Grain of Salt
9th Hour Theatre
Reviewed at the Mercury Lounge Jan. 22

Ottawa writer Megan Piercey Monafu pries the lid off the can of organized religion in this new work.

Performed by five actors including Monafu, the verbatim theatre piece is based on interviews with Canadians, both believers and non-believers, about all sorts of religious issues from gay marriage to whether apologies by powerful wrongdoers cut any mustard at all. The text – mostly monologues – is given various settings: in one scene, the speaker is in a restaurant with the other performers miming the role of servers; in another, we watch the actors as they rock to and fro on the Montreal Metro. At one point, the ensemble does a funny doo-wop routine; elsewhere, they sit on the floor drinking wine and earnestly discussing their beliefs. …

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Detroit
Plosive Productions
At The Gladstone

It’s enough to make you think twice about even saying “Good morning” to the guy next door.

Detroit, Lisa D’Amour’s dark comedy about present-day life in the first ring of the suburbs, those subdivisions that sprang up in the 1950s and ‘60s but have lost some of their original neighbourly gloss, is the story of a relationship that opens with goodwill but descends into chaos.

In limning the desolation that lurks behind white picket fences, D’Amour makes clear that a similar malaise infects contemporary life itself.

Plosive Productions’ scrappy and frequently very funny mounting of Detroit — it’s directed by Chris Ralph — marks the Canadian debut of D’Amour’s award-winning play. It tracks the story of an emerging tract-home friendship between Mary (Teri Loretto-Valentik) and Ben (David Whiteley) and their new neighbours Sharon (Stephanie Izsak) and Kenny (the especially good David Benedict Brown).

Ben has lost his banking job and wants to hack out a new career in the jungle of Internet-based financial services, while Mary is an unhappy paralegal and closet boozer. Kenny and Sharon are loose canons, both just out of rehab and more than a little suspect.

Read More at OttawaCitizen.com…

Continues until Feb. 1. Tickets: 613-233-4523, thegladstone.ca.

Photo. David Cooper

Maria, we learn early in this fresh and invigorating production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s famous musical The Sound of Music, wears curlers beneath her wimple. She’s a postulant, a kind of nun-in-waiting at the time and a burr beneath the abbey’s saddle, her hunger for life too big for the constraints of a black-and-white habit.

As everyone who’s seen The Sound of Music knows — and our numbers are legion thanks to the award-winning stage show which premièred in 1959 and the equally awarded mid-’60s film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer — Maria chucks the head gear. In the process, she unveils her true self and that of the von Trapp family, the motherless gang of seven that Maria joins first as subversive governess and then as wife of Austrian war hero Captain von Trapp.

(read more….)

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Theatre+Review+Sound+Music+production+breathes+fresh+life+into+familiar+musical/9258293/story.html

Photo. Julie Oliver

As if Constance Ledbelly, dressed in the drabbest outfit ever and nibbling at a cheese slice in her office as she labours over esoteric academic pursuits and dreams of true love, didn’t have enough problems.

Then her creator, playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald, tosses the hapless assistant professor of English down a rabbit hole that lands her in the middle of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet. There Constance, against her will, becomes a character in the plays, getting swept up in everything from old-fashioned sword fights involving doublet and gown-wearing folks to equally old-fashioned romantic dilemmas and inadvertently changing the course of the two plays in the process.

No wonder the poor lady looks a little out of her depth. Constance, played by Margo MacDonald (no relation to the playwright), is the centrepiece of this clever and funny 25-year-old play about a voyage through a time warp. “I’ve only ever gone on package tours,” says the academic at one point, as fearful as she’s intrigued by what’s happened to her. The play is also about self-discovery, about re-emerging from the rabbit hole a fuller and more self-aware person.

Alas, this production of MacDonald’s play never quite discovers its own potential (Read more….)http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Review+Goodnight+Desdemona+good+luck/9228243/story.html

Raoul Bhaneja performs Hamlet. Photo: Andrew Kenneth Martin.

OTTAWA — To tinker or not to tinker, that’s the … well, actually, it’s not a question at all. Anyone who’s going to play Hamlet – and who wouldn’t want to, considering the extraordinary palette of character and situation William Shakespeare has bequeathed us with this play? — has to experiment with the role if he’s to make it his own.

Raoul Bhaneja takes the making to a whole different level by playing all 17 characters, including the title role, himself in this slightly slimmed-down version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy.

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