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

Houët’s Ladies of the Lake: An underwhelming production

By Patrick Langston | February 10, 2013

undercurrents-ladiesofthelake — photo: Lisa L’Heureux

There’s water. And there’s waterlogged. The latter describes this show which sets out, in only tangentially interesting fashion, to reveal the origin of the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend — you know, the gal who, in some versions of the legend, gave Arthur his sword Excalibur.

In this movement, music and text-based piece, a lady named Vivienne (Kate Smith), on a quest for she knows not what — which makes the searching kind of tricky — falls into a remote lake.

Ambrose, a mysterious seer/healer who lives in a nearby hut and is played by John Doucet, helps restore to Vivienne to good health once she escapes the lake. …

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Blue Box by Carmen Aguirre. A memory that should have remained with Undercurrents.

By Patrick Langston | January 21, 2013

Time changes everything. Or at least it does when it comes to this show, a Nightswimming production directed by Brian Quirt.

I saw it last year at GCTC’s undercurrents festival and liked it. Delivered in storytelling fashion, it seemed a fresh, funny and smart retrospective on a young woman’s entree into the very adult worlds of political action (the narrator was a resistance fighter in General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile), love (she was drawn irresistibly to a dim but sensually magnetic Mexican she called “Vision Man”), and sex (she does enjoy it and worked in the sad, tawdry phone sex business for a spell).

My reaction to seeing it again, this time as part of GCTC’s regular season? The show is self-congratulatory, emotionally tepid and far too long.

Was it the intimate space of GCTC’s Studio theatre that helped make the show captivating last year? Was Aguirre just having an off-night when the show opened on the much larger main stage last week?

Hard to say, but revisiting the show was a disappointment. The terror that we should have felt when she was being followed by Chilean bad guys, for instance, was almost non-existent. The crazy affair with Vision Man? A little dull, actually, maybe because Aguirre’s sexual frankness – she immediately dispenses with the euphemism of “box,” for example – quickly loses its shock value, becoming predictable and (am I missing something here?) pointless.

There are some good moments when the narrator’s deeply felt anger about social injustice emerges, but such scenes are rare.

This remounting suggests the show should have just remained on the festival circuit.

Bat Boy The Musical: A spirited and occasionally poignant production at the Gladstone Theatre.

By Patrick Langston | January 17, 2013

photo David Pasho Zach Counsel in the title role

Reviewed for the Ottawa Ciizen

OTTAWA — It’s an unlikely plot: A half-bat, half-boy emerges from a cave and tries to make a life for himself in a redneck West Virginia town. But then again, logic and musicals don’t necessarily keep company.

Under Black Sheep Theatre director Dave Dawson, the ensemble delivers a funny, occasionally poignant and spirited production of this nihilistic cult favourite written by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming with music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe. The writers based the musical on an early 1990s story in the satiric Weekly World News.
Zachary Counsil plays Bat Boy. Equipped with a pair of overgrown eye teeth and Mr. Spock-like ears, he’s full-voiced on the musical numbers (that’s not true of all the cast) and textured when depicting the pain of being unusual in a world where being unusual is to be feared and hated.
And Bat Boy is feared and hated. The folks of Hope Falls – now there’s an ambiguous name for a town – are horrified when Bat Boy first appears. It’s a classic case of “otherness,” although Bat Boy, taken in by the kindly if frigid Meredith Parker (Rebekah Shirey), wife of the local veterinarian, soon acquires language and manners in excellent My Fair Lady fashion. The big Act One number Show You a Thing or Two is a tip of the tongue-in-cheek hat to that hit musical, with Bat Boy exclaiming, in a paraphrase of Professor Henry Higgins, “I think I’ve got it!”………….

All My Sons: A solid take on Miller’s award-winning play.

By Patrick Langston | January 11, 2013

  
Photo:Maria Vartanova

If you're looking for a lift from the post-Christmas blues, Arthur Miller's
All My Sons is not your ticket.
 
However, if you're looking for a truthful, emotionally harrowing play about
families, responsibility and just how adept we humans are at deceiving
ourselves about ourselves, OLT's production of Miller's 1947 play is what
you want.

…

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Billy Elliot : a Lukewarm Effort

By Patrick Langston | January 3, 2013

>Billy Elliott The Musical is based on the hit movie, and the Broadway stage version that ran from 2008 to 2012 was seen by 1.8 million people.

Billy Elliot The Musical

Broadway Across Canada

National Arts Centre Southam Hall

Reviewed Tuesday, Jan. 1

OTTAWA — The story of Billy Elliot should clutch your imagination and never let go.
After all, it’s about underdogs – and who doesn’t cheer for an underdog?- including young Billy who’s born into a coal mining family but who wants to be a ballet dancer, and miners who aspire to a better life but, trapped in the corrosive economic cauldron of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, have no choice but to strike.
The multi award-winning musical also spotlights those ever-precious themes of individuality, persistence, family and community.
Just the kind of ingredients that you’d think would make your blood boil when the good guys are ill-treated and warm the cockles of your heart when they luck out.
What’s more, the touring production currently at the NAC features some solid performances including, on opening night, the talented Ben Cook as young, motherless Billy (Cook shares the role with three other actors) and Craig Bennett as Billy’s burly dad who’s initially horrified that his son wants to join the ballet but eventually comes round.
Also on board: Patti Perkins as Billy’s feisty, albeit caricatured, Grandma, Janet Dickinson as Mrs. Wilkinson, the rough-and-tumble dance teacher who spots and nurtures Billy’s potential, and a raft of other capable performers.
Heck, there’s even music by Elton John – although that doesn’t automatically make it memorable music – to accompany Lee Hall’s book and lyrics and Peter Darling’s choreography (Hall also wrote the screenplay for the original 2000 movie while Stephen Daldry directed both the movie and the musical).
Despite all this, the current production of the inspirational show is less than inspirational.

