Wendy Lill’s play The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum is set on the East Coast of Canada sometime directly following the Second World War. The story, which is about the tragic lives of Glace Bay miners and their fight for more fair working conditions and wages, may not speak directly to many of us in the audience. After all, I can’t say I know too many people in Ottawa starting their work day down a mine shaft with minimal safety precautions only to be paid below minimum wage. It’s what’s at the heart of The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum that makes it universal. Yes, it speaks of a specific time and place, but the struggle to find happiness in life after a tragedy and the fight for one’s place in the world is universal. Unfortunately, the NAC’s production, marking the opening of the 2012-2013 season, fails to capture this universality and instead delivers a play that feels dated and flat.

…

Read More Read More

Photo: Alan Dean. A play that, in the author’s own words, has “no plot at all and remarkably little action,” Noel Coward’s Hay Fever is notoriously difficult to get right. While the playwright provides a sinfully witty script, the onus is on the actors to give meaning. Every phrase must be accompanied with a movement and a glance that is just so in this comedy of manners about a bohemian, slightly unhinged family who torment their unsuspecting weekend guests. The end result should be a comedy that resides in the half pauses and affected looks to be fund in between the words, rather than strictly the script itself. Tim Ginley’s production for the Ottawa Little Theatre is a valiant effort with some solid performances, but ultimately doesn’t quite live up to the script’s promise.

…

Read More Read More

In a festival with plenty of laughs, a collaborative piece about suicide was bound to stand out. White noise is the story of Nadia Kajouji, a first-year Carleton University student who committed suicide in 2008. Twisted by Design does a beautiful job of telling her story and, perhaps even more importantly, creating a lingeringly haunting atmosphere.

The story is told through Margaret (played by a convincing Margaret Evraire) who is a first year university student suffering from depression much like Nadia was. While searching for people to talk to, she stumbles upon Nadia’s story. From that moment on, their stories intermingle. As Margaret follows the other girl’s story, she decides not to kill herself and to seek help from outside.

The play is gripping, especially the scenes with the Qallupilluit, monsters from Robert Munsch’s book A Promise is a Promise, who come to both girls and spiral them ever-deeper into depression. There’s a dreadful, understated feeling throughout and the actors manage to get the story and atmosphere across without resorting to over-the-top or pathetic performances. A great, touching play!

I confess. I make snap judgments all the time, whether with people or shows. I know it’s not good and we should allow time to make up our minds, but I can’t help it. The truth is, I trust my instinct. Having said that, I love nothing more than being surprised and proven wrong in my judgments. The Two Little Birds’ production of and then it happens, ironically all about the tension between giving the audience what they want while still staying true to oneself, does exactly this.

The piece started with information gathered at last year’s Undercurrents and Wakefest festivals through the group’s interactive installation, The Lab, which asked participants what they liked about theatre and what they wanted to see. and then it happens starts off by choosing an answer for each of the question from The Lab and enacting them. The result is a mess. There are bits of musical theatre, a one woman show, a toy helicopter, and many other unfinished pieces.

…

Read More Read More

Even with the latest census pointing out Canadian’s migration to the West, Alberta can still sometimes seem like a wilderness, especially outside of Edmonton. Images of the adventure-hungry and young pouring to work for its oil companies abound. Yet, there’s much more to the place than meets the eye. This is exactly what Toronto’s Architect Theatre points out in Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show, set in and around For McMurray. Based on interviews with long-term residents and those passing through, Highway 63 show that, behind the stereotypes of oil, drugs, and desolation, lie very human stories.

…

Read More Read More

When  I first heard that the Gladstone was putting on Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac under a new translation, I immediately got flashes to awkward “modern” dialogue, too much emphasis on slapstick and, worst of all, random, misplaced attempts at song. Talk about not judging something before seeing it. David Whiteley’s version of the classic play manages to be modern and funny without sacrificing the eloquence and poignancy of the original script.

Richard Gélinas’ Cyrano is an audacious, nuanced hero. He will fight (and defeat) a hundred men, as much with his sharp tongue and poetry as with his sword. He is energetic and boisterous with his fellow soldiers, but is plagued by insecurity about his goodly-sized nose. Cyrano falls in love with his cousin Roxane, a strong and passionate woman, portrayed by a somewhat flat Élise Gauthier. Roxane, however, falls in love with Christian, a handsome, but dense young man in Cyrano’s company.

…

Read More Read More

Secret agents, wily villains, a dapper hero and beautiful love interests. Seventhirty Productions’ staging of The 39 Steps, itself an adaptation of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, promises much in the way of comedy and adventure. Luckily for the John P. Kelly production it delivers on all fronts, despite a few fairly noticeable technical problems.

The play, based on Alfred Hitchock’s 1935 movie which was itself based on a novel by the Canadian John Buchan, follows Richard Hannay, a British ex-pat upon his return from Canada who suddenly finds himself thrown in the middle of a spy game by a preposterously-accented foreign spy. The play stays true to the movie version, but is ingeniously reshaped into a farce of the both the genre and the process of putting on a play. The show is incredibly witty, fast-paced and presents a myriad of characters for the audience to enjoy and keep up with.

Did I mention that the cast of 150-some parts is played by 4 actors? Al Connors, playing a dapper, ironic Hannay, is the only actor to portray a single role, while Kate Smith plays the three female roles – the sensual Anabella Schmidt, beautifully argumentative Pamela and a shy Scottish housewife that Hannay has a brief affair with.

…

Read More Read More

It seems the majority of people these days are either in the process of getting it, talking about getting it or researching what type they should get. How well does it work and how honestly are we prepared to explore our inner demons? Playwright Bernard Farrell weighs in on the questions with a decidedly pessimistic, though hilarious view in I Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Fell. The play, in a great production by SevenThirty productions, pokes fun at not only the idea of group therapy but participants’ willingness to actually be open with each other on anything other than a superficial level. …

Read More Read More