Jamie Portman, Author at Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Boom provides comfort for those afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder

By Jamie Portman | March 2, 2016

  
 Photo: Richard Leclerc.

Is Boom more flash than substance? It may seem churlish to ask that question, given the undeniable
vitality and creativity that have gone into Rick Miller’s panoramic look at the Boomer generation over a quarter century of change.
Indeed, in his capacity as writer, director and performer, Miller does secure his credentials as a mercurial and engaging presence as he whips us through the decades. So Boom is an achievement of sorts — and definitely a collective one.
That often translucent pillar dominating the stage of the NAC Theatre is essential to the multi-media impact of a carefully planned entertainment in which state-of-the art projections and a seductive soundscape integrate with Miller’s own endlessly shifting persona to evoke the shapes and textures of another era.

…

Read More Read More

Cuckoo’s Nest Has Some Soaring Moments

By Jamie Portman | February 27, 2016

 

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest has become a period piece. However,
that doesn't necessarily mean that Dale Wasserman's adaptation of the
Ken Kesey novel about life in a state mental institution in the early
1960s has become dated. It still has historic  importance in what it
has to tell us about U.S. psychiatric care in another era — and let's
remember that Kesey's novel, based on the author's own experiences
working in a state veterans hospital, was considered in its time to be
a blistering indictment of a culture that condoned electroconvulsive
therapy and pre-frontal lobotomy as legitimate ways of dealing with
mental illness.

…

Read More Read More

Suzart Spelling Bee A Mixed Bag

By Jamie Portman | February 20, 2016

There are some likeable moments in The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but this inaugural production in Suzart’s new After Dark series still leaves you wondering why the show collected several Tony awards and lasted more than two seasons on Broadway.

Its main merit lies in the few good performances that do take shape and in further revealing the exciting possibilities that the new Live On Elgin holds for Ottawa’s cultural life.

The show, which involves some audience participation, essentially chronicles the progress of a spelling bee in words and music. But Elaine McCausland and her cast are delivering more of a staged performance than anything resembling a proper production. To be sure, the nature of the material might suggest that it’s ideal for an intimate venue like this, but the end result lacks the imaginative vigour that represents this enterprising theatre company at its best.

Still there is pleasurable work from Liam Gosson as Leaf Conneybear, an amiable young contestant with a knack from conquering his insecurities and managing to come through at the last minute with the correct spelling at each round, and Jay Landreville, smug and self-satisfied, as an opponent named Barfee. Rachel Duchesneau has some nice moments of vulnerability as Olive, who’s travelled to the spelling bee by bus, Adam Goldberg is very funny as the increasingly frazzled vice-principal entrusted with giving contestants ludicrous examples of sentences employing words to be spelled correctly, and Axandre Lemours supplies benign comic menace as the guy whose involvement in the bee is part of his community service. …

Read More Read More

Cat’s Cradle On The Dull Side At Kanata

By Jamie Portman | February 4, 2016

The most puzzling thing about Cat’s Cradle, which tottered onto the Kanata Theatre stage the other day, as why anyone thought it was worth doing n the first place.

Furthermore the fragile fortunes of Leslie Sands’s dull psychological thriller are not boosted by the general lethargy of Susan Monaghan’s production.

When you start glancing at your watch to find out why the first act seems endless, only to discover you’re only 45 minutes into the performance, that’s a sign of a show in trouble.

To be sure, this February offering does have a few things going for it. Set designer Rom Frigon has given us a splendid representation of a vintage country inn in the England of the early 1960s. Marilyn Valiquette has supplied serviceable costumes. Actress Caro Coltman is persuasively in character as the landlady who may or may not have secrets to conceal. Martin Weeden exudes terrier-like authority as Sir Charles Cresswell, the embodiment of local privilege. And Douglas Cuff convinces as the world-weary police inspector who has returned to the scene of his greatest failure to make one more effort to discover the truth about the disappearance of a young child years before.

That mystery is supposed to be haunting all the play’s characters as they prepare for the wedding of the young, 19-year-old woman who may, in the blocked recesses of her mind, have knowledge of what actually happened to her missing sibling on that fateful day. But you wouldn’t know it from the tepid emotional temperature of this production. …

Read More Read More

Love Letters Offers Much Pleasure

By Jamie Portman | January 31, 2016

A pair of desks on opposite sides of the Gladstone Theatre stage. Behind each, a chair — one occupied by a woman named Melissa Gardner, the other by a man named Andrew Makepeace Ladd lll.

A.R. Gurney’s 1989 play, Love Letters, has a deceptively simple setting, but one rich with possibility. In an age of e-mail exchanges and text messaging, this Pulitzer Prize finalist evokes the past, conjuring up a whole emotional world by means of the written exchanges between these two people over the course of 50 years. Because those lifetimes also involve the choices they make within a wider social and political context, and because those choices are sometimes questionable, the play also assumes a rueful “what if” quality as it approaches its climax.

