How do you maim a perfectly good musical? Run the show through an abysmally tuned sound system in the NAC’s Southam Hall, one that, on opening night, cranked the volume but frequently made performers sound like they were singing into soup cans, distorting voices so badly that, except for a couple of quieter numbers, lyrics were incomprehensible.
Sometimes it’s only by seeing a new production of a show that you realize what was lacking in an earlier version. That’s the case with Where the Blood Mixes by actor/playwright/director Kevin Loring, now artistic director of NAC Indigenous Theatre.
A searing, often funny and ultimately semi-hopeful exploration of the intergenerational legacy of residential schools, the play was performed at the National Arts Centre in 2010, a year after winning the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Drama. Directed by Glynis Leyshon, the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre/Belfry Theatre production was vivid, with an on-stage musician and an evocative design that included projections.
Then along came director/translator Charles Bender, who re–imagined the play in both official languages, stripping it to its essentials and presenting it in the round. Bender’s version, performed in both English and French, was part of Mòshkamo: Indigenous Arts Rising, the two-week festival that rang in the inaugural season of NAC Indigenous Theatre in September.
Bender’s production, practically devoid of set or props, is immediate and raw in ways the earlier production wasn’t. The intermingled story of the two central characters, Floyd (Marco Collin) and Mooch (Charles Bender) — their denial of the damage inflicted by residential schools, their inability to connect with those most important to them, their eviscerating loneliness — leaps unmediated from stage to audience and back to the stage in a kind of dramatic loop that underscores the multiple circles of the play itself, including the hoops of pain, hopelessness and potential healing that help define Floyd and Mooch and the sharing circle that ended each performance. …
Jeff Ho wrote and stars in trace. “We are women who do what must be done.”So says the cigarette-puffing, mahjong-addicted great-grandmother in Jeff Ho’s one-man play trace, now at the NAC. The fallout of doing what you must do, especially in fraught circumstances, is the subject of Ho’s taut, chamber piece about three generations of women in his family.
A scene from Oleanna with Madeleine Julian as Carol and Guy Buller as John. Photo: Erika Scrivens
A Company of Fools presents Romeo and Juliet. Photo: JVL Photography
DK Reinemer stars in Becoming Magic Mike Photo: Brian Harris
These performances were reviewed June 16. The Ottawa Fringe Festival continues until June 23 at various downtown venues. Tickets & information: ottawafringe.com, 613-232-6162. Pinter Stew (Third
God is a Scottish Drag Queen (Mike Delamont, Victoria, BC) The world could use a few more laughs these days. Fortunately, God is at hand.