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

Stratford triumphs with Napoli Milionaria, a 20th century Classic from Italy.

By Jamie Portman | August 25, 2018

Tom McCamus (left) as Gennaro and Michael Blake as Errico in Napoli
Milionaria! Photo David Hou.

STRATFORD, Ont. — The Stratford Festival’s 2018 playbill is now complete — and the final entry is an absolute winner.

Napoli Milionaria! is the name of the play, and it’s a wonderful, steaming broth of an entertainment — robustly staged with understanding and affection by festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino and featuring a stellar cast led by Tom McCamus as the beleaguered head of a turbulent Neapolitan household clinging to survival during the Second World War. …

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The Shaw Festival struggles to come to terms with a vintage anti-war play.

By Jamie Portman | August 23, 2018

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Peter Hinton is a director who has long thrived on risk-taking. Indeed, he would probably tell you that the right to take risks is a necessary component of meaningful artistic activity.

Along with that component comes another necessity — the freedom to fail. There are times when Hinton, the former head of English theatre at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, has failed spectacularly, but there have also been visionary achievements — a startling Way Of The World at NAC, a visually sumptuous Lady Windermere’s Fan and a controversial but rewarding Cabaret at the Shaw. …

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Seana McKenna shines as Julius Caesar at Stratford

By Jamie Portman | August 21, 2018

Julius Caesar with Seanna Mckenna. Photo Clay Stang.

STRATFORD, ONT. — By the time the assassination scene arrives in the Stratford Festival’s new production of Julius Caesar, the sense of foreboding is palpable.

It’s not just the soothsayer’s urgent warnings to “beware the Ides of March” or the fearful nightmares of Caesar’s wife who pleads with him to remain at home and not go to the Senate on this fateful day. It’s also the noirish atmosphere that shrouds Scott Wentworth’s production in its early scenes. …

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Perth Cranks Up the Suspense with Angel Street (gaslight)

By Jamie Portman | August 21, 2018

Angel Street (Gaslight) By Patrick Hamilton, Classic Theatre Festival Directed by laurel Smith

PERTH, Ont. — The Perth Classic Theatre Festival has come up trumps with a sizzling revival of Patrick Hamilton’s renowned psychological thriller, Angel Street.

Director Laurel Smith and an excellent cast steadily crank up the tension in the production that opened on the weekend. But Smith never loses sight of the fact that Hamilton’s 1938 play about a vicious husband who is steadily driving his wife towards madness is also an unsettling study in character. In fact, it was this latter aspect that was seized on by actress Ingrid Bergman for her Oscar-winning performance in the 1944 movie, released under the title of Gaslight. …

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the Shaw Festival triumphs over inferior material with Grand Hotel.

By Jamie Portman | August 17, 2018

*James Daly as Baron von Gaigern and Michael Therriault as Otto Kringelein with the cast of Grand Hotel, The Musical. Photo by David Cooper.*

NIAGARA-ON THE-LAKE, Ont. — The musical numbers are sublime in their execution. The visuals can be stunning — reflecting a creative imagination that embraces the adage that less can often mean more. A superb cast has been assembled. The entire evening has a silken efficiency that reflects professionalism at its highest. What more can we want? …

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Robert Lepage finally makes it to Stratford with an astonishing Coriolanus

By Jamie Portman | July 30, 2018

Photo Clay Stang. Coriolanus André Sills. **See Jamie Portman’s review of Coriolanus** : http://capitalcriticscircle.com/robert-lepage-finally-makes-it-to-stratford-with-an-astonishing-coriolanus/

STRATFORD, Ont. — It’s one of many startling moments in the Stratford Festival’s production of Coriolanus. Through pride and arrogance, the tarnished hero of the play’s title has squandered the love of the Roman populace and is fleeing for his life. So we see him behind the wheel of an automobile, speeding to safety as an increasingly forbidding landscape flashes past. It could be a journey into hell — it seems so ominous and interminable — and it’s happening within a rectangular, wide-screen frame surrounded by the blackness of the Avon Theatre stage. Finally when he halts the car and steps out, Coriolanus is clearly in a blighted, forsaken place. …

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Actress Catherine McNallly Triumphs in once-controversial Shaw play

By Jamie Portman | July 25, 2018

Photo Jean-Denis Labelle Mrs Warren’s Profession

Mrs. Warren’s Profession
By Bernard Shaw
Perth Classic Theatre Festival to August 12

On the surface, Mrs. Warren’s Profession may simply seem to be a late Victorian shocker about a wealthy female brothel-keeper who eventually gets her comeuppance from the daughter she has carefully reared in a cocooned world of privilege and propriety.
But the play has more on its mind than tabloid sensationalism There is no denying the dramatic power of those closing scenes when Vivie Warren, the secrets of her family history finally laid bare, confronts her mother with her knowledge of the truth and brutally seizes control of her own destiny. …

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OLT’s Unexpected Guest: troublesome script, good performances

By Jamie Portman | July 13, 2018

The Unexpected Guest by Agatha Christie, Ottawa Little Theatre, directed by Alain Chamsi

There’s no denying that Agatha Christie brings off a stunning surprise at the very end of The Unexpected Guest.

It’s a pity, therefore, that elsewhere the play is often bogged down in verbosity.

The current Ottawa Little Theatre production is sustained by some solid performances, but the fact remains that this 1958 thriller, the last to achieve box-office success for its author, seems excessively wordy. It also strains the credulity of even the most avid Christie admirer. …

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Acting Legend Martha Henry Triumphs as Prospero at Stratford

By Jamie Portman | June 30, 2018

The Tempest. Stratford Festival, Photo David Hou, Marthy Henry as Prospero.

STRATFORD — We find ourselves immediately plunged into the opening shipwreck scene: sails flapping and breaking, winds shrieking through the darkness, frantic crew members shouting at each other — and, as always in productions of The Tempest, their words are pretty much unintelligible.

But Shakespeare’s lines don’t matter that much at this point, so we can simply sit back and enjoy the Stratford Festival’s formidable resources being put to work. Unfettered theatricality holds no fears for director Antoni Cimolino, and here he has some sterling collaborators — set and costume designer Bretta Gerecke, lighting wizard Michael Walton and sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne. …

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Chekhov surfaces in the Okanagan in a sterling Shaw Festival premiere

By Jamie Portman | June 28, 2018

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Sarena Parmar’s new play, The Orchard, deserves to be met on its own quietly compelling terms.

We’re back in the 1970s, in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. And we’re plunged into the very real crisis confronting a Punjabi-Sikh family on the verge of losing their home. Correction: not just their home but also their orchard — and its loss will not 0nly be a material one but an assault on this family’s very identity. …

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