That quality keeps emerging in Teri Loretto-Valentik’s production at the Gladstone Theatre — although it seemed somewhat tentative on opening night. Pierre Brault and Lucy van Oldenbarneveld, both pleasing performers, are responsive to the material and also — one would assume — to the challenge of creating fully developed characters out of what is essentially a platform reading, but are they completely there yet? …

Read More Read More

TotoToo Delivers A First-Class Hosanna

By Jamie Portman | January 28, 2016

It’s the most famous scene in Michel Tremblay’s contemporary classic, Hosanna.

It comes at the top of the second act when the title character, an anguished Montreal drag queen, unveils a chronicle of disaster in telling us what really happened when she showed up at a Hallowe’en costume ball, dressed as Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra.

It’s an extraordinary moment of theatre and a high point of this new TotoToo production. But we shouldn’t really call it a “moment,” not when it consists of a monologue lasting more than thirty minutes and taxes the resources of actor Barry Daley to the utmost.

The scene proves to be an emotionally compelling tour de force, its intimacy heightened by the production’s venue — the new Live On Elgin space. There’s pain here, also slivers of corrosive humour in the glimpses Daley’s performance gives us into the human comedy as it exists in one particular underground culture.

It’s a fading culture because events over the last four decades have turned Tremblay’s play into a period piece. But Daley’s monologue, an extended journey into Hosanna’s troubled psyche, still proved a show-stopper the other night. Daley harnesses the urgency and — importantly — the joual rhythms of the still serviceable English translation by Bill Glassco and John Van Burek in laying bare some messy emotional realities and in probing the shifting nature of identity …

Read More Read More

Matchstick. A pair of winning stage presences but the aura of spontaneity diminishes as the material progresses

By Jamie Portman | January 26, 2016

Photo: Barb Gray

The first point to be made about Matchstick, GCTC’s new winter offering, is that it Nathan Howe and Lauren Holfeuer are a pair of winning stage presences.

The second is that Howe, wearing his creator’s hat, has attempted a genuinely original script — one which, in its fusion of word and often delightful music, tells the story of a young girl named Matchstick whose yearning for a better life leads to a calamitous relationship.

The third point is that the material is delivered in a visually imaginative and often enchanting production package. Director Kristen Holfeuer’s excellent collaborators include David Granger (set), Bill McDermott (lighting) and Jessica Gabriel and Chloe Ziner (projections). Particularly, in the first part of the evening, with bold and colourful fairy-tale images on a scrim and arresting puppet silhouettes that are not quite of this world, this is a show that repeatedly seduces us into its magic.

…

Read More Read More

Underpants Droop At The Gladstone

By Jamie Portman | January 10, 2016

If you can believe the people at Ottawa’s fledgling Theatre Kraken, people actually had working radios back in the days when Germany possessed an emperor and housewives still wore below-the-knee bloomers as underwear.

In truth, however, such discrepancies merely define this company’s production of The Underpants as a historical mish-mash.

It’s also a mish-mash when it comes to style, performance and the accents of the characters. All of which helps to make the evening a glum and pointless theatrical experience.

Promotion for this appallingly misconceived theatrical event has emphasized the name of comedian Steve Martin who is responsible for this adaptation of German playwright Carl Sternheim’s 1911 expressionist satire of bourgeois values. The piece will never rank as one of Martin’s shining creative moments, lacking the wit and verbal agility of his earlier play, Picasso At The Lapine Agile — but Don Fex’s production at the Gladstone Theatre makes it seem even worse, giving more heed to the text’s sophomoric sexual double entendres than its more cutting elements of social and political satire. The latter are largely trampled under.

…

Read More Read More

Winnie-the-Pooh: A Retreat Into Nostalgia

By Jamie Portman | December 12, 2015

Photo: William Beddoe. Chris Ralph (Winnie) and David Gerow (Eeyore)

There’s something decidedly inviting about the shared pleasure of spending time with Winnie The Pooh and his friends.

So you’re conscious of a strong sense of community when you arrive at the Gladstone Theatre for Plosive Productions’ latest Christmas bow to the glory days of radio.

In this instance, it’s a simple matter of audience members engaging in a special way with the people at the microphones. And the task of Winnie-the-Pooh: The Radio Show is to recreate through voice and a bit of body language the magical world created by author A.A. Milne in his Pooh Bear tales.

…

Read More Read More

GCTC’s Angel Square — A Buoyant Delight

By Jamie Portman | December 10, 2015

Photo: Barb Gray

On one level, GCTC’s sterling production of Angel Square might seem to offer no more than a series of impressions of a particularly beguiling kind.

But they’re impressions that beautifully evoke another time and place — Lowertown Ottawa in the 1940s. And out of them there emerges a delightful stage work of genuine shape and substance.

It’s through the prism of an observant youngster named Tommy that these moments unfold. Even if we weren’t actually there ourselves, we find ourselves engulfed in his childhood world. And its components resonate with us today.

It’s a world of Woolworth stores — remember them? — with creaking wooden floors. Of Ottawa’s majestic Union Station, now an underused government conference centre, but in this production exerting a ghostly remembrance of things past, courtesy of designer Jock Munro.

…

Read More Read More