Very overrated, honeymoons — especially if you run into your ex-spouse on the adjoining balcony of the honeymoon hotel. Even more so when your stormy first marriage ended with an acrimonious divorce and the intensity of emotion is still simmering.

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Zoe Tupling  and Penu Chalykoff. Photo: Alan Dean

Being part of the melodramatically inclined Bliss family may be alternately divine or tragic. Being a guest in the Bliss country house is simply a nightmare.

The stark contrast between the Bliss family’s theatricality and the more normal approach to social interaction of the guests is at the heart of Noel Coward’s 1925 comedy of manners/verging on farce.

Coward was inspired to write Hay Fever — it took him just three days in 1924 — after visiting the home of U.S. stage and silent movie queen Laurette Taylor. (The script apparently marked the end of their friendship.)

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Rekindling memories and relearning language after a stroke are the paths to rebuilding a father/son relationship that has lain dormant for four decades. Ernie stepped out of his son’s life when his marriage failed, as his father did and as it now seems his son, George, is about to step out of his son’s life.

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Playwright Norm Foster. Photo by Alan Dean. Perhaps playwright Norm Foster was waiting for a train when the idea of a script about five people in the waiting room of a train station occurred to him. Perhaps Canada’s most prolific playwright devoted more time to turning Jasper Station into a musical in cooperation with composer and lyricist Steve Thomas than is obvious from the very stilted first act of this play with music, first presented in 2001.

Act II has a little more substance — just a little — but, in general, the story line of Jasper Station is wafer thin, the songs are forgettable and the characters range from one-dimensional to foolish. And weak material, however well presented, remains weak.

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Photo: Paddy Vargas. One of the most satisfying aspects of the annual Puppets Up International Puppet Festival in Almonte is its carnival atmosphere. For two days, the main street is full of puppets, face painters, clowns, street musicians, craft tents, cotton candy and visiting families. Their view may be of a lanky stilt walker dancing to a rock ‘n roll ditty from one of the street entertainers, a pint-sized smiling version of Spiderman with his face immaculately covered in scarlet and black make-up, puppets chatting from one of the balconies or the midday parade of the entire puppet contingent. Store windows decorated with painted stage drapes and filled with puppets get into the act too and many of the townsfolk are involved as volunteers.

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The Classic Theatre Festival’s declared mandate is “presenting the classic hits of Broadway and the London stage” and there is no doubt that Mary, Mary falls within the defined requirement.

This romantic comedy was one of playwright Jean Kerr’s two biggest hits. (The other was Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.) Chalking up a four-year run in the early 1960s, Mary, Mary, was one of the longest running Broadway plays of the decade.

The issue is that, while it may have seemed fresh and innovative half a century ago, the script, with a stilted first act weighted down with exposition, now gives the impression of being well past its best-before date.

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Time travel and genre fusion seem to be two of the sports in this Game of Love and Chance.

A mix of a 16^th -century form of physical theatre of Italian origin with the work of an 18^th-century French playwright, best known for his focus on language, adapted/rewritten to use current language and North American slang by performers in 19^th-century costumes may or may not be successful, depending on the skill of the mixer (director/adaptor).

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  Photo by Alan Dean: .  As mystery writer Agatha Christie’s first play, Black Coffee deserves recognition as a landmark in theatrical history. Further, it is the only play (and later movie) in which Christie featured the character of Hercule Poirot, although many screen adaptations of her mystery novels star the Belgian detective.

That said, the carefully plotted Black Coffee, first produced in 1930, is heavy-handed, repetitive and slow moving. In the Ottawa Little Theatre production, director Johni Keyworth exacerbates the problem by keeping the pace slow and insisting that some of the characters attempt to adopt English accents. Much of the time, the accents are gratingly unconvincing and the actors are so focused on trying to sound English that they give less than the required emphasis to characterization. Thus, the result is stilted at two levels. For example, having a character pause, move two paces to centre stage, face the audience and announce that the death of the patriarch of the household is murder is even more painful than the over-pronounced vowels of failed English accents.

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When it premiered in 1958, William Gibson’s Two for the Seesaw was hailed as an honest examination of the relationship between two damaged souls.

It remains that — as well as a contrast to the more usual whitewashed-happy-nuclear-family style of show more usual in the 50s. But in the current climate, there are issues — even when the drama is presented as a period piece. For example, hitting a woman or commenting that an ulcer is a “man’s disease” is likely to raise the hackles of many audience members in the 21^st century.

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