To say that Ottawa actor Pierre Brault is a shape-shifting, identity-changing wonder doesn’t tell the whole story. His latest offering, Will Somers, is winning enough to attract even those playgoers who are getting sick and tired of one-man shows. Indeed, its impressive artistry raises an often overworked genre to a superior level.

At the Gladstone, Brault is delivering a robustly entertaining 90-minute excursion into the world of Will Somers, the witty and inspired fool who served as court jester to King Henry Vlll and survived to tell the tale. Do Will’s memories lurch over the line into the “tall-tale” category? Who knows? Who cares? This Will, in his own way, is the type of performance artist always ready to provide fodder for our amused speculation. We happily suspend judgement: given that our literature is full of unreliable narrators, is it really wrong in this instance to sacrifice truth for the sake of a good story? Hence, we’re easily drawn into those moments of sly innuendo mischievously conjured up by Pierre Brault’s Will when he gets onto the subject of Henry’s soured daughter, Mary, and the real nature of his relationship with her.

Noel Coward observed on more than one occasion that he was the kind of artist who takes light entertainment seriously. The same might be said of Pierre Brault who, in scripting this piece, has clearly done some meticulous homework on behalf of a historical figure whose life is more often than not shrouded in obscurity. …

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Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple first arrived on Broadway more than half a century ago, but time has not diminished its comic potential. In chronicling what happens when the neurotic, freakishly neat Felix
Ungar moves in with his good-natured but slobbish buddy, Oscar Madison, the play becomes a springboard for hilarity. But if you look beyond the crisp one-liners and the deftly-managed comic situations — and how did that linguini end up clinging to the kitchen wall? — you
also find a good deal of sharp psychological observation about how human relationships can misfire.

Kanata Theatre’s new production has several things going for it. To begin with, there is the work of Bernie Horton and Stavros Sakiadis in the two key roles.
Horton’s Oscar is very much the likeable slob the script demands. His housekeeping may be atrocious, the bedraggled sandwiches he offers his buddies on poker night probably constitute a risk to one’s health, and you may sympathize with the ex-wife who keeps nagging him on the  phone about his maintenance payments — but there’s something endearing and disarming about this Oscar in all his fallibility.
As Felix, Sakiadis adroitly gives us all the irritating foibles that will have Oscar climbing the wall within days — the hypochondria, the obsessive neatness, the fusspot fastidiousness that even has him distributing dainty doilies to the gang at the card table during one of Oscar’s poker nights.

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