Author: Jamie Portman

Jamie Portman has distinguished himself as one of the finest theatre critics in the country. He is presently a free lance critic , periodically writing reviews for theatre in Canada and in England for the Capitalcriticscircle and Postmedia-News (formerly CanWest). Jamie makes his home in Kanata.
The Perth Classic Theatre Festival turns to fluff with There’s Always Juliet.

The Perth Classic Theatre Festival turns to fluff with There’s Always Juliet.

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John Van Druten’s There’s Always Juliet is a trifle of a comedy about a fun-loving London socialite whose attitude towards romantic love is turned upside down when she meets a young American visitor at a tea party.

It’s a rather peculiar choice for Perth’s Classic Theatre Festival, which is unabashedly populist but also dedicated to quality entertainment from the so-called Golden Age of Broadway and London theatre. But There’s Always Juliet, a failure in New York when it premiered there in 1932, is so slight, insubstantial and forgettable that it scarcely seems worth doing. …

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Stratford’s new play about the Bronte sisters disappoints, salvaged only by the performances

Stratford’s new play about the Bronte sisters disappoints, salvaged only by the performances

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Photo: Hilary Gauld Camilleri
From left: Andrea Rankin as Anne Brontë, Beryl Bain as Charlotte Brontë and Jessica B. Hill as Emily Brontë in Brontë: The World Without. Photography by Hilary Gauld Camilleri.

 

Stratford. — It’s only fair to emphasize that the Stratford Festival’s world premiere of Bronte: The World Without is at least partially salvaged by three sterling performances.

So kudos are in order for the collective effort of Beryl Bain, Jessica B. Hill and Andrea Rankin in trying to draw us into the 19th Century world of the three Bronte sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne. …

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The Shaw Festival misfires with The Baroness and the Pig

The Shaw Festival misfires with The Baroness and the Pig

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The Baroness and the Pig  Photo David Cooper   Yanna McIntosh(left of photo) ,  Julia Course

Niagara-on-the-Lake, On. —   The scene does offer some amusement. A benevolent Baroness has embarked on a key initiative in her Rousseau-inspired mission to prove she can create a useful maidservant out of a gibbering, feral girl who has essentially grown up among pigs.

The Baroness, portrayed with kindly but steely resolve by Yanna McIntosh, an actress whom we always want to watch, is trying to teach Emily the correct etiquette for answering the doorbell and greeting the new arrival with a silver tray on which a visitor’s card must be deposited. …

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O’Flaherty V.C. The Shaw Festival stumbles with its namesake’s satirical take on the First World War

O’Flaherty V.C. The Shaw Festival stumbles with its namesake’s satirical take on the First World War

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Shaw Festival :  O’Flaherty V.C. Photo:  Emily Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — It’s characteristic of the Shaw Festival’s new artistic regime that this summer’s lunchtime theatre offering begins with cast members being themselves  — by treating the audience to a mini-concert of Irish balladry. One of them strums a guitar, another presides at the piano, and nationalistic numbers like Foggy Dew are sung with appropriate fervor.

There’s also a bit of conversational back and forth with the audience, in deference to current artistic director Tim Carroll’s love for what he calls “two-way theatre” But eventually, the Canadian accents are dropped and the four performers submerge themselves in matters Irish as viewed through the sardonic prism of George Bernard Shaw more than a century ago. …

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Orpheus chalks up another winner with Mamma Mía

Orpheus chalks up another winner with Mamma Mía

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Photo Allan Dean, Tanya (Stefania Wheelhouse) Donna (Nicole Milne). Rosie (Christine Moran).

Music and lyrics by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus  and some songs with Stig Anderson, Book by Catherine Johnson.  Originally conceived by Judy Craymer. Orpheus Musical Theatre Society.   Directed by Shaun Toohey

Perhaps it’s the moment when Nicole Milne, spellbinding in the role of Donna, communicates the yearning poetry of The Winner Takes It All. Or maybe it’s the explosion of comedy, colour and ensemble expertise that occurs on the beach with Lay All Your Love On Me.

