March 2015 - Page 3 of 3 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 13, 2015

Photo. Tristram Kenton/Guardian.

Recent films in Ottawa have shown us radically different perspectives of India and the contrast is astonishing for those of us who do not know the country. The beautiful film The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the sequel to the film The Best exotic Marigold Hotel shows us upwardly mobile Hindu families, property owners who are working with the British Elderly and Beautiful who join the locals in Jaipur to renovate a hotel in ruins while preparing a sumptuous wedding ceremony that ends in lavish fireworks and Bollywood style dancing A feel good movie that shows Indian upper middle classes from a British perspective where everyone goes home happy.
This new live performance Behind the Beautiful Forevers , brought in by satellite, the first ever National Theatre production with an all British-Asian cast says director Rufus Norris proudly, shows us a very different India and it was a lot less pleasant.

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Kneehigh’s Tristan and Yseult: A Passionate Tale Retold for a Twenty-First Century Audience

By Jane Baldwin | March 13, 2015

Photo: Richard Termine. Dominic Marsh (Tristan) and Hannah Vassallo (Yseult).

Although new to Boston, Great Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre Company is over thirty years old. Based in Cornwall, the company, composed of ever-changing international actors, tours widely. Their repertoire tends to showcase works drawn from mythology. Tristan and Yseult, the production currently playing at Boston’s Cutler Majestic is representative of their imagistic style, which frequently features acrobatic movement, live folk music, song, and dance. The work was adapted and directed by Emma Rice.

Kneehigh has updated the medieval romantic tale of Tristan and Yseult by adding vaudeville, musical comedy, and circus techniques. Wagner’s lush music from his 1865 opera often takes a backseat to recorded bluegrass, Latin music, jazz, Carl Off’s “Carmina Burana” and modern pieces such as Nick Cave’s “Sweetheart Come,” as well as Stu Barker’s compositions written especially for the show, played by the company’s four musicians.

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Young Frankenstein Gets Class Treatment — Undeservedly

By Jamie Portman | March 10, 2015

Photo: Valley Wind Productions

The problem with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society’s current winter offering, Young Frankenstein, is that it’s not worth doing.

Devotees of Mel Brooks’ patented brand of low-grade comedy may still want to embrace it, given that it’s a musical version of one of his most popular movies and honours the Brooks tradition of luxuriating in its own bad taste. And let’s face it, there are some on this planet who continue to hail Mel Brooks as some kind of comic genius. It’s also true that his freewheeling lack of inhibition can sometimes disarm an audience as efficiently as a dose of salts: for an example, one need go no further than his first real screen success, the western spoof, Blazing Saddles, and the notorious baked-bean sequence around the campfire and the ensuing discharge — in stereophonic sound no less — of collective cowboy flatulence.

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Young Frankenstein: Silly, smutty script, slick production

By Iris Winston | March 9, 2015

Production trumps content over and over again in the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society production of Young Frankenstein, the crude parody of the horror genre and the 19^th century novel by Mary Shelley.

As quoted in the Orpheus program, Mel Brooks, the primary creator of the script, music and lyrics, says, “Good taste is the enemy of comedy.” His kind of comedy, perhaps, but amusement does not have to be drawn from bathroom humour and gags that take so long to set up that there is time to be bored or disgusted before they are milked dry. Brooks may have demonstrated his talent to amuse more effectively in The Producers — though even here he frequently teetered on the brink of bad taste and periodically toppled over — but Young Frankenstein does not hold a candle to the earlier show. It just makes me long for the wit of Noel Coward over the lumbering attempt at making a monster out of this molehill of silly smut.

However, distasteful as the material is, presumably Orpheus chose to present the 2007 musical in an attempt to attract new audience members. If that was achieved, it should also be noted that there were several walkouts at intermission on opening night. …

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Grounded: Actress soars in Cambridge Central Square Theatre Production.

By Jane Baldwin | March 8, 2015

Photo: A. R. Sinclair. Celeste Oliva

George Brandt’s Grounded is a highly political one-woman show that tells a direct and complex story of the new role of women in warfare. The character’s symbolic aspect is emphasized by her lack of a name. She is simply The Pilot. The play is expressionistic in style in that the audience viscerally experiences her inner world. No opposing view exists.

