Patrick Langston is the theatre critic for the Ottawa Citizen. In addition to reviews of professional and the occasional community theatre production, he writes a monthly theatre column and previews of major shows for the Citizen. Patrick also writes for Ottawa Magazine, Carleton University Magazine, and Penguin Eggs -Canada's folk, roots and world music magazine. Patrick lives in Navan.
Grumpy old man meets charming, precocious 10 year old girl. The two strike up an unlikely friendship. Girl, generally sunny but with a sensitive side, helps man deal with a burden from his past. Man enriches girl’s life. Each goes their separate way.
In the hands of a lesser artist, such a tale could be twee and trite. In the hands of playwright/actor Julia Mackey, it’s rich, true and deeply moving, a solo show that runs just 65 minutes but leaves you replete, wanting neither more nor less of the gift you’ve been handed.
Ottawa Citizen, Octobert 28, 2015 Photo. Deen Van Meer.
Maybe Ontario’s disgruntled public school teachers should take up dance. It sure helps the put-upon workers in Newsies express their collective will when battling their dastardly overlord.
Mind you, the teachers would have to log a few hours of practice to be as nimble and emotive as these dancers. Splendidly choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, the newsies – those young, persistent men who once hawked newspapers on the mean streets of many cities – leap, flip and tap their way through some terrific routines as they tangle with Joseph Pulitzer, the heartless publisher of the New York World.
Pulitzer, faced with declining circulation and pushed by his own greed, has decided to up the price he charges to the newsies who must buy each paper they sell. Already living somewhere well short of the luxurious, the lads rally behind fellow newsboy Jack Kelly (played with cocky charisma and fine voice by Joey Barreiro) when he decides enough is enough and leads his comrades in a boisterous and risky walkout. Pulitzer has not only money but the force of law and municipal politics on his side. Fortunately, Kelly has the force of his own moral rectitude, not to mention slowly evolving social perspectives on the shame of child labour, behind him.
The struggle to find and hold onto that hope, love and faith impels the action and characters of Adventures, an ambitious and, in the production that opens the new NAC English Theatre season, ultimately unsatisfying show that blends drama and comedy with song and movement, the ever-present spectre of death amid the bloom of life, and the story of a family and its community.
The play (its name comes from a George Bernard Shaw short story) premiered in 2002, launching Toronto’s black Obsidian Theatre company. It was then picked up for several months by Mirvish Productions. The current revival, directed by Sears as was the première, played Montreal’s Centaur Theatre before coming to the NAC.
With its cast of 22, the play is set in a 200-year-old black community in southern Ontario. At its heart are Rainey, a young black woman played by Lucinda Davis, and her aging father Abendigo.
Besieged by their eager avowals of commitment to the public weal in the federal election campaign, you might wonder what motivates politicians. Altruism? Guilt? Thirst for power?
Michael Healey’s comedy Generous, the resonant season opener at the Great Canadian Theatre Company, asks many of the same questions about not just politicians but about those who wield power in any form.
Asymmetric structure and story are one in Healey’s 2006 show. We bounce between events past and present as we watch the first acts of four apparently different plays and then, post-intermission, three concluding acts. Similarly, the lives and motivations of the characters are fractured. The plays, of course, ultimately prove to be no more unconnected than do the events of anyone’s life, which is not to say that either is a neatly completed jigsaw puzzle.
Generous – and congratulations if you spot any character wholeheartedly embodying that adjective – opens with a frantic, cartoonish scene in the prime minister’s office where we learn an overly loyal junior minister has taken to heart the PM’s words to stab a backbencher (Brian Mulroney once said of a cabinet minister, “Slit her throat”). Meanwhile, the PM’s chief of staff Eric (Drew Moore) reveals that he entered public service to do good, thereby setting up the exploration of altruism that percolates through the rest of the show.
Photo Lois Siegel. John P Kelly director of the NOrman conquests
If you think your personal relationships are sometimes fraught, check out Living Together, the second part of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests now in a terrific revival at The Gladstone. Your problems will pale by comparison.
The comic-with-a-bite trilogy consists of three separate but related plays: Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden. Table Manners opened The Gladstone’s season a couple of weeks ago, Round and Round the Garden opens Sept. 25, and all three will play in repertory starting Sept. 29. On Oct. 10, the three plays will be presented in one fell swoop.
The city may be an indifferent, sometimes cruel place. But it can still harbour grace and love even if you’re an almost-obsolete robot infatuated with an office worker who’s as much a misfit as you. That’s the ultimately hopeful upshot of Nufonia Must Fall Live!, the gentle puppet-show-with-a-difference by Eric San, a.k.a. Montreal-based scratch DJ and music producer Kid Koala, that’s been making a splash at home and abroad since it debuted last year.
Based on his own 2003 graphic novel and soundtrack Nufonia Must Fall, San’s multidisciplinary show employs real-time filming of more than a dozen miniature stages and a cast of white puppets, with the video projected on a screen at the rear of the stage.
