Photo courtesy of the NAC.

Dorine (Petrina Bromley) and Tartuffe (Andy Jones0

“Suckin’ on the hind tit” was likely not among Molière’’s catalogue of favoured expressions, but when it’s tossed off in Andy Jones’ hugely funny adaptation of the playwright’s 17th-century satire Tartuffe, which launches the new English theatre season at the NAC, it’s a perfect fit.

That’s because Jones, who also plays the vile religious fraudster Tartuffe for whom the play is named, has set Molière’’s satiric attack on religious hypocrisy in Newfoundland during 1939. It’s a setting that not only captures the vibrancy of Molière’s play with fresh and colorful language (“you’ve got more lip than a coal bucket,” “sweet Jesus in the garden!”), it also brings the play close enough in time and geography to us in Central Canada that we realize again how timeless and universal this attack – and it can be a vicious one – on religious imposters really is.

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Maja Ardal. Photo: Andrew Fox

You have to be tough to survive childhood. If you’ve forgotten that fact, Maja Ardal’s solo show, a finely wrought recreation of childhood life in 1950s Edinburgh, will remind you in a hurry.

Semi-autobiographical, the play opens with four-year-old Elsa arriving in Scotland after immigrating from Iceland with her parents. Gregarious, self-possessed and with an outsized imagination (just one of the meanings of “fancy” revealed during the show), Elsa quickly pals up with a neighbouring child Adele whose perennial uncertainty and impoverished life have thwarted the growth in her of those critical childhood allies, fantasy and hope. “Make a wish,” Elsa tells her at one point. “What for?” responds Adele.

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A male actor’s hand on a female actor’s breast? The F word? A play about a cash-strapped married couple making a porn film? It’s sure not the old days at OLT.

Even so, this comedy by Norm Foster seems so far not to have driven any patrons from the theatre at intermission. And really, how could it? It’s funny, fluidly directed (Venetia Lawless in her directorial debut) and well-acted (the cast includes Kenny Hayes, bespectacled and in a conservative suit, as the most unlikely porn star ever). And while suggestive in a tongue-in-cheek way, it’s not offensive, and the stability of married life – albeit occasionally fraught – is at its core.

Skin Flicks is light fare, its characters all likeable but without much depth, its plot hardly credible. But it is kind of sweet in a silly way, and OLT could have done worse than to launch its 101st season with this show.

Skin Flick  by Norm  Foster

Ottawa Little Theatre

© 2013 Microsoft

Katie Richardson as Prince Hal, Matthew JOhn Lundvall as Falstaff. Photo: Justin Van leeuvan

Who knew that William Shakespeare presaged punk?

That connection is one of many unexpected elements in this anarchically funny, flawed and mostly rewarding adaptation by Margo MacDonald of Shakespeare’s Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and some of Henry V.

At two and three-quarter hours including intermission, the show is a bit of a marathon. That’s true despite MacDonald, who also directs, having cherry-picked from the three plays to tell the story she’s interested in: the ill-fated relationship between Prince Hal, the future king of England who must set aside his rambunctious youth and companions to become a responsible leader, and Sir John Falstaff, the “huge hill of flesh” who is Hal’s principal companion and who never sets aside his wastrel ways…..

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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Theatre+review+Bumpy+enjoyable+ride+both+punks+princes/8873190/story.html

Plays at the Gladstone Theatre September 3-8, at Shenkman Richcraft Studio 10 – 15, at Centrepoine, 17-22.

Published in the Ottawa Citizen, September 5, 2012.

Photo. Wayne Cuddingham, Ottawa Citizen.

Did George Bernard Shaw ever envision Arms and the Man staged like this?

Seizing on the themes of duplicity, self-deception, and confusion of fantasy and reality that underpin Shaw’s biting comedy about love, war and class, director Andy Massingham has given the show a telling Commedia dell’arte twist.

Actors appear in mask or with faces richly painted, many of their costumes big and bright. Characters – at least the worst dissemblers or the most deceived among them — move with exaggerated physicality. And those characters break down into servants, masters and lovers, which is how Shaw wrote the play but is also the classic structure of Commedia.

What Shaw may have envisioned is, in the end, idle speculation. What’s not speculation is that this production — funny, fast and furiously satiric — works.

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The Hatter
Spired Theatre (Richmond, BC),

File this under “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Writer/performer Andrew Wade has concocted an interesting premise for his solo show: What drove Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter mad? Much less interesting is the answer – suffice to say that it’s straight out of the Psychology 101 chapter on denial – and how Wade gets there. His Hatter is unconvincing as a character, his trials and tribulations no more resonant than a door mouse’s thoughts are deep. Wade plays, briefly, the March Hare and other Wonderland characters but lacks the agility to make the transitions. There’s an improvised song based on an audience suggestion, but it does nothing except chew up time. The Hatter also reads a long poem which he’s supposedly never seen, yet Wade rattles most of it off without ever looking at the paper on which it’s written. On the plus side, the Hatter does offer fresh tea to every audience member.

The festival continues until June 30 at various downtown venues. Tickets / information: Fringe office, 2 Daly Ave., 2nd floor; 613-232-6162; ottawafringe.com.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Fringe+Festival+Review+Enough/8566083/story.html#ixzz2XDcJg6NF

Imprisoned    Rebel Rabbit Productions (Ottawa), Academic Hall

This play by Allie Bell raises serious questions. Is pedophilia a form of madness in which the victimizer suffers from a God complex? How often do we get it wrong when we judge our fellow guilty? Why does evil exist alongside beauty in the world?Unfortunately the show, directed by Paul Dervis, also raises other questions. Why, for example, does a man named Salvatore (Jeff Lefebvre), an apparent pedophile whose artistic vision is matched only by his talent for spotting vulnerable children, speak in the precise manner of an immigrant yet have not a trace of an accent? Why did Bell not give Tom (Doug Phillips), the cynical bulldog of a detective who pursues and jails Salvatore, something more interesting to say at fraught moments than “Shut up!” Why does the show, which deals with intense subject matter including a missing child and a seriously troubled man, have no emotional trajectory?

There are no answers to many questions. But some questions shouldn’t need to be asked in the first place.

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