Alvina Ruprecht

Ottawa Fringe Theatre 2016: “2 For Tea” and the idea of being British!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 20, 2016

2 for Tea staged by British to British with James and Jamesy, from Sussex UK.

A new style of fringe performance where the 2 actors capture all the iconic moments,the popular images, and the historical references that make “Britishness”. It’s nothing more than that! But because these elements are so popular, people catch them all immediately and they roar with laughter.

What is this “Britishness” then? It’s a cup of tea slithering out from the wings on the end of a gloved hand suggesting British Music Hall theatre, it’s a full tea pot pouring out tea for that proverbial “Brew” on Coronation street. It’s even oblique references to the “tea party” in Alice in Wonderland; it’s placing the cups in exactly the perfect position on the table because it’s all about style, and good manners that become ridiculously overblown but not so for this very British show.

It’s also about pop culture icons like Mick Jagger _with the swivelling hips and the skinny legs – ; it’s about the civilised and extremely polite Englishman with the bowler hat who epitomizes a mass of British images including financiers on Fleet street and the clowns in Beckett’s theatre; it’s about being caught in the bombing of London during the World War II, it’s about the sense of family with the elderly parents who are awaiting the end and the final voyage that brings them up to their ultimate resting place with smiling faces, the stiff upper lip and all that.

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Naked Boys Singing: engaging fun, sophisticated parody, exciting music and a good healthy romp in the altogether!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 18, 2016

Naked Boys Singing : The international hit musical review. Originally conceived by Robert Schrock. Written by Stephen Bates, Marie Cain, Perry Hart, Shelly Markham, Jim Morgan, Daivd Pevsner Rayme Sciarni, Mark Savage, Ben Schaechter, Robert Schrock Trance Thompson, Bruce Vilanch, Mark Winkler. Directed by Schaun Toohey

Seven naked gay male characters on stage might sound like an evening of peek abo and sexual titillation but this show has very little to do with that. In fact director Shaun Toohey calls this “ a light hearted romp where the actors did not at all have to be naked and you would still have a good show.” It certainly is not about the nudity because the men involved are not supposed to be Greek gods with perfect bodies But that is the point. The show is a series of sketches about aspects of life…the frustrations, the sadness, the happy moments, the positive and negative experiences which open one’s eyes, which show the difficulties of relationships with some very funny parodies involving male genitalia that is the centre of a lot of attention here. The nakedness becomes a symbol of men’s desire to open their souls and not hide things anymore. They are vulnerable but they are trying to reach the essence of their beings and the unclothed body is the best symbol of that achievement.

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Ottawa Fringe Festival 2016: Love is a Battlefield – A High class performance by Fringe Royalty

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 17, 2016

Love is a Battlefield written by Martin Dockery, performed by Vanessa Quesnelle and Martin Dockery; Dramaturgy by Vanessa Quesnelle.

The epitome of the best in Fringe performance, actor, director, story teller, mimic, mime, creator of stage events that are completely original, Martin Dockery is back in Ottawa under the fringe spotlight with his just as brilliant partner Vanessa Quesnelle. The woman with the velvet singing voice that one could listen to all day, as the character says in this show, also proves how she can hold her own in this brief encounter that appears to be improvised but that is tightly scripted I was told.

A singer has hired the character played by Dockery to make a recording of her latest song. It all takes place in her apartment while her husband it out. Simple enough; however as emotions heat up, unexpected information is discovered, the simple arrangement becomes an accumulation of complex possibilities and relationships that make the dialogue more and more ambiguous as the interlocutors, avoid clear answers, respond to questions with questions, and create an atmosphere of mistrust that persists until the very end, which in itself is purposely unclear.

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Fringe Festival 2016: Fugee a timely play with some excellent performances.

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 17, 2016

Fugee : Directed by James Richardson, written by Abi Morgan. A production of the Third Wall Academy

Third Wall Academy has made enormous strides in its theatre training this year, especially related to its actor training, with its production of this moving, and very timely play by Abi Morgan. It brings us into the world of child refugees from around the world, while emphasizing the horrors of Child Soldiers that have been discussed in much African literature recently, including the award winning novel by writer Ahmadou Kourouma (Allah Is Not Obliged 2007) from the Côte D’ivoire, also the country of origin of 14 year-old Kojo, the young French-speaking character at the centre of this performance. Kojo is submerged in the unfathomable noises of an English speaking refugee centre, as a narrative filled with flashbacks, confused memories of his family, gives us the background of this youth who is the focus of this play.

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Festival TransAmérique: Go Down Moses de Romeo Castellucci, un parabole énigmatique de la civilisation humaine.

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 7, 2016

Photo: courtesy of the Festival TransAmérique

Go Down Moses, écrit, conçu et mis en scène par Roméo Castellucci. Une production de la Sociètas Raffaello Sanzio.

Toujours attiré par les textes fondateurs de la civilisation judéo-chrétienne, Castellucci a choisi le prophète Moïse, figure centrale de l’Ancien Testament, pour donner l’impulsion créatrice à sa réflexion sur les diverses manières d’appréhender les rapports entre les êtres humains.

Associée à la libération des opprimés, qu’ils soient des esclaves juifs en Égypte à l’époque biblique ou des esclaves africains dans le nouveau monde (la source, célèbre negro-spiritual etats-unien, est mise en évidence dans le titre), la figure de Moïse ouvre toutes les possibilités culturelles, historiques, religieuses, philosophiques et iconographiques pour structurer un événement dans un espace libéré de la matérialité contraignante de la scène. Ainsi, on dirait qu’il souhaite rassembler un bilan des activités culturelles en s’ouvrant à toutes les époques et toutes les formes de création: la culture populaire, des récits télévisuels, des enquêtes policières, des aventures spaciales, une intermédialité cinéma-théâtre, et même des origines de la tragédie grecque (Eschyle) dont l’Orestea, una commedia organica, présenté par Castellucci au FTA en 1997, était déjà l’exemple le plus troublant.