The audience can make out the puppeteers and camera people as they go about their business on stage. Koala and the Afiara Quartet provide live — and alternately sad, lush and disquieting — music on piano, strings and turntables at stage rear. …
Something to remember: writing, producing, directing and acting in a play mounted in your own theatre is probably not a good idea. Case in point: I’m Not Jewish But My Mother Is! written, produced and so on by Steve Martin on his own stage. Trite, repetitive and clichéd with a predictably gooey centre, the comedy is a prime example of how being overly involved in something blinds you to its faults.
Not that Martin hasn’t shown talent in many things theatrical. As owner of The Gladstone, he’s produced some excellent shows. As a director, he did a bang-up job in 2009 with David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin, Jr.’s howlingly funny The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society’s Production of A Christmas Carol. As an actor, he was first-rate, several years ago, in Stephen Mallatratt’s The Woman in Black at Ottawa Little Theatre, and has since held his own in Glengarry Glen Ross, Noises Off and other shows at The Gladstone.
But in those cases, he was wearing just one or two hats. With I’m Not Jewish …, he’s wearing them all so there’s no place for anyone with a dissenting view of Martin’s writing or staging decisions, no room for someone to suggest richer character development, no one to notice that maybe all that dancing (and Martin, a professional ballroom dancer, is undeniably fleet of foot) is overkill.
The play’s storyline is simple enough: successful bachelor lawyer Christopher Bloomfeld (Martin) has a stereotypical Jewish mother Rose Bloomfeld (Barbara Seabright-Moore) whose mouth pops into gear before her brain is fully engaged; lawyer also has a curvaceous girlfriend Felix (Bekah Fay) who arrives at his apartment while mouthy mother is visiting unannounced; sparks fly – though maybe not in the way you’d expect; heart-to-heart resolves all. …
Odyssey Theatre’s celebration of its 30th anniversary is a mixed bag in more ways than one.
Taking Spanish writing and the measures to which we go for love as her themes, artistic director Laurie Steven has chosen three one-act plays, each of which she directs, rather than the usual single, full production. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
The first piece, Saving Melisendra, is Steven’s stage adaptation of a chapter from Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th century novel Don Quixote. In it, the increasingly mad knight Quixote (William Beddoe) interferes in a puppet show about two lovers, one of whom, Melisendra, has been captured by some dastardly Moors.
The puppets, designed by Kathy McLellan and operated primarily by John Nolan who plays the puppet master Pedro, are clever. There are some funny Punch and Judy-style bits, and melodrama is given the gears. The text touches on ideas of reality and artifice in theatre (“I thought everything taking place here was taking place,” says the deluded Quixote).
But the show overall is flat, lacks commitment and is unfocused. On opening night, which had been twice delayed because of weather, the show also saw the first of several set or costume malfunctions. …
Raunchy, subversive, funny as all get-out, Avenue Q by Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty is a gem of contemporary musical theatre, one that takes the iconic children’s television show Sesame Street and turns it on its head with sex, obscenities and the very realistic notions that life frequently sucks, that none of us is really all that special, and that while the dispossessed might band together they will, for the most part, remain dispossessed.
TotoToo takes all this and wraps it into one excellent production. An ensemble piece, the show nails pretty much everything from voices and puppetry to Aileen Szkwarek’s well-oiled choreography and the live musical accompaniment directed by John McGovern . Artistic director Michael Gareau keeps the show moving at the requisite smartly staged clip while inspiring all the performers to have so much fun that the audience is swept along by the same joyous spirit.
Of particular note among performers: the wonderfully expressive Pascal Viens (Rod) who is making his debut in musical theatre, Alianne Rozon whose Kate Monster is a lonely lady to whom we can all relate, and Andrew Galligan as Princeton, a character in search of self-authorship.
The Kailish Mital Theatre’s sound system is lacking, and distortion at the show we attended occasionally made lyrics impossible to understand. It was a small price to pay for a crackerjack show.
Needles and Opium: a wondrous, magical mystery ride
It’s tempting to think it was inspired by, if not something even stronger, one of those LSD-laced sugar cubes.
The huge cube in which Quebec playwright Robert Lepage’s fascinating Needles and Opium takes place is for sure laced with the phantasmagorical. Elevated a few feet above the stage with three of its sides walled and three open, it slowly rotates, walls becoming ceilings becoming floors and both time and place proving elastic as three interconnected stories flow into each other.
In one story, American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis visits Paris for a music festival in 1949 and falls in love with French chanteuse Juliette Greco. Unwilling to bring the white Greco back to a segregated U.S, he returns to New York City without her and, despairing, falls into heroin addiction.
In another strand, French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, hooked on opium, visits New York City, also in 1949.
The third, which takes place in 1989, finds an unconfident Quebec actor named Robert, in withdrawal from a love affair, in Paris to do the voiceover for a film about Davis’s visit to that city four decades earlier.
