Iris Winston, Author at Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

A Christmas Story: An attempt to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

By Iris Winston | December 2, 2015

Photo: Maria Vartanova

There is no denying the enthusiastic reaction of the audience to the opening-night performance of the Ottawa Little Theatre production of A Christmas Story. Neither is there any denying my total bewilderment that this set of charmless vignettes about a nine-year-old boy’s obsession with a BB gun would be of lasting interest.

Recalling the Christmas of 1939, the adult Ralph narrates his memories of his strategy to obtain the gun, as well as his father’s winning an extraordinarily ugly lamp, a young love interest, a friend freezing his tongue to a metal post and overcoming a bully. Ongoing jokes about the repetitive family menu, the whines of the younger brother, father’s battle with the furnace and the neighbour’s dogs wear thin. And a moment as a pink rabbit — don’t ask — is not worth even a snicker.

The OLT production, directed by Brian Cano, is clearly working hard to create a silk purse out of this sow’s ear and one is very conscious of the amount of effort involved.

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“So This is Christmas” : Two Different Takes on the Christmas Spirit.

By Iris Winston | November 29, 2015

The two one-act comedies that make up Phoenix Players’ So This is Christmas, deliver two different takes on the spirit of the season.

In Sleeping Indoors by Jim Holt (retired artistic director of City Lights Theatre, Savannah, Georgia), a literary couple takes in a homeless man to provide him with a taste of the warmth of the season. As they learn more about him from his journal, they also learn more about generosity, individuality and his view of the world.

In The Christmas Tree by Norm Foster, two lonely people duel for the last scrawny tree available on Christmas Eve, using tall tales to engender sympathy as the weapon of choice.

The plays are light. The tone is pleasant and the style of presentation is gentle as director Jo-Ann McCabe leads her casts on their exploration of the Christmas season.

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The December Man: A Clear Depiction of Survivor Guilt

By Iris Winston | November 22, 2015

Photo: Andrew Alexander

The December 6, 1989 massacre of 14 women — all engineering students at the University of Montreal’s École Polytechnique — was a tragedy with far-reaching proportions.

In her award-winning 2007 drama The December Man, playwright Colleen Murphy shifts the focus away from the murdered women and the mass murderer and on to a fictitious male student, Jean Fournier, and his parents.

Jean is presented as one of the males that murderer Marc LePine separated from the women before his killing spree. Jean’s guilt at living when they died and his remorse at not doing anything to save them destroys him as he succumbs to his survivor guilt. It also devastates his parents — blue-collar workers who had dreamed of their son becoming a successful engineer.

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Anne of Green Gables. The Young Girl from Prince Edward Island Charms Once More.

By Iris Winston | November 22, 2015

Photo. The cast on the Orpheus facebook.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know the story of Anne of Green Gables — the girl who was sent to the Cuthbert household instead of an orphan boy as requested?

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic novel, adapted for the musical stage by Don Harron and Norman Campbell, has been running in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island each summer for the last 50 years.

It was a hit in Ottawa when the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society presented its version in 1999 and it deserves to be a hit once more in the current production, as directed by Joyce Landry with musical direction by Terry Duncan and choreography by Debbie Guilbeault.

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Glorious. A production surrounded by a sense of joy.

By Iris Winston | November 10, 2015

Poster from Linden House Theatre. Janet Uren as Florence Foster Jenkins.

There might be some glory in the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, but there is little of similar magnificence in Glorious, the weak semi-biographical comedy by Peter Quilter.

Glorious, set in 1944, the last year of Jenkins’ life, recounts how her conviction that she was a great opera singer was in total contrast to her ghastly out-of-tune, out-of-rhythm performances. Yet, she was eventually invited to sing at Carnegie Hall — prestigious indeed, even if it was at her own expense, and many attendees came to laugh at her — and played to a full house, plus packed standing room, with a reported overflow of another 2,000 people clamouring to witness the concert mounted by the legend of the appalling voice.

While Jenkins is the central focus of Quilter’s script, he tries to grind out extra humour (usually failing to amuse, possibly intentionally to remain in line with the singer’s inability to sing). He forces some witty (not) references to the pianist’s sexual orientation, the randiness of Jenkins’ common-law partner, the lack of communication between Jenkins and her Spanish maid and throws in some particularly irritating sequences around her friend’s dying dog.

However, despite the lack of glory in Glorious, Linden House Theatre’s entertaining production, directed by Robin Bowditch, survives and thrives.

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Radium Girls: a production that qualifies as a treatment for insomniacs

By Iris Winston | November 4, 2015

The mystery behind Radium Girls is how such a fascinating piece of history could be turned into such a boring drama. Yet, according to playwright D.W. Gregory’s website, this is her most performed play and it has received a number of awards.

In recounting how a group of female factory workers were poisoned by the radium-based paint they applied to watch faces to make them luminous—they were forced to lick the paintbrushes into fine points—Gregory replaces dramatic opportunity with short sequences, lack of meaningful characterization and multiple doubling.