Again, perhaps the most memorable moments come with the emotional impact of soon-to-be married Sophie’s I Have A Dream when Meaghan Chapin wistfully sings it at the very beginning and then invests the material with a different texture at the very end. …

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Stratford’s To Kill A Mockingbird unveils an intriguing Atticus Finch.

Stratford’s To Kill A Mockingbird unveils an intriguing Atticus Finch.

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To Kill a Mockingbird. Photo David Hou

 

 

STRATFORD, Ont. —   It didn’t seem such a great idea 11 years ago when the Stratford Festival first put To Kill A Mockingbird on stage. Back then,Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s beloved 1960 novel seemed serviceable and little more  — and the festival’s 2018 remounting gives no reason for altering that verdict.

The script’s Hallmark Playhouse efficiency scarcely justifies its presence in a playbill that should be driven by higher standards. As with many of the festival’s previous involvements with mediocre stage versions of popular novels, its necessity seems questionable. …

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Stratford triumphs with The Music Man

Stratford triumphs with The Music Man

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Daren A. Herbert (centre) as Harold Hill with members of the company.
Photo Cylla van Tiedemann
The Music Man.

STRATFORD, Ontario — You start having a good feeling about the Stratford Festival’s latest revival of The Music Man from the very beginning.

That‘s because of how brilliantly it brings off that audacious opening scene on a train bound for River City, Iowa, in 1912. It’s a guy setting  — a lot of traveling salesmen here — and they can’t stop talking and attempting bits of one-upmanship with each other. But it’s no normal conversation — no music, just snippets of dialogue snapping back and forth to the jiggling rhythms of the passenger car and reaching an almost fugal complexity. …

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Reviews in from Stratford. Stratford’s Ideal Husband sustained by solid performances

Reviews in from Stratford. Stratford’s Ideal Husband sustained by solid performances

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Sophia Walker (left) as ady Gertrude Chiltern and Bahareh Yaraghi as Mrs. Laura Cheveley in An Ideal Husband. Photography by Emily Cooper.

Perhaps it was novelist Henry James’ own frustrated playwriting ambitions that were jealously at play when he attended a peformance of Oscar Wilde’s  An Ideal Husband more that 120 year ago and delivered an appalled verdict. The ever-fastidious James considered Wilde’s new stage piece “so helpless, so crude, so bad, so clumsy, so feeble, so vulgar” that he couldn’t imagine any audience enjoying it. …

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Miss Shakespeare: A bouquet of fine performances

Miss Shakespeare: A bouquet of fine performances

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Photo Andrew Alexander

Miss Shakespeare

Book and lyrics by Tracey Power

Music co-written with Steve Charles

Three Sisters Theatre Company

Directed by Bronwyn Steinberg

There’s a memorable moment in the Three Sisters Theatre Company’s production of Miss Shakespeare when an outstanding Robin Guy transports us back to the early 17th Century with a song called Tumbling.

She’s playing a woman named Katherine Rose who has lost 14 of her children in infancy yet still yearns for them to be alive. She gives utterance to this fantasy in one of this show’s most poignant musical numbers. Guy captures the tearful sensibility of the song brilliantly, but she’s also adding layers to her character. There’s this terrible loss in Katherine’s life, but there’s also a sturdy resilience and enough rebelliousness to make it conceivable that she would join other female characters in agreeing to defy the strictures of the day and act on stage at a time in history when the idea of a woman performer was unthinkable. …

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Kanata Theatre scores high with Vania and Sonia and Masha and Spike

Kanata Theatre scores high with Vania and Sonia and Masha and Spike

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One of the pleasures of Kanata Theatre’s latest offering is its success in delivering a succession of plausible, fully-realized characters.

Furthermore director Jim Holmes and his cast are attentive to the nuances, both comic and wistful, of Christopher Durang’s amusing yet curiously heartfelt comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

To be sure, these characters inhabit their own, slightly skewed universe while also providing a conduit for Durang’s own wry reflections on the real world. What’s more, the plays of Anton Chekhov crop up as reference points in this 2012 script — even though you need to know nothing about his works to enjoy what’s happening on the stage of Kanata’s Ron Maslin Playhouse. …

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