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

Shaw Festival’s Light Up The Sky is a Mixed Bag

By Jamie Portman | July 29, 2015

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Moss Hart’s 1948 stage success, Light Up The Sky, needs tender, loving care in performance. The last thing it needs is an overkill approach.

It’s a backstage comedy of sorts — except that its turbulent events occur in Boston in the leading lady’s swanky Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite on the opening day of the pre-Broadway try-out of a new play.

The performance turns into a disaster, and the early bonhomie we’ve witnessed turns into a cat fight in which tempers flare, egos further inflate and the blame game runs rampant.

The ingredients are familiar. So are the essentially stock characters that range from the terribly sincere novice playwright to the volatile diva to the show’s blustering financial backer. Moss Hart was writing about a world he knew intimately; he was also desperately trying to prove that he was capable of going it alone as a playwright instead of relying on the wit and guidance of George S. Kaufman, his writing partner in such evergreen triumphs as You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came To Dinner. …

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Stratford Scores With an Intriguing Revival of John Mighton’s Possible Worlds

By Jamie Portman | July 28, 2015

19047065253_b47d3fc363 — Photo: David Hou

STRATFORD — The Stratford Festival’s new production of John Mighton’s award-winning Possible Worlds begins with the sight of a man’s naked body, dead in a pool of water.

The imagery is bold but not quite real. The lighting is dank, the soundscape ominous. Near the body, silhouetted in the water, is his clothing, evoking the shape and substance of what he once was. And then the corpse pulls himself back to life — well, at least, a sort of life. But there’s a questing element to all this as he splashes through the water and dresses himself in his soaking garments.

And if we’re not sure at this point who or what he is, neither — we suspect — is he.

It’s the sort of moment that can have us retrieving pop-culture references out of our own consciences. William Holden looking down on his own murdered corpse in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard? Or maybe Jeff Bridges struggling into a form of being in Starman? Or is this simply how my own particular world responds at a particular moment in time in watching the play? …

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OLT’s Bedtime Stories: The Best and Worst of Norm Foster

By Jamie Portman | July 15, 2015

Norm Foster’s Bedtime Stories consists of six playlets, four of which should have been left to gather dust in the playwright’s bottom drawer.

There’s a variability in quality here. And that places a hard-working cast at something of a disadvantage in Ottawa Little Theatre’s current summer production of this frequently produced Foster piece.

But there remains enough here to show this prolific Canadian playwright’s genuine merits. He has a gift for funny, observant glimpses into contemporary life. He also — when he puts his mind to it — can examine human relationships with genuine poignancy. Both these qualities are on display in Bedtime Stories.

But Foster also has a weakness for the kind of sophomoric humour that can quickly wear out its welcome. In Bedtime Stories, the playlets are linked in three basic ways.

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Ferocious comic relief and dangerous despair all emerge in Deborah Hay’s brilliant portrayal of Katherina inThe Taming of the Shrew.

By Jamie Portman | July 14, 2015

Photo: David Hou.

STRATFORD, Ont. — For modern-day audiences, the most contentious moments in The Taming Of The Shrew come at the end.

That’s when Katherina, the fiery and rebellious spouse of the swaggering Petruchio, finally appears to be yielding to her husband’s god-given authority.

By this time, she has been dragged kicking and screaming into marriage. She has then been subjected to emotional humiliation, to starvation, to sleep deprivation by her new spouse — and doesn’t all this remind us of the classic interrogation techniques practised by today’s CIA?

Defenders of Petruchio may argue that he’s merely imposing tough love on a young woman whose out-of-bounds behaviour, furious temper and tendency towards violence have earned her the label of “Katherina the cursed” — that his determination to reduce her to a state of total submission is “done in reverend care of her.” But is it really that simple? Not by a long shot when it comes to the Stratford Festival’s astonishing new production.

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Director Peter Hinton’s Contemporary Take On Pygmalion is a Bundle of Delights

By Jamie Portman | July 2, 2015

Photo. David Cooper. Jeff Meadows as Colonel Pickering, Harveen Sandhu as Eliza Doolittle and Patrick McManus as Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. Photo by David Cooper.

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Linguistics genius Henry Higgins is lurking behind a pillar in London’s Covent Garden working madly away at his I-Pad.

Flower seller Eliza Doolittle is a feisty street urchin whose form-fitting blue jeans are so full of holes that you wonder whether they will last out the scene, not to mention the complete run of the Shaw Festival’s bold but exhilarating revival of Pygmalion.

