Photo: Andrew Alexander

Why do Shakespeare straight if you can spoof it? That’s the approach director Eleanor Crowder has taken with her all-male production of this early Shakespeare comedy.  Problem is, while the show is often entertaining, it ultimately can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a spoof, a comedic love story, a post-feminist broadside or some combination of all three.

Scott Florence, well-versed in playing fast and loose with Shakespeare thanks to his years of experience with the irreverent A Company of Fools, sets the performance bar high as Petruchio, the wily, self-assured gentleman from Verona who tames  (or does he?) and marries the snarly, fiercely independent Kate. Sardonic, self-interested, a natural student of behavioural psychology, this Petruchio plays those whom he meets like yoyos. Florence is a delight to watch, especially when he channels Pommes Frites, the preening character he created for Fools shows like Shakespeare’s Danish Play.

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For the Ottawa Citizen

Photo Andrew Alexandre

“Arrogant white man!” you think to yourself when Edward Curtis makes his first appearance near the beginning of this richly imagined, multimedia play by Marie Clements.
Why wouldn’t you? There’s the early 20th century American photographer, played with a firm blend of empathy and objectivity by Todd Duckworth, delivering, in stentorian tones, a lecture in Carnegie Hall in which he deconstructs “the Indian” as if discussing an exotic specimen of flora or fauna.

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Photo: Andrew Alexander

OTTAWA — In 2008, John P. Kelly directed Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves at The Gladstone. It was hilarious.
This time, Kelly directs Ayckbourn’s later play Absurd Person Singular. It too is a hoot. Except when it turns dark. Then something truly ugly about human nature and one of its spinoffs, the class system, emerges.
Last year, the play celebrated its 40th anniversary – Anna Lewis’ costume design for this production includes bell bottom trousers and a head band – but the show’s snarling social satire remains vital.
The story finds three married couples gathering in one of their kitchens on three successive Christmas Eves. Two of the couples, Geoffrey and Eva Jackson and Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright, are upper middle class, but as the seasons roll by their fortunes, both financial and marital, erode. Sidney and Jane Hopcroft, on the other hand, scramble out of the working class but never lose the stigma of their origin, both in their own eyes and in those of the others.
These are not couples anyone in their right mind would want to spend time with. As the play’s title suggests, each person is singular and absurd, unconnected in any meaningful way to his or her partner or to the rest of the world…….

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Theatre+review+Despite+hilarity+Absurd+Person+Singular+explores+dark+depths+human+nature/8060121/story.html#ixzz2MspvNi5R

Until March 23. Tickets: 613-233-4523, thegladstone.ca

Photo. Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA —  When a guy pretends to play guitar using a toilet plunger, you suspect a send-up of rock ‘n’ roll is be about to engulf you. Which – in addition to spoofing musicals generally and not taking itself particularly seriously – is the order of the day for Rock of Ages, the comic rock musical set in the 1980s when big hair, glam metal bands and bombast ruled the rock record charts.

Although the second act gets sluggish (mostly because of Chris D’Arienzo’s overly long script), the touring production of this silly, unsubtle and totally entertaining show is as undeniably winning as a smile from Ronald Reagan.

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OTTAWA — “Fess up. Aren’t you, beneath your comfortable middle-class trappings, a Neanderthal at heart?” The four folks in French playwright Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, executed in savagely funny style by Third Wall Theatre, sure are.

Oh, they try to be genteel: two couples meeting to discuss a schoolyard dust-up between their sons. They drink coffee, eat pastry, chat about art. Soon, though, cracks appear in the civil discourse. By the time the evening staggers to a close, it’s not just the living room where they meet but, at least metaphorically, all of western civilization of which they believe they represent the peak — in a bourgeois sort of way — that lies in tatters.

Michel (John Koensgen), the conciliatory owner of a household goods company, and his book-writing, passive-aggressive wife Veronique (Mary Ellis) are the hosts and parents of the boy who has lost a couple of teeth in the fight. …

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 Photo: Jana Chytlova.  Chris Ralph as Billy Bishop 

This production of John Gray’s musical about World War One flying ace Billy Bishop is enjoyable if flawed.

Chris Ralph plays Bishop, who was born in Owen Sound, Ont., with gusto, empathy and humour. He captures both the times and the man including the innocence with which young recruits went off to that war and Bishop’s basic goodness as well as his penchant for running afoul of rules.

Over the course of Gray’s highly likeable script, which blends storytelling with acting and song, we follow the in-the-sky and on-the-ground adventures of the charming Billy. The former include vivid stories of dogfights with skilled German pilots while the latter spotlight some very funny incidents involving upper-crust Brits and dim-witted military officers to whom Bishop reports. Ralph plays these various characters, some 18 in all, convincingly and economically.

However, he also plays much of it too loudly. Less shouting (was the loud voice meant to convey Bishop’s youthful enthusiasm?) would have made for a more textured and, for the audience, less-wearying performance.

Turning down the volume would also have lessened the awkward contrast between Ralph and James Caswell, his much quieter pianist, co-vocalist and occasional narrator.

One other issue: both Ralph and Caswell have pleasant but limited singing voices. Their upper registers are shaky, and when they shoot for the high notes the results are less than stellar.

Bottom line: This Billy Bishop hits some air pockets but overall it’s a pretty good trip.

It plays at The Gladstone and is directed by Teri Loretto-Valentik

Othello as a credulous homeboy? Richard III as the meanest, gangsta-rapping mutha you ever saw? Why not? Shakespeare’s characters are as real as any inner-city denizen. Besides, the Bard likely would have laughed his ass off at the sardonic, high-energy hip-hop spin that Melanie Karin and David Benedict Brown give to everyone from Hamlet to Romeo and Juliet by setting lines and plots from the plays to music by Kanye West, Tupac and others.

An award-winner when it premiered at the Ottawa Fringe Festival last summer, Hip-Hop Shakespeare is funny, fast and clever. …

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