The character, wonderfully played by Celeste Oliva, has risen to the rank of Major as a fighter pilot engaged in air to ground warfare, a role in which she takes enormous pride and pleasure. Flying in the “blue,” as she calls it, killing “the guilty,” in this case young male Iraqis, makes her feel righteous, “part of the sky,” administering punishment like a god.

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Obaaberima : a corporeal performance that expresses it all!

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 6, 2015

DSC_0027(1) Tawiah M`Carthey. Photo Barb Gray.

Questions of identity have become one of the focal points of recent theatre in Canada. In Ottawa we have seen performances in French by Mani Soleymanlou whose recent plays “Un”, “Deux” et “Trois” have focussed on his Persian identity as a construction produced by the interiorization of the gaze of Quebecers who saw him as the Middle eastern immigrant he never knew he was, given the fact his family was Iranian and he arrived here when he was very young. Other more recent immigrants such as Wajdi Mouawad, have used theatre to reflect on their immigrant condition and their sense of identity within their new Canadian/Quebec surroundings. Recently in Ottawa, we have seen other such performances by artists asking similar questions through performance.

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Obaaberima`: Multiple identities merge into inspirational whole in Obaaberima

By Patrick Langston | March 5, 2015

Photo: Barb Gray. Published in the Ottawa Citizen, Thursday, March 5, 2015

At one point early in Obaaberima, writer/performer Tawiah M’Carthy’s courageous one-man show about sexual identities, we watch the main character Agyeman, still a young boy, slip into a dress. The action, mimed by M’Carthy, is transformative, lighting a glow in Agyeman’s eyes and lending a sudden strength and ease to his posture: this male/female, we realize, is who he really is.

Problem is, Agyeman doesn’t see himself through our eyes. So it takes another couple of decades, years that are fraught with confusion, wrong turns, even a prison term, before he understands that wearing a metaphorical dress while remaining a male – in other words, exploring his male and female sides and ultimately coming out to himself and to the rest of the world — is his only real choice.

The triple Dora-winning play follows Agyeman from boyhood in homosexuality-denying Ghana to adulthood in more-open-but-yet-not-entirely-so Toronto. Such coming-out stories are no longer groundbreaking, but M’Carthy enacts this one (he has said it draws on but is not about his own life) with such intimacy and skill that it becomes one we’ve never before heard.

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Marat-Sade: An energetic, well-balanced production of Peter Weiss’ play

By Rajka Stefanovska | March 5, 2015

It took about a hundred years for Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse François de Sade) to become a figure of great interest and even greater controversy. His sadistic nature (the expression sadism is derived from his name due to his writings and behaviour) and immoralitym completely unacceptable by any social standards, caused him imprisonment more often than not. He spent his last years of life incarcerated in Charenton asylum (Val-de-Marne, France), where he wrote and directed plays with its inmates as actors.

In the 20^th century, artists celebrated him as a founder of free expression in erotic literature; Guillaume Apollinaire even called him “the freest spirit that has yet existed.”

His writings, full of sexual fantasy combined with philosophy of pornography with an emphasis on violence, repel some and fascinate others to this day.

Sade’s life and philosophy inspired many, among them German writer Peter Weiss, who wrote the play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (shortened version “Marat-Sade” ) in 1963. The plot is set inCharenton asylum in 1808, where Marquis de Sade directs a play about the death of the popular French Revolution leader Jean Paul Marat. Conceptualized as a play within a play, this sharp political theatre deals with abuse of power and the meaning of revolution. In the wake of Artaud and Brecht vision of theatre, he uses the environment of chaos and madness to show human suffering and class struggle, as well as to question the role of the true revolution – should it change socity and where should the change come from: from the histrorical event itself of from ourselves? …

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Eugene O’Neil: A Chamber Theatre Hintonburg Production at the Carleton Tavern

By Capital Critics Circle | March 5, 2015

CAST:

Features Donnie Laflamme as Yank, Louis Lemire as Paddy, Matt Smith as Long, Laura Hall as Mildred.