Calendar Girls

By Tim Firth

Kanata Theatre

Directed by Tania Carrière

Any production of Calendar Girls presents special challenges. The storyline, a slightly fictionalized version of true events at a Women’s Institute in northern England, is the basis of a 2003 movie starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. It is so well known, that there is little room for any surprises on stage. In addition, the concept — a group of mature women posing discreetly nude behind some protective covering to raise funds for charity — has since been adopted and adapted for numerous assorted fundraising ventures (including at least two in the Ottawa area).

Although the flash of bare flesh on stage for each of the six women who drop their robes for a few seconds is not the main focus of Calendar Girls, it is often the point of concentration of pre-show publicity and audience awareness. The main goal of the script is to focus on the bonding and friendship among the group. But because the key photography/nude scene closes the first act, director and cast are likely to have difficulty in maintaining momentum through Act II. The attempts to fill in the women’s back-stories have limited success and the falling out between the two women behind the calendar project is too under-written to be entirely credible. …

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The Mouse House

By Robert Ainsworth

Ottawa Little Theatre

Billed as a thriller — but actually more of a tale of sibling rivalry — The Mouse House by Peterborough playwright Robert Ainsworth grinds along rather than sending chills down the spine.

Ainsworth has been careful in preparing his situation. His protagonist, Carson, a successful author, returns to the isolated family cottage in 2006 to overcome his writer’s block and complete his latest his novel (on a portable typewriter), turning down his agent’s offer of a cellphone, so that she can keep in contact with him. Isolation confirmed. When a young drug addict breaks into the cottage, Carson cannot easily reach out for help.

Much of the ensuing drama is divided into blackout-separated short sequences depicting the shifting relationship between the two. Carson seems gentle, timid and kind. Troy seems a kid in need of help.

The tug-of-war is eventually resolved because Carson’s anxious literary agent asks his brother, Thomas, a long-haul truck driver, to check on Carson. To say more would be to reveal the twist in The Mouse House tale (tail). …

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Photo: Maria Vartanova.

Despite all the nudge-nudge-wink-wink exploitive publicity and jokes, Calendar Girls is not mainly about a group of middle-aged-to-senior women posing nude.

Rather it is a story of friendship and the continuing ripples of successful fundraising that began with an unusual idea.

Based on the true story of a charitable project by a Women’s Institute in the Yorkshire Dales, the fictionalized version of Calendar Girls started as a 2003 movie starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. Five years later, Tim Firth adapted his movie script into a stage play. (A musical featuring the story debuted in England earlier this year.)

The idea that a creative member presented to the WI was intended to honour the recently deceased husband of another member — her closest friend — by raising money for leukemia research through sales of the annual WI calendar. In place of the usual landscapes, local buildings or recipes, this calendar would feature the WI members tastefully unclad.

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Photo: Courtesy of Gladstone theatre. Will Somers!

Long before the phrase became a cliché, jesters were speaking truth to power. As entertainers and critics, court jesters, or fools, held more sway than their station in the social hierarchy warranted, through medieval times, the Renaissance and beyond.

Even in this context, the King’s Fool Will Somers was remarkable among jesters for the length of his service — from 1525, when he was first introduced to King Henry VIII, until the monarch’s death in 1547 and on through the reigns of Henry’s son, Edward, and daughter, Mary. (He was rumoured to be the only man who could make Mary Tudor laugh). His last public performance was at the coronation of Mary’s sister, Elizabeth I, in 1558, two years before his death.

As presented by Pierre Brault in his newest one-man show, Will Somers is intelligent, funny, earthy, irreverent, yet caring and intensely loyal to his Tudor masters. Little wonder that the Brault version of Somers kept his head through a bloody period of history and religious conflict.

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Photo: Wendy Wagner

Neil Simon’s 50-year-old comedy portraying the myriad ways in which incompatible roommates can drive each other crazy is almost as amusing as it was before Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon inhabited the characters of the slobbish Oscar Madison and the OCD neat freak Felix Ungar in the 1968 movie version.

Considering that the concept was also a TV series featuring the odd pairing, as well as numerous stage versions over the years, yet another view of Oscar and Felix poses a considerable challenge.

In the current Kanata Theatre production, directed and designed by Jim Clarke and Ron Gardner, Bernie Horton offers a suitably slobbish Oscar. Laid back and smiling, even when losing in the weekly poker game, his anger with Felix when he finally tosses him out provides a fine contrast, but some glimpses of that hard edge early on would have made for a more rounded characterization.

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Courtesy of Orpheus Musical Theatre

At the heart of Chorus Line is the huge contrast between the opening and closing scenes. The intentionally ragged beginning features some two dozen dancers, a few practising exercises, others meandering around, all anxiously waiting to strut their stuff so that the director will choose them from among their rivals for a place on the line. The closing number shows the dancers as a unit, the perfect backup for the star of the next Broadway show.

And the paradox of the creation of the well-oiled dancing machine, peopled by anonymous dancers moving in unison, is that, along the way, Chorus Line morphs into often tragic tales about the individuals and the life-and-death importance of this audition, the next and the many beyond that.

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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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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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