Patrick Langston, Author at Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

My Brilliant Divorce: Kate Hurman walks the balance between humour and poignancy

By Patrick Langston | April 27, 2014

Photo: Lois Seigel

Angela Kennedy-Lipsky can crank out shrewd and funny lines: “Smugly round,” she says of her ex-husband’s head. At the same time, she’s so lonely that she sends a postcard to herself from a disastrous resort holiday.

And that’s the real trick to Geraldine Aron’s comedy My Brilliant Divorce, a one-woman show here starring Kate Hurman: to walk the balance beam between humour and poignancy that makes Angela a full human to whom we can relate.

Directed by John P. Kelly, this production slips more than once in the first act, only to stride beautifully through the second.

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Hedwig and the Angry Inch: Extraordinary!!!

By Patrick Langston | April 5, 2014

Photo. Gladstone

Let’s cut to the chase: Tim Oberholzer as Hedwig, the title character in the rock opera about a transgendered person whose life and sex change surgery have both gone horribly wrong, is nothing short of extraordinary.

Hard to say what deep well of inspiration Oberholzer pulled this performance from, but he’s a joy to watch as he gives us a big-wigged, drama queen Hedwig who is, in one fell swoop, angry, hurt, curiously hopeful, cynical and one heck of a singer with all the rock star moves.

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Death of a Salesman: A resonant tribute to Miller’s masterpiece

By Patrick Langston | April 2, 2014

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – about the delusional, beaten-down anti-hero Willy Loman, a travelling salesman you’d not look twice at were you to pass him on the street – is a play at once timeless and specific, a story one instinctively relates to at the same time it’s a snapshot of the American dream embodied in one man and his family circa the mid-20^th century.

So Chamber Theatre Hintonburg’s decision to enact the play on a tiny stage at the Carleton Tavern, while creating staging problems, seems appropriate: a story writ large and small at the same time.

The centre of that story is Willy, and Donnie Laflamme gives us a richly realized characterization of this man whose disintegration you watch with the same slightly voyeuristic guilt you’d bring to watching a train wreck. Hope, anger, love, confusion: Willy’s mind is a tornado of emotion, and Laflamme captures it all in the passionate, loose-cannon style that is his acting trademark.

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Seeds at the National Arts Centre: Brilliant docudrama

By Patrick Langston | March 29, 2014

Photo fro the Ottawa Citizen: Wayne Cuddington.

Eric Peterson as Percy Schmeiser.

Who would have guessed that a legal battle over genetically modified canola could be scintillating?

Yet that’s precisely what Montreal playwright Annabel Soutar’s docudrama Seeds achieves. Not to mention being a smart and sympathetic study of the complexities of human nature, a challenge to our tendency to operate on presuppositions, and a meditation on the nature of life.

The story seems straightforward. In the late 1990s, Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser (played here flawlessly by Eric Peterson of television’s Corner Gas and Street Legal) was accused of patent infringement by agribusiness titan Monsanto Canada for planting their genetically modified (GM) canola seed without a licence.

Scheismer claimed that the seeds had wound up on his property by accident, and that as a property owner he had the right to do with those seeds as he wished.Monsanto figured he’d buckle under their pressure, but he fought back. The case wove its way to the Supreme Court of Canada where Schmeiser lost in a five to four decision in 2004.(read more)………

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Theatre+Review+Annabel+Soutar+Seeds+brilliant+docudrama/9677244/story.html

The Dumb Waiter: A Partially successful production at the Avalon Studio Theatre

By Patrick Langston | March 23, 2014

Photo: Richard Ellis. Mary Ellis (Augusta ), Kristina Watt (Benita)

“What’s going on here?” asks Gus at one point in The Dumb Waiter. The question is a waste of breath: Gus and fellow armed thug Ben are in a Harold Pinter play and Pinter’s never big on providing answers regardless of whether questions are about quotidian or existential issues.

Besides, even if there were an answer, would it give Gus and Ben an escape route from the faceless and oppressive power structure that’s steamrolling over them?

Third Wall Theatre’s revival of Pinter’s late 1950s play, directed by Todd Duckworth, is partially successful in dealing with these and other matters.

Mary Ellis plays the chatty, questioning Gus while Kristina Watt is the taciturn and controlling Ben. Usually the roles are filled by men, but changing the characters to women (Augusta and Benita to be formal) works fine: male or female, the two still have to wait in a grungy basement for their assignment from an unseen boss.

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Mary Walsh Dances with Rage: slash and burn comedy the GCTC – Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre.

By Patrick Langston | March 20, 2014

Photo Barbara Gray.

OTTAWA — Her sword is just plastic, but Marg Delahunty, aka the Princess Warrior, has a tongue sharp enough to separate a rhino and its hide without even trying.

Marg, as all fans of slash-and-burn Canadian comedy know, is the alter ego of Newfoundland comedian Mary Walsh. Resplendent in her glittering, red Princess Warrior outfit, the one we’ve all admired as we’ve watched her ambush public figures from Mayor Rob Ford to former prime minister Jean Chrétien on CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Marg is front and centre in Walsh’s one-woman show Dancing with Rage.