Miracle on 34th Street: The Radio show. Thoroughly engaging family entertainment.

By Patrick Langston | December 16, 2012

Adapted by Ottawa playwright John Cook and presented by Plosive Productions, this story about belief, generosity and the Christmas spirit is thoroughly engaging family entertainment.

The story is best known in its 1947 film incarnation but translates well to the stage in Plosive’s presentation as a radio drama that takes us inside the broadcast studio. There, several actors and a sound effects person create a sweet-tempered tale about a little girl named Susan Walker (the expressive Kelty O’Brien) who discovers that Kris Kringle (Tom Charlebois) is real.

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November: Political drama centred around a stupid, racist American president, balances between credible and mere caricature.

By Patrick Langston | November 30, 2012

Todd Duckworth as The President. Photo David Pasho.

United States President Charles Smith, the centrepiece of David Mamet’s nasty and funny November, is stupid, venal, and a racist. Trailing badly in the last week before Election Day, he’d do anything to win a second term in office. If he loses the election, his one desire is a presidential libary although its doubtful he’s read a book in decades. Yet reprehensible as he is, like a train wreck you can hardly take your eyes off him.

That’s in part because playwright Mamet has created an oddly compelling character modeled to some extent on George W. Bush (the play premiered on Broadway in 2008, the year that Barrack Obama unseated Bush).

It’s also because Todd Duckworth, who plays Smith in this quick-footed production, has discovered enough tics and absurdities in this tempestuous, crude and wholly self-serving dud of a leader — he doesn’t know the difference between Iran and Iraq and equates the evils of slavery with the evils of disco music — to keep him buoyant, balanced between credible and mere caricature.

Smith, presumably through dumb luck, has a sharp-minded chief of staff named Archer Brown (Steve Martin, who makes the most of a thinly sketched character). Archer’s seen it all and, ruthless, does what he has to do to keep Smith mostly between the lines.

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Mr. Pim Passes By: A. A. Milne’s engaging incursion into theatre!!

By Patrick Langston | November 28, 2012

Photo. Alan Dean

Yes, you can imagine the author of Winnie-the-Pooh writing this play. Inconsequential, unassuming and surprisingly engaging, A.A. Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By is a gentle bit of entertainment that finds a generally befuddled Mr. Pim (Barry Caiger) accidentally throwing a spanner into the marriage of the ultra-conservative George Marden (Robert Hicks) and his more liberal wife Olivia Marden (Jenny Sheffield). There’s other stuff involving an evolving relationship between a couple of younger folks, a bluff aunt shows up, and all comes right in the end.

Directed by Joe O’Brien, the show is well-paced, its simple beginning slowly gathering complications that are absurd to all but those involved. And like a Winnie-the-Pooh story, the characters tangle with questions of loyalty, right and wrong, and other issues without Milne’s ever becoming heavy-handed about it.

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Pride and Prejudice. Janet Munsil’s new stage adaptation captures all this in vivid, eloquent and frequently very funny fashion

By Patrick Langston | November 23, 2012

Sometimes we only discover ourselves by discovering someone else. That at least is the case for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the main characters in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s classic early 19th-century novel about love, identity and social structure. Each is hobbled by pride and prejudice, and each, over the course of the story, learns to see the other and themselves with a clearer eye. Good thing: without the transformation, they would never have fallen in love, and we wouldn’t have had Austen’s wonderful tale.

Janet Munsil’s new stage adaptation captures all this in vivid, eloquent and frequently very funny fashion. Some devotees of Austen may prefer the author wearing a quiet, ironic smile to laughing out loud, but this period drama is an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and, despite sometimes swapping Austen’s subtlety for obviousness, remains in the important ways true to the spirit of the original….read more on the Ottawa Citizen:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Theatre+Review+Pride+Prejudice/7603843/story.html.

Footlose: An upbeat musical that is sometimes exciting, sometimes “so so”.

By Patrick Langston | November 22, 2012

Bomont , U.S.A., the fictional setting for Footloose, is no place to live if you’re a teenager. The small town has banned dancing and rock music, which bothers new arrival Ren McCormack (Mathieu-Philippe Perras, a fine dancer with a good if undisciplined voice) so much that he corrals his fellow teens into challenging the municipal edict.

This is an upbeat musical, so it’s hardly a spoiler to say that Ren and company are successful. Besides, it’s the getting there that’s the focus of this pretty derivative musical as the teens conspire, cuddle, have showdowns with teachers and parents, fight, dance at an out-of-town country music joint, and generally carry on exactly as teenagers are supposed to do.

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