Shaw Festival 2014 Archives - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

A Lovely Sunday for Crève Coeur is a curious hybrid that suggests Williams is wrestling with his own demons.

By Alvina Ruprecht | August 12, 2014

Photo. David Cooper. Julain Molnar as Miss Gluck

In the Shaw Festival programme, professor/critic Annette J. Saddik writes that in the 1960’s , after his last complete full length play, Williams was exploring “anti-realistic styles, embracing contradictions (…) shifting between minimalism and excess, the tragic and the comic”. This comment certainly introduces us to A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur where the contradiction is already inscribed in the title of the play. However, I would certainly not define Williams’ earlier work as “realistic” by any means with its strong tendency towards expressionism (Streetcar) and even elements of symbolist drama (Menagerie) that he himself has explained in several of his introductions. Nevertheless the anti-realism is very clear in this work and if Creve Coeur is noted for its “tragicomic playfulness” by Saddik, the play as well as this staging, pinpoint the problems that arise with Williams’ attempts at comedy.

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The Charity That Began at Home: A Forgotten Edwardian Comedy That is a Sheer Delight

By Jamie Portman | August 12, 2014

Martin Happer as Hugh Verreker and Julia Course as Margery in The Charity that Began at Home. Photo by David Cooper. .

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — One of the happiest aspects of a Shaw Festival summer is an encounter with its latest archaeological discovery.

The people who run this internationally celebrated theatre are serious about its central mandate — to explore the world of Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. And that, happily, has led to the rediscovery of neglected dramatists from the past. …

Cabaret at the Shaw Festival: Director Peter Hinton Goes the Phantasmagoric Route For a World that Emerges From the Dying Embers of the Weimar Republic.

By Jamie Portman | August 12, 2014

Juan Chioran as the Emcee. Photo by David Cooper.

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — You can’t be entirely sure what is happening in the final sombre moments of the Shaw Festival’s production of Cabaret. Indeed, there’s the suggestion that Cliff Bradshaw — the expatriate young American who has come to pursue a writing career in Berlin amidst the dying embers of the Weimar Republic and the rising tide of Nazi Germany — won’t make it home safely. After all, we last see him engulfed in the hellish inferno of designer Michael Gianfrancesco’s skeletal set.

The latter, looking like something lifted out of a Fritz Lang film, is an ominously ambiguous concoction of steps and scaffolding, of blinking lights and yawning voids. It can morph into the infamous Kit-Kat Club — although it’s not really the Kit-Kat Club we have known in previous treatments of this classic musical — or it become Fraulein Schneider’s boarding house — although again it’s doesn’t seem quite right because there’s something fragmented, even intangible, about the way its overlapping worlds are presented to us.

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Ottawa Fringe 2014. Moonlight After Midnight

By Capital Critics Circle | June 22, 2014

Reviewed by Kat Fournier

The play opens with a man seated on a wooden chair, eyes closed, in an otherwise simple setting. A hotel room, we soon learn. A woman enters, and the audience believes they are witnessing a long awaited reunion. Suddenly, the dialogue shifts and from thereon-in it is impossible to know what is real and what is not. This play uses the fictionality of the stage world to keep the audience guessing, and it is a totally mind-blowing experience. The script toys with the audience, constantly shifting the story so that the line between reality and fiction blurs. But there is a constant: These two characters are meeting on a night where a rare comet can be seen just after midnight. The comet will pass by again in precisely ten years, and so they make a pact. Until the final moment, the play delivers no answers and only more questions. This play is everything I’ve ever wanted out of theatre. To say that Martin Dockery and Vanessa Quesnelle’s chemistry is riveting would be an understatement. Don’t miss this play.

Plays at Venu C. Courtroom.

Moonlight After Midnight

Written by Martin Dockery