Photo Wendy Wagner

Actor Dale MacEachern deserves a big bouquet for his contribution to Kanata Theatre’s new production of A Flea In Her Ear.

But, no, better make that two bouquets. MacEachern takes on dual roles in the Georges Feydeau farce, and excels in both. We first see him as the somewhat stolid but emotionally distraught Victor Chandebise, an affluent Parisian whose declining libido at home has led wife Raymonde to question his faithfulness. MacEachern etches out this characterization with shrewd psychological observation and comic efficiency, and then shows equal ease in creating the buffoonish Poche, drunken porter at the notorious Frisky Puss Hotel, a shambling oaf who happens to look exactly like Victor.

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Ninety minutes in the company of Canadian singing icon Jackie Richardson is an experience to be cherished. And her current show, Big Mama/The Willie Mae Thornton Story, offers a seamless procession of memorable high points. You come away from the National Arts Centre still mesmerized by her rendition of George Gershwin’s Summertime, so intense in its yearning, or exhilarated by the jaunty good humour of Hound Dog, a song that Elvis Presley was to claim as his own even though it had been preceded by an earlier groundbreaking recording by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, the fabled blues singer whom Richardson is celebrating in this memorable evening of entertainment.

Supported by Audrei-Kairen’s script and sustained by her own formidable stage authority, Richardson is able to transport us back into a culture of racism and violence, of artistic struggle and achievement against tremendous odds. She is not only telling the story of Willie Mae Thornton, she is also re-connecting us to the origins of the blues, which means the institution of slavery, while also awakening us to the ironies of an Elvis or Janis Joplin getting rich on the ill-paid creative labours of non-whites.

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Photo: Maria Vartanova

More than half a century has passed since Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn landed on Broadway and launched a remarkable writing career. Simon went on to write more substantial plays — among them, The Odd Couple, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Lost In Yonkers — but his 1961 debut piece still still can demonstrate a lot of charm and vitality.

One of the virtues of Sarah Hearn’s production for Ottawa Little Theatre is that she respects it as a character piece and not just as a vehicle for a succession of verbal gags and comic situations. Therefore, she looks for some solid contrast between Alan Baker, the feckless playboy brother struggling to escape his own family culture, and younger sibling Buddy who arrives, suitcase in hand, at Alan’s bachelor pad in the hope of experiencing a more hedonistic lifestyle. And she recognizes not just the comic potential of the generational conflict which erupts between them and their parents but also an underlying pathos.

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Photo: Andrew Alexandre. Todd Duckworth (Edmund Curtis) and Quelemia Sparrow (Angeline)

The first point to be made about The Edward Curtis Project is that the production itself is exquisite.

Playwright Marie Clements’s direction is assured and imaginative — in the seamlessness of its ever-changing visual imagery, in its crucial attentiveness to mood shifts, in its balancing of naturalism with a more elusive expressionism, in the ethereal beauty of its soundscape.

Furthermore, it’s rare for back projections to be used so well. And their presence is an essential component of Clements’s attempt to revisit the influential but unreliable world of Edward Curtis who once enjoyed international fame for his allegedly “authentic” photographs of First Nations people throughout North America. These blown-up relics from nearly a century ago often dominate the Greenberg Centre stage, providing an eerie visual counterpoint to the more unsettling truths about an obsessive white man who saw it as his mission to document ‘the vanishing Indian” through the medium of the photograph but whose manipulative, orchestrated images constituted an ongoing lie.

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Photo: Glendon James Hartle

The big problem in discussing Ira Levin’s clever but nasty thriller is that there’s not much you can say about it without spoiling the audience’s enjoyment. The script revels in unexpected twists and turns, and is adept at orchestrating the kind of shock scene that gives you no advance hint that it’s going to happen.

On the other hand, no production should give you time to think too hard about the play because that will make you aware of just how preposterous it really is. That means maintaining a solid theatrical momentum which drives the story to its gruesome climax. It also means an appreciation of the fact that — for all its cunning with plot devices — the play is also a character piece.

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Set by Brian Smith. Photo: David Pasho

If you can believe James Richardson, artistic director of the happily resuscitated Third Wall theatre company, God Of Carnage is destined to become a classic.
Oh really? Worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as The Bacchae, King Lear, Tartuffe, The Importance Of Being Earnest, The Cherry Orchard? Let’s keep things in proportion — especially when it’s a script from a playwright like Yasmina Reza.

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