Photo: David Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Perhaps the oddest aspect of Peter And The Starcatcher — playwright Rick Elice’s subversively gleeful take on the Peter Pan legend — is that the title character often seems so inconsequential that he almost vanishes into the woodwork.

Such, at any rate, is the impression given by the Shaw Festival’s production of this 2012 Broadway success about a shipboard trunk containing stardust and an orphan youngster who is destined to become Peter Pan. Charlie Gallant delivers an amiable enough performance in this role (he’s known simply as “Boy” for a good part of the evening) and there’s no denying his dexterity with a ship’s rigging. But it can scarcely be said that he demands our unwavering attention.

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Moya O’Connell   Photo: Emily Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — the opening image is powerful — a huge boulder rising implacably from the stage of the Shaw Festival’s Court House Theatre. And on top of it, naked and yielding to the dark mysticism of the moment, is the mermaid figure of a woman in anguish over both the lure of the sea and the danger it holds for her.

It is a moment of potent symbolism — augmented by a loud and angry soundscape. The Shaw Festival’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s Lady From The Sea has seized our attention immediately — thanks to the combined efforts of director Meg Roe, designer Camillia Koo, lighting wizard Kevin Lamotte, sound expert Alessandro Juliani, and actress Moya O’Connell who will go on to deliver a haunting performance in the title role.

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Photo: David Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Sweet Charity poses a challenge to any performer hazarding the title role.
Here’s the problem. This 1966 musical was conceived as a showcase vehicle for the legendary Gwen Verdon, a one-of-a-kind Broadway talent. Her director husband, another legend named Bob Fosse, saw her as ideal casting for the role of a forlorn New York dance hall girl who keeps being disappointed in love.

I saw Verdon as Charity, and her high-kicking performance was definitely one for the memory books. She had a dynamite presence — even though, in portraying a character who is more used than loved, she seemed to be fulfilling the inner needs of a director whose depiction of women on stage or screen often seemed problematic.
The show ultimately belonged to Verdon — not to playwright Neil Simon, whose amusing, observant book seemed tailor-made for its star, not to composer Cy Coleman who provided some of the best music of his Broadway career for Sweet Charity, not to veteran lyricist Dorothy Fields who, at the age of 61, had provided a succession of witty, verbally brilliant complements to Coleman’s score.

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Photo: Emily  Cooper.

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Bernard Shaw’s early romantic comedy, You Never Can Tell, may well be his most beguiling play. It is, of course, a characteristically Shavian take on one of his recurring preoccupations — the battle of the sexes — but this time, in a calculated commercial attempt to seduce late Victorian audiences into attending, GBS threw in the type of dramatic conventions prevalent in the West End theatre of the day.
Hence, this Socialist playwright gave us a fashionable seaside resort setting, displays of high fashion, expensive food and drink — and a philosophical waiter. Not the kind of culture Shaw tended to embrace — but if it earned him money, that was all to the good.

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Photo: Maria Vartanova. Katie Buller and Shaun Toohey.

Hugh Whitemore’s play, Breaking The Code, can seem something of a period piece these days — and not only because of its wartime setting. Yes, it tells a compelling real-life story — that of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who was instrumental in cracking Nazi Germany’s notorious Enigma Code only to have the full weight of the state destroy him a few years later because of his homosexuality. Its problem is that it was written in 1986 and that its original impact has been eclipsed by subsequent events.

The salvaging of Turing’s reputation was yet to come when the play had its triumphant launching in London’s West End. But Breaking The Code was crucial in making the public aware of this forgotten genius who was so vital in helping the Allies win the war and also of the personal tragedy that led to his death — possibly by suicide — in 1954. And because homosexuality had been decriminalized by this time, these new revelations about Turing’s tragic end roused the public conscience, thereby paving the way for his rehabilitation — an official public apology by British prime minister Gordon Brown in 2009, a posthumous pardon by the Queen in 2013, and a year later the perhaps inevitable act of benediction from Hollywood in the form of the movie, The Imitation Game.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova. David Whitely and Chandel Gambles.

There are those who will no doubt be attracted to a new Ottawa production of Venus In Fur by some of the hype surrounding it — the promise of titillating sexual mind games and the opportunity to ogle one of the characters in various stages of undress.

There will also be some who will insist on applauding David Ives’s Tony-Award-winning Broadway hit as no more than an entertaining sex comedy cheeky enough to probe some of the darker recesses of sado-masochistic culture. Indeed, it’s scarcely surprising that Venus In Fur is being produced all over the place these days — not always for reasons necessarily artistic. Sex sells — especially the naughtier brand that on the surface drives this play. So the guffaws and giggles that Plosive Productions is generating from the show now on view at the Gladstone are perhaps inevitable. But let it be noted that the laughter begins diminishing as the play reaches its creepy, identity-bending conclusion — and this reflects the virtues of Catriona Ledger’s production and the often brave performances of David Whiteley and Chandel Gambles.

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Photo: Barb Gray

Dean Gilmour as Anse, the patriarch of the family

The youth is engaged in a battle of wills with the unruly horse that he loves. And he seems to be straining every muscle as he’s thrown about the stage and into the air by the whiplash resistance of his steed. But, of course, there’s no animal on the stage of the NAC Theatre — except in our imagination.

However, we do have a determined young actor named Ben Muir in the role of Jewel, the fierce and haunted bastard son who is perhaps the most compelling character in Take Me Back To Jefferson — the title lately bestowed by Theatre Smith-Gilmour on its 2013 adaptation of William Faulkner’s great novel, As I Lay Dying.

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