The reality is compelling. Five of the radium girls brought suit against their employer, the U.S. Radium Corporation, eventually winning some financial compensation and payment of their medical bills for the remainder of their much-shortened lives.

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Flare Path at the OLT: More Fizzle Than Flare

By Iris Winston | October 31, 2015

Photo: Maria Vartanova

War dwarfs personal relationships. Set against the sense of duty to country, an extra-marital affair seems “tiny and rather cheap,” says the woman at the centre of the love triangle in Terrence Rattigan’s Flare Path. This is particularly so when her husband is a serving RAF officer, risking his life on every bombing mission, and her lover is an aging matinee idol.

Rattigan wrote the 1942 drama while he was an air gunner, flying Coastal Command during the Second World War. Thus, stiff-upper-lip dialogue that makes light of the constant danger, through jolly, matter-of-fact conversations and silly nicknames for the flyers rings true. So does the sense of dread hanging over the women who are left behind. One drinks and pretends not to worry. A second is irritable and withdrawn. The third struggles with her moral dilemma between passion and duty, trying to decide whether her husband or her lover has the greater need of her.

The emotional restraint of most of the characters in Flare Path, reflected in the understatements in the text, can and should heighten the emotional connection and anguish with the threat of death always at hand.

Sadly, the insipid Ottawa Little Theatre production does not do this. Instead, as directed by Klaas van Weringh, the emotion is so suppressed that the result is frequently awkwardness as two characters preserve their distance from each other and keep their voices level. The latter may be partly an attempt to maintain the appropriate accents, but much of the time it seems to be at the director’s behest.

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Newsies: A Visual Powerhouse.

By Iris Winston | October 29, 2015

Photo: Deen Van Meer

The hottest news about Newsies is the excellent choreography and terrific dancing, closely followed by the striking high-tech design enabling fluid set changes that become part of the action.

The 2011 musical, based on a 1992 Disney movie — and, according to the program, inspired by the book Children of the City by David Nasaw — is a romanticized version of the 1899 newsboys’ strike against the papers owned by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The poverty-stricken boys were forced to buy the newspapers they then hawked around the streets of New York City. When Pulitzer and Hearst hiked the price to the newsies, they could not make anything approaching a living wage. Their strike, which included forming a human barrier across Brooklyn Bridge, eventually forced the newspaper tycoons to back down and is credited with laying some of the groundwork for future unionization of labour.

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Menopause The Musical: A funny production celebrating the changes in life

By Iris Winston | October 18, 2015

Janet Martin (Iowa Housewife), Nicole Robert (Earth Mother), Jayne Lewis (Soap Star), Michelle E. White (Professional Woman)

“Good evening, ladies. And you too, sir.”

The producer’s introduction acknowledges the target audience and underlines that the connection with Menopause The Musical is through common experience — past, present or anticipated. (For the record, there were four men in the capacity audience on the evening that I saw the award-winning show and they were laughing almost as hard as the rest.)

Menopause The Musical by Jeanie Linders premiered in 2001, and, according to the show’s official website, some 11 million people — mainly women, often of that certain age — have laughed their way through the 90 minutes celebrating the change of life, courtesy of the four types representing them all: a professional woman, a star of daytime TV, an ex-hippie and a small-town housewife.

The action begins at the lingerie sale counter in Bloomingdale’s department store in New York. The four women — never named to emphasize the universality of hot flashes, memory glitches, weight gain, frequent bathroom visits, mood swings and so on — sing about their menopausal experiences with melodies borrowed from the pop charts of the 1960s and 70s.

So, songs such as Puff, the Magic Dragon becomes Puff, My God, I’m Dragging and My Guy becomes My Thighs, as the housewife bemoans the heftiness of her nether regions. To the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, we hear that “In a guest room, on the sofa, my husband sleeps at night.” Meanwhile, The Great Pretender is the vehicle for explaining the handling of forgetfulness. The clever parodies are very funny and the familiarity of the pop melodies increases the humour quotient at every well-orchestrated and well-choreographed turn and through each smooth scene change. …

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“Love! Valour! Compassion! A fine ensemble production that is moving, amusing and brings one close to tears!

By Iris Winston | October 12, 2015

Photo: Allan Mackey

It is not surprising that a thread of anger runs through Love! Valour! Compassion! given that Terrence McNally’s award-winning play had its première in 1994. This was a time when the scourge of AIDs was felling many, primarily homosexual men, and being HIV positive was a death sentence.

Buzz and James, two of the eight characters in Love! Valour! Compassion!, are near death. By contrast, long-time couple Arthur and Perry have escaped AIDs and mark their fourteenth anniversary together in physical health, as they repair the health of their relationship. Meanwhile, aging choreographer Gregory must come to terms with his inability to dance as he once could and deal with a recurring speech impediment. His balance is restored when he is with his young partner, Bobby, who is blind but undaunted by his disability. Another regular member of the group that meets at Gregory’s home is the angry and bitter John. With him is Ramon — handsome, virile, passionate and promiscuous — the catalyst who upsets the equilibrium the rest have achieved over the years.

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