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Belles Soeurs The Musical: Tremblay passes the test of musical theatre with flying colours!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 2, 2016

Photo: “Ode to Bingo”courtesy of the NAC and the Segal Centre for Performing Arts.

A chorus of unglamorous women of various shapes and sizes files onto the upper level of the proscenium arch that frames the kitchen where Germaine Lauzon (Astrid Van Wieren) and her “soeurs” are about to party, pasting one million trading stamps into those little booklets, making Germaine’s dream of owning all those items in the store catalogue, a reality at last. Little does she know that her dreams will come crashing down before the performance ends.

A band of five talented musicians tucked into either side of the small kitchen space raises the excitement level and carries us beyond a traditional Broadway style of glitzy performance. This new English language production of Tremblay’s Les Belles-soeurs (a reworking of the French musical production presented in 2010), originally staged as a play in 1968, is actually not far from Tremblay’s original conception of the work. True, there is music, there are lyrics in English, and the original joual which was the essence of Tremblay’s statement about Québécois culture, has been replaced by lyrics in standard English. Even the ending has changed radically. Yet it works because director René Richard Cyr, composer Daniel Bélanger, adaptor of the English book Brian Hill as well as the English Lyrics, musical adaptation and additional music by Neil Bartram and the musical direction by Chris Barillaro, have collectively reinvented a stage language that compensates so well for all that has changed.

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São Paulo Companhia de Dança :Extremely strong dancers do justice to all the choreographers!

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 28, 2016

Photo (promotionnelle) © (The Seasons) Édouard Lock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-uwuH_Qix4 Norman McLaren, Pas de deux (1968)

The Canadian premiere of this Brazilian Dance Company – the São Paulo Companhia de Dança – at the National Arts Centre, offered three pieces each by a different choreographer. The Seasons by choreographer Edouard Lock, whose work is well known on the stages of Canada/Quebec, was no doubt the most interesting piece. As the Brazilian dancers appeared to easily grasp the emotional, the high spirited and pressing physical demands of this clash of bodies and lighting effects, The Seasons also incorporated a most exciting remix and reinterpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and thus soared above the other two pieces , Mamihlapinatapai (Jomar Mesquita) and Gnawa (Nacho Duato), which almost seemed “déjà vu” in the aftermath of Lock’s tsunami that came crashing down on us with all its strength.

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Phoenix Theatre runs rampant in the high school “staff room”.

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 27, 2016

This Phoenix Theatre production called Staff Room (by Joan Burrows) is a mild crowd pleaser, definitely aimed at a niche audience. A cast of ten actors playing 55 roles carried out a non-stop whirlwind evening of skits , monologues, dialogues or exchanges with multiple actors of varying descriptions. Each skit was an individual performance but all were linked by the fact that they all took place in the staff room of a high school where the teachers, administrators, cleaners and related employees were all involved in the business of this institution of learning. Joel Rahn responsible for media relations, stepped out on the stage before the curtain went up and asked us point blank: “How many people were/are school teachers“? A lot of hands went up. I gather that If he asked the question it was important, and we soon realized why.

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Woyzeck’s Head: a thoughtful attempt to transform Büchner comes up against a lot of dramaturgical challenges

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 25, 2016

James Richardson takes Georg Büchner’s unfinished textual fragments (he died at the age of 24) and “plays”with them as much as all other directors have done in the past. More recent scholarship has organized the narrative into a reasonable sequence of events. Sill, directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Denis Marleau , Bob Wilson and Brigitte Haentjens among others have imposed their own stage esthetics to produce meanings of different sorts, often nourished by a particular formalistic departure point. For example, Brigitte Haentjens who was influenced by the physical work of French masters like Lecoq transformed the soldiers into tribal dancers, stamping their feet and creating a collective will behind the seductive routines of the Drum Major. In such an atmosphere, Marie, woyzeck’s wife could not refuse his advances. Scenes with the captain are transformed into torture, humiliation or even into sexually ambiguous and highly grotesque comedy especially when Woyzeck has to crawl between the Captain’s legs to shave his hidden parts. Ostermeier’s rendering of that was hilarious and unforgettable, a sign of the misery of naturalism approaching a more sinister form of critical expressionism that was to erupt onto the German stage and into film in later years. In fact Fritz Lang already seems to be muttering in the wings? . Much has been done with this very disturbing metaphor of oppression, brewing fascism and the rise of power-hungry individuals in an era when the rational thinking of science clashed with the irrationality of romanticism and the debate becomes heated in this play.

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887 : Memory and history coincide in Lepage’s intimate portrait of Quebec! A Winner!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 15, 2016

http://littquebecoise.weebly.com/speak-white-de-michegravele-lalonde.html

Michèle lalonde reads her poem Speak White in 1970 …scrole down on the Quebec site.

Lets begin at the end! Alone on a darkened stage as the lights are dimming, Robert Lepage reaches the end of his emotional journey into the past. What am I doing here he asks us in his own voice? I have been asked to “remember”, but “remember what?” and his tone becomes angrier and more aggressive and he roars out a thunderous interpretation of Michele Lalonde’s unforgettable anticolonial poem Speak White. The play ends on this rousing high note but the evening’s journey has been full of personal and collective memories that Lepage has gathered together in a most intimate moment with the audience. That ending was hair-raising and even unexpected, because Lepage usually avoids political discussions so one wonders how he really locates himself in relation to this strong statement given Lepage’s career on the international stage, moving from one country to another as his works evolves according to his vision of theatrical process which imiposes constant changes on the event.

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