The show, which seesaws between hilariously pointed moments and arid stretches and ultimately doesn’t hold together particularly well, opens with another Walsh character: the purse-lipped, purse-clasping Miss Eulalie. Tut-tutting about topical issues — bridges and sinkholes in Ottawa, the recent appointment of Joe Oliver, “the minister responsible for the destruction of the environment,” as replacement for the departed minister of finance Jim Flaherty — she totters down the aisle and onto the stage.

Walsh soon sheds that character along with Miss Eulalie’s bulky coat and rummage-sale hat to stand before us in black underwear. She bemoans the state of contemporary feminism as well as her own aging body (she’s 61) — or at least the state of a society that makes a clothes-shopping expedition for an aging woman, whose body now bulges in unforeseen ways and places, a voyage to hell. “It leaks out like some fleshy Exxon Valdez,” she says, gripping some of that fleshy stuff in a way that’s simultaneously self-deprecating, endearing and smartly subversive…….Read more

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Theatre+review+Princess+warrior+sharp+tongue+needed+edit/9647381/story.html

Spamalot : Orpheus Musical Theatre takes on Monty Python.

By Patrick Langston | March 8, 2014

Photo credits: Valleywind Productions/David Pasho.

Hard to tell who was having more fun on opening night of Orpheus’ hilarious production of Monty Python’s Spamalot: the audience or the cast.For sure, each fed off the other as the unabashedly silly musical about King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail unrolled, in the process skewering everything from the Arthurian legend itself to political correctness and the tradition of the Broadway musical.

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Underbelly: One man show on William Burroughs bounces off the fringes

By Patrick Langston | February 27, 2014

Ottawa Citizen February 27, 20140

Jayson McDonald in Underbelly, Photo credit William Beddoe

At one point in underbelly, Jayson McDonald’s hallucinogenic, one-man show inspired by the life and times of mid-20th century American beat writer William S. Burroughs, “Willy” gives us a brief autobiography. He then mimes the famous Burroughs writing technique of cutting up and repositioning phrases, so the original recounting of how he lost his virginity to a prostitute is transformed into “I lost my virginity to mankind.”

It’s a sardonic reflection on his own and all of life — much as the entire show is — and a reminder of how Burroughs’ relationship with normal reality was a loose one. That relationship seems, on the basis of McDonald’s show, to have bothered Burroughs not in the least.

Burroughs was, of course, a junkie and a writer so a readiness to reconstruct reality according to his own parameters isn’t surprising. And because he was also a gifted writer, when Willy starts talking about giant bugs and assorted other creatures that could have slithered straight out of John Carpenter’s horror film The Thing, a dark, even hypnotic lyricism sometimes emerges.

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Enron: the rise and fall of “Enron” takes on too much.

By Patrick Langston | February 21, 2014

OTTAWA CITIZEN February 20, 2014 12:10 AM

Theatre review: Story of rise and fall of Enron takes on too much

Dmitry Chepovetsky who plays Jeffrey Skilling

Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington , Ottawa Citizen

The show: British playwright Lucy Prebble’s uber-theatrical revisiting of the Enron scandal which saw the U.S. energy giant vanish in a cloud of bankruptcy dust in 2001 after the corporation’s senior executives played fast and loose with the financial truth. Music, movement and mask – including corporate types sporting raptor dinosaur heads – are part of Prebble’s semi-fantastical look at Enron’s rise and fall, old-fashioned hubris, and moral sleight of hand.

Pros: A shrewd and sometimes very funny look at endemic greed, the illusion of personal invincibility, and individual and collective moral bankruptcy. Eric Davis is especially good as Andy Fastow, Enron’s deluded and vulnerable Chief Financial Officer.

Cons: Arcane details of business operations and federal regulations don’t always make for scintillating theatre. An overly small acting area hems in the enormity of the Enron story as well as this production’s commitment to it.

Verdict: A play that takes on too much and ends up delivering less than it could; a production that doesn’t have enough faith in itself to ever really stretch its wings.

Written by Lucy Prebble

National Arts Centre English Theatre

At the NAC Studio, February 17 to March 1. 2014.

Continues until March 1. Tickets: NAC box office, 1-888-991-2787, nac-cna.ca

Undercurrents: The Tashme Project – Living archives from Tashme Productions (Ottawa/Montreal)

By Patrick Langston | February 19, 2014

If you shake your head in dismay at the universally dismal experience of Japanese Canadians consigned to internment camps during World War Two, you’re making the same mistake as those who consigned them to the camps in the first place.
To wit: painting individuals with a collective brush.
That’s one of the messages of this subtle and affecting piece of verbatim theatre by two performers whose families were interned.
Seeking to unlock that part of their heritage, Julie Tamiko Manning and Matt Miwa interviewed dozens of Nisei or second-generation Japanese Canadians who, now in their 70s and 80s, were children when interned at Tashme, the largest camp in British Columbia. They then used the Nisei’s own words to fashion a picture of life in the camps and afterward.
That picture is as diverse as human nature itself.
Taking on the voices and gestures of those interviewed, Miwa and Manning – both of them robust actors – show us children delightedly playing marbles, living in freezing shacks with no running water, marvelling at the gorgeous mountain setting, losing parents and siblings to death……..(read more)

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Theatre+review+Thoughtful+moving+portrayal+depicts+lives+interned/9506311/story.html

Published in the Ottawa Citizen by Patrick Langston