchant audiences. Odyssey’s Wondrous Talesis an 8-episode podcast where tricksters and sages, villains and heroines will transport you to far away mythic worlds. Writers and actors will perform new Canadian versions of diverse folktales from around the world.

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Thoughts on the pandemic, confinement and the theatre community in Ottawa and the region

Thoughts on the pandemic, confinement and the theatre community in Ottawa and the region

Corioolanus

 

You must have noticed that there have been no reviews lately. This of course reflects the situation in Ottawa  which shows us that there are no live performances happening in the city because of confinement.  However, many artsits and many theatre groups are working on virtual performances, and video tapes that reflect past performances that are being brought back to local audiences. Stratford is showing last seasons performances on a regular basis, the Gladstone has presented  Pierre Brault and is no doubt preparing other on line events.  Much behond Ottawa you can find performances coming in from Russia (Moscow), France, Germany and a lot of countries where professional theatres are still trying to show as much as they can from their facebooks or their own sites.  Take the time to google all  the theatres in the world including theatres in Canada of course and you will no doubt come across some exciting events that are often free but not always.  It is important that the artists involved make a bit of money to continue their work.

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The Assembly – NAC: In Search of a Middle Ground

The Assembly – NAC: In Search of a Middle Ground

 

photo Maxime Côté   The Assembly

No longer is there a “safe place” on the Canadian political spectrum; to be moderate is to be a mere bystander to fascism and anarchy, while to cling to either ideological extreme is to engage in bigotry or naïveté. Trump’s America leaves no room for a middle ground, nor does it open adequate space for level-headed debate; Trudeau’s Canada, according to Porte Parole’s unnerving verbatim play, The Assembly – Montreal, isn’t far behind. Gone, seemingly, are the days of the Canadian theatrical identity – sentimentality for its own sake, polite facades spackled over mid-left political leanings.

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Peggy’s Song: a sincere exploration of grief which asks important questions.

Peggy’s Song: a sincere exploration of grief which asks important questions.

photo oliver photos  Peggy’s Song

Peggy’s Song, the final production of Theatre Kingston’s 2019-20 season, provides a light-hearted respite from the serious dramas shown in the fall (the socially consciousdriven Welcome to my Underworld and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days). To be sure, there is a serious story undergirding this play by long-time writer Jim Garrard, directed by Jacob James, making it fitting with the theme of this year’s season. Yet seemed to be a less ceremonious and more relaxed event at the same time, compared to the two previous productions. I suspect that this has to do with the play’s equal blend of comedy with tragedy, which resulted many laughs being periodically elicited from the audience.  

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Cold refreshing Identity: Take de Milk, Nah?A Bold and Necessary Success at the National arts centre

Cold refreshing Identity: Take de Milk, Nah?A Bold and Necessary Success at the National arts centre

 

photo Andrew Alexander

The National Arts Centre’s website calls Jivesh Parasram’s Take d Milk, Nah? a “highly-hyphenated story about the search for identity.” This is certainly the case: Parasram’s burst onto the national scene is a not-quite identity play, an Indo-Caribbean-Hindu-Canadian hour-and-a-half of reconciling experience and impact, and a nearly-incredible solo show. Take d Milk, Nah?, in its insistence on the in-between, is a landmark piece of theatre for the NAC – if not for dramaturgical finesse, then for unmistakable, commendable certainty in itself and in its own importance.

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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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A Case for Hadestown.

A Case for Hadestown.

To escape the mundanity of our own everyday.

To revel in the ephemerality of storytelling.

To imagine, to empathize, to learn, to transmit.

The reasons we still attend, enjoy, and review theatre are remarkably similar to the those for which we recycle Greek myths, even in a 2020 beyond what our predecessors could have conceptualized. We can attribute this cycle to the comfort of habit, or perhaps, more grandly, to an ideological belief in intergenerational storytelling, regardless of the tellers’ own bittersweet understanding of fate. We, for the most part, know how the myths end: Icarus loses to his pride, Achilles to his brawn, Orpheus to his crippling self-doubt. We also know that a curtain designates onstage space as sacred, that imminent dramatic action is the sensationalized product of artistic collaboration, that seemingly-alive lights have a consciousness somewhere in a small booth in the ether of a given auditorium.

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Robin Hood: the Ottawa Christmas Panto has matured into a much more substantial performance without sacrificing any of the fun!!!

Robin Hood: the Ottawa Christmas Panto has matured into a much more substantial performance without sacrificing any of the fun!!!

 

Robin Hood. Photo Dominique Gibbons

An  unexpected pleasure this  year. The panto seems to be geared for adults as much as for young ones with nasty jabs at Doug Ford, at Brexit,  at Ottawa’s   problematic light rail and much more to  titillate the adults .There was also an  extremely naughty Nanny Annie, the ‘dame’ played  by the  irreplaceable  Constant Bernard   who is supposed to be Maid Marion’s  nursemaid while flirting outrageously with certain males in the audience  and launching  jokes  meant for fun-loving adults only!.  The Brilliant panto dame, our Ninny Nanny   is back in Ottawa now after an absence of 2 years.  It is such a pleasure to find her still sporting that great voice which  takes over the whole  theatre,  a stage presence  that crushes everyone else and a magic that turns her  whacky costume into a chef d’oeuvre of grotesque  pop art  à la Cirque du Soleil  thanks to costume designer  Lu-Anne Connell’s magical sense of humour .

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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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