Published on: October 26, 2014 for the Ottawa Citizen.

Natasha Greenblatt and Alex McCooeye star in The Importance of Being Earnest at the NAC. Photo: Andree Lanthier

A food fight. A dogpile. People treating an elegant sofa with all the respect of Tom Cruise. Is it a play mounted in the living room by your children and their young pals? No, it’s Oscar’s Wilde’s sophisticated gem The Importance of Being Earnest under the direction of Ted Dykstra and starring NAC English Theatre’s possibly embarrassed 2014-15 Ensemble.

Seeking a fresh take on a much-seen play, Dykstra has turned to farcical physicality to illustrate Wilde’s pricking of superficiality, social conventions and other Victorian foibles. Problem is, that physicality, especially the near-slapstick variety often employed here, is meant to underscore the surface existence that is one of Wilde’s bugbears but instead draws so much attention to itself and so limits the actors that the playwright’s intentions and subtlety vanish in the shuffle.

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Relax, theatre practitioners: the Hunchinson family is zero threat to your collective livelihood. As we discover early in this clown-based show by Brooklyn/San Francisco-based Under the Table theatre, the trio of Hunchinson siblings is attempting to mount a stage play based on Victor Hugo’s melodramatic and therefore ripe-for-the-pillorying story The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Fortunately for you practitioners and for us audience members who love a good laugh, the clan is as inept as it is dysfunctional.

All of which makes The Hunchbacks of Notre Dame at once absurd, funny and oddly endearing.

Paul Hunchinson (Josh Matthews) is the writer-cum-director of the play-within-a-play who gives his director’s notes using free-form dance moves (theatre itself is just one of the many targets here). When not battling with his un-cooperative brother and sister, he plays the priest in Hugo’s story.

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For the Ottawa Citizen.

Photo, Andrew Alexander. Featuring  Anita Majumdar.

Life by its nature is a fraught affair. Try living it as a female Indo-Canadian teenager at predominantly white Port Moody Senior Secondary in British Columbia.

That’s the setting for Anita Majumdar’s Fish Eyes and Boys with Cars, the simultaneously wonderful and disappointing double bill at the Great Canadian Theatre Company.

Majumdar wrote, choreographed and performs both shows. She blends exquisite Indian dance and acting that’s riveting in Fish Eyes but less so in Boys with Cars with issues ranging from teenaged (and, by extension, human) angst to patriarchy and cultural appropriation.

Fish Eyes, which Majumdar has been performing for a decade, finds 17-year old Meena despairing that “everyone’s living the dream” – as in making out and drinking beer – while she’s preparing to participate in an Indian dance festival.

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Andy Massingham and Tess McManus.  Photo: David Whitely.

Reviewed for The Citizen.  Initially, it jars. Here are members of the mid-17th century French aristocracy in full period costume peppering their speech with modernisms like “Our wives sometimes screw us” and “ditz.”

But David Whiteley’s new translation of Molière’s classic comedy about jealousy, self-deceit and assorted other human idiocies – along with their flip side, love – not only soon comes to feel natural but also sets the tone for this robust and funny production of The School for Wives.
With John P. Kelly in the director’s chair, the show happily blends bits of slapstick, commedia dell’arte and farce into a well-realised production that’s at once modern and of the period. Which, considering that our basic foibles haven’t changed over the centuries, makes sense.

The arrogant and sexist blowhard Arnolphe (Andy Massingham in full stride) is at the centre of the story. An aging aristocrat who fears cuckoldry the way most men fear death, he’s hit on a way to secure the perfect wife: he’s had his ward Agnès (Tess McManus, nicely blending ingénue and sullen teenager) raised in a convent where, presumably schooled in obedience and ignorance, she’ll now make the ideal, faithful mate.

Arnolphe’s scheme is, in keeping with his self-absorbed nature, despotic and, in our eyes especially, antediluvian. “Your sex only exists so that man can be revered/The power and the glory belong to the beard,” he declaims to Agnès in the early going. One detected a frisson of fury amid the laughter that the line drew on opening night.

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If you blinked, then – like Hamlet trying to steel himself to action – you missed your chance.

On Saturday, Prescott’s St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival hosted Globe To Globe, the riveting international touring production of Hamlet by London, England-based Shakespeare’s Globe theatre company. It was in town (and Canada) for two shows only before hitting the road again.

The company is touring Hamlet to every country in the world between now and 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The show also links to the 450th anniversary of the writer’s birth this past April.

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Photo. Joan Marcus

You can’t help but speculate on the reception had The Book of Mormon been served up for Ottawa audiences when the National Arts Centre opened in 1969. Ashen-faced horror? Walkouts? A boycott of the NAC?

As it is, the delightfully offensive and sharply funny musical by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone (known for, variously, television’s South Park and the irreverent Broadway show Avenue Q) garnered thunderous applause Wednesday night. Clearly, we revel in obscenity-laced, slice-and-dice attacks on everything from shiny-faced Mormonism, and by extension all forms of intransigent religious belief, to pop culture heroes like Bono.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova

The story It’s enough to make a life-long renter out of anyone. David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, now in an electric revival at The Gladstone, spotlights the desperate, often viciously unethical goings-on at a testosterone-driven real estate office where clients’ cheques, as opposed to their interests, motivate the motley gang of sales agents. With management amping up the pressure to make sales, the office descends into ever-worse lying, cheating, and a plot to steal leads and sell them to another agency: a microcosm, in other words, of human nastiness and spiritual barrenness circa the 1980s, all done up in classic and funny Mamet style.

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