This is definitely not Edwardian England we’re experiencing — not with a soundscape that includes Kanye West’s Runaway and Janet Jackson’s Got ‘Til It’s Gone, not with Henry Higgins’s female housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, sporting a red tee shirt telling us all to “keep calm.”

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The Shaw Festival triumphs with a provocative Top Girls

By Jamie Portman | June 30, 2015

Photo: David Cooper.

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — There’s no doubt about it. The Shaw Festival’s new production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls is a dazzler of a show — provocative, invigorating, hilarious, heart-wrenching. It allows us to feast on a seemingly effortless display of stunning ensemble acting that deserves a triple underlining in the memory books.

The show that made a triumphant arrival at the Court House Theatre Saturday night can claim any number of attention-grabbing sequences, thanks to Vikki Anderson’s incisive direction and the astonishing work of her seven-member cast, almost all of them in a variety of roles. But there’s a particularly pivotal scene involving Marlene, a woman obsessed with proving that women can be a success in business and ruthless in her determination to claw her way to power within the Top Girls Employment Agency.

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The Twelve-Pound Look. A forgotten J.M. Barrie play delights at the Shaw Festival

By Jamie Portman | June 29, 2015

Photo: David Cooper.

When it comes to live theatre, some of the nicest surprises come in the smallest of packages.

This year’s Shaw Festival lunchtime presentation is an absolute gem — a 105-year-old playlet from Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie who reveals himself here as a sympathetic advocate of women’s rights.

This funny and provocative one-actor, The Twelve-Pound Look by name, is not overtly political, but it was written at a time when Britain’s suffragettes were actively campaigning for a woman’s right to vote. And the suffrage movement has clear parallels to the play’s preoccupations — the right of a woman to think and behave independently and to be an equal partner in a relationship.

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Stratford’s She Stoops To Conquer Has Its Moments

By Jamie Portman | June 26, 2015

Courtesy of the Stratford Festival

STRATFORD, Ont. — There’s genuine pleasure in watching two veteran
Canadian actors successfully mining the humor of Oliver Goldsmith’s
classic comedy, She Stoops To Conquer.
So when the curtain rises at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre to
reveal Joseph Ziegler and Lucy Peacock in warm and witty conversation,
their world of comfortable privilege further defined by Douglas
Paraschuk’s amusing country-mansion setting, you feel that you’re in
safe hands.

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Screwtape: A Masterful Performance

By Jamie Portman | June 23, 2015

Photo. courtesy of the Ottawa Fringe.

John Huston can be a mesmerizing performer, but he also brings an intellectual vigour to his work. In this adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s legendary Screwtape Letters, he is both amusing and unsettling in his portrayal of a senior devil who tackles his duties as a satanic tempter with robust commitment while also attempting to rouse his numb-brained nephew, Wormwood out of his torpor. Huston, a dapperly attired devil in a dark Bay Street suit with an appropriately scarlet necktie, also displays his own brand of evangelical fervour when he passionately declares, “Catch the shepherd, and the whole flock of sheep will follow.” And he’s quite astonishing at the moment when he turns into a centipede.

However, the sanctuary of this church is not the easiest venue for him or his audience. The other afternoon, the effectiveness of his performance was in frequent jeopardy from the church’s challenging acoustics.

Screwtape, from By The Book Productions, Toronto

Adapted and performed by John D. Huston

St Paul’s Eastern United Church

Inescapable: A Guilt Edged Winner

By Jamie Portman | June 22, 2015

This is a consistently funny and dazzlingly creative piece about two middle-aged guys and a mysterious box that contains a sinister toy — but is it really a toy? Maybe it’s a time machine. In any event the object tests their friendship in unexpected ways, frightens the bejeebers out of them and seems to have trapped them in a time warp. Dockery, all flailing arms and legs, is terrific as the guy who’s plunged into gibbering neurosis by this item — plucked, we are repeatedly told, from his own closet. Jon Paterson is the buddy who has increasing difficulty maintaining his equilibrium in the face of all this angst. Together these actors manage the crisp, ping-pong dialogue with comic agility — and bolster it with memorable body language.

This an entertainment rooted in the absurdist tradition. There’s Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and N.F, Simpson, plus smidgeons of Peter Cook and Harold Pinter from the days when they wrote review sketches. As well, there should be a doff of the hat to Bill Murray and Groundhog Day. A winner all the way.

Inescapable by Martin Dockery

From RibbitRePublic, Vancouver

Arts Court Courtroom