Audiences at Anton in Show Business, from Three Sisters Theatre Company, get to glimpse the backstage drama as a group of misfits try to stage Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. But as economic pressures and personal narratives unravel, the show becomes the background track to their quirky antics. The play parodies the New York theatre scene through a throng of one-dimensional characters, satirizes equity in the theatre, and makes digs at the impossibility of artistry. It’s a play that leans into its sense of irony, and it’s built for the audience who knows a thing or two about the realities of living and working in the arts.

The play unfolds on two levels. On one level, the characters are trying to put on The Three Sisters. On the other, they are aware that they are simply portraying characters who are putting on a play. The play employs this “metatheatrical” guise principally to satirize the convention. It is gimmicky by design.

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest has become a period piece. However,
that doesn't necessarily mean that Dale Wasserman's adaptation of the
Ken Kesey novel about life in a state mental institution in the early
1960s has become dated. It still has historic  importance in what it
has to tell us about U.S. psychiatric care in another era — and let's
remember that Kesey's novel, based on the author's own experiences
working in a state veterans hospital, was considered in its time to be
a blistering indictment of a culture that condoned electroconvulsive
therapy and pre-frontal lobotomy as legitimate ways of dealing with
mental illness.

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Photo: David Leclerc

The sound booms book-ending Rick Miller’s packed ride from 1945 to 1969 are the world-changing release of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

The baby boomers, born, raised and living through those tumultuous years, are invited to relive their memories through Miller’s lens, a combination of multi-media flashes, impressions (some more successful than others), comic twists and the stories of three people with very different backgrounds: Miller’s mother, Madeline, originally from Coburg, Ontario; Laurence, an African-American draft dodger and jazz pianist; and Rudy, an Austrian who immigrated to Canada after the Second World War to become an advertising executive and illustrator.

As well as the kaleidoscope of political, cultural and social events with which Miller’s Boom bombards us, replays of advertisements of the period — oddly amusing from the perspective of the 21^st century — remind us just how much times have changed.

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Photo David Leclerc

The long awaited Boom directed, written and performed by Rick Miller is both seductive and questionable, especially as it purports to be a cultural history of the Baby Boomer generation that will incite young people to become interested in their own stories as well as world history. It turns out to be an amalgamation of various narrative structures that function in different ways, some are successful and others much less so. Rick the actor begins by introducing us to a film of Maddy his mother, projected against a huge pole of light that stands in the centre of the stage. This is the background against which all the floating images, the films, the lighting effects and the great mass of visual information will unfold during the evening. Structured by chronological time (1945-1969), the stage event becomes, the story of Rick’s own life told through fragments of historical information and personal experiences by multiple voices whose identities are not at all clear and who splinter the whole narrative into so many pieces it is difficult to locate any kind of centre.

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Photo  Manuel Harlan

The American Repertory Theatre is currently presenting George Orwell’s 1984. Newly adapted by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, the British company is touring the US after a long and successful run in the UK. It has a lot going for it, particularly the reference to the book’s appendix, which does not appear in the original American edition.

Most people who read the book will remember newspeak, the language which was to replace oldspeak (Standard English). Newspeak would destroy the individual’s ability to think conceptually by limiting the number and complexity of words. Early American editions of Orwell’s book left the reader with the impression that the totalitarian government had won. And it seems that even in Great Britain, few people pay attention to the appendix, an explication of newspeak principles, which although it appears to be written long after 1984 is in oldspeak from which one may infer that the regime no longer exists. To dramatize the appendix, there is a short scene out of time with the rest of the play in which unknown characters – linguists, politicians, historians? – discuss its content.

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Freakish, Friendless, Pushy Parents! The contestants in The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are never asked to spell any of this group of words, but they come to mind as the background of the kids and the adults involved in the cutthroat competition are revealed in passing.

Surprisingly, the 2005 musical, with book by Rachel Sheinkin and music and lyrics by William Finn, won a number of Tony awards when it debuted on Broadway. (It must have been a lean year.) The music is entirely forgettable, although some of the lyrics are effective and the book holds more interest than simply testing spelling ability.

Heavily dependent on the quality of the characterizations by the six finalists and the three officials running the Bee, the inclusion of audience participation (four extra contestants) is more awkward than effective and the general presentation—partly because of the script and partly because of the limited stage space —is somewhat static. However, the members of the cast in the Suzart After Dark production define their characters well and have fun with their roles (despite the occasional stumble over lines).

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