Patrick Langston is the theatre critic for the Ottawa Citizen. In addition to reviews of professional and the occasional community theatre production, he writes a monthly theatre column and previews of major shows for the Citizen. Patrick also writes for Ottawa Magazine, Carleton University Magazine, and Penguin Eggs -Canada's folk, roots and world music magazine. Patrick lives in Navan.
Woyzeck’s Head based on the text by Georg Büchner, adapted by and directed by James Richardson
A Third Wall Theatre Production.
As the title suggests, this interpretation by Third Wall director James Richardson of Woyzeck, Georg Büchner’s unfinished 1837 masterwork about a man who is going mad, focuses on the protagonist’s head, the seat of memory, emotion and intellect. Gone, or at least relegated to the almost-tangential, are the class and other external social concerns that are usually showcased when the original work is performed. That focus is a good and a bad thing.
Photos, Courtesy of the National Arts Centre and the Segal Centre.
Initially, it’s discomfiting. Here are Germaine Lauzon, her family and her pals, richly imagined characters we’ve long associated with a straight-ahead stage play, breaking into song about bingo and being free and no-good boyfriends.
But Belles Soeurs: The Musical, which is based on Michel Tremblay’s evergreen mid-1960s tragicomedy Les Belles-soeurs, soon feels as comfortable as Germaine’s weathered kitchen where all the action takes place. And for the most part those songs work splendidly, showcasing not just some fine voices but the surging loneliness, longing and occasional sisterhood that define the lives of these working class women.
Few things are more distressing in a theatre reviewer’s daily round than a show that excites neither wild praise nor outright condemnation. When a play is “OK” — to wit, Beverley Cooper’s Janet Wilson Meets the Queen now making its world premiere at the Great Canadian Theatre Company — it’s tough to know what to say about it.
This show should have traction. As we know from Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott that played the NAC in 2013, Cooper can write in an empathetic, trenchant style as she confronts complex social issues through compelling characters.
In the case of Janet Wilson Meets the Queen, both the characters (all confronting their own, intertwined crises) and the issues (they are multiple) kind of resonate, but not really.
Janet (an appropriately stiff-limbed Marion Day) is a late-1960s Vancouver housewife whose chipper manner and fixed smile cover a growing anxiety as the world shifts beneath her knitted-slipper clad feet.
If you’re a nun suffering from insomnia, just book a berth in the cavernous abbey depicted in this production of The Sound of Music. The place is so immensely boring, so circumscribed by tempered voices and looming, dark spaces, that you’ll be snoozing in seconds.
In fact, one suspects that the real reason Maria abandons a career in a wimple for life with the von Trapps is to avoid death by tedium.
You already know the storyline of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s famous musical — Maria Rainer, a postulant at an Austrian abbey in the dark days of the advancing Third Reich, takes a temporary job as a governess with the von Trapp family, falls in love with the adorable but emotionally undernourished children and their rule-loving widower father Captain Georg von Trapp, teaches them all to sing again, marries the captain, and flees the Nazis with her new family.
All couples play dangerous emotional games, but most of us are like kids with a ball and jacks compared to George and Martha.
The middle-aged couple at the heart of Edward Albee’s 1962 play, now at The Gladstone in a revival whose reach exceeds its grasp, has honed to an art the pastime of taunting, flaying, almost-but-not-quite-mortally wounding each other with words. …
Production shot from the toronto production of Jordan Tannahill’s “Concord Floral “
Those of us long past our teenage years can only breathe a sigh of gratitude to aging after seeing Jordan Tannahill’s disquieting Concord Floral.
Dislocation, loneliness, confusion: these we remember about our younger selves. And while Tannahill and this gripping production depict those horrors of growing up with precision and sensitivity, the show also layers in a creeping sense of dread about contemporary teen life, a feeling that “something in the air has shifted” as one character puts it, that may seem foreign to the adolescent experience of many older audience members. …
To survive as a court jester, at least under Henry VIII, was to walk a balance beam. You were expected to point out, humorously, royal follies, but cut too close to the bone and your neck was the one being sliced. You were a kind of confidante to the monarch without ever quite knowing where the invisible and shifting line of intimacy sat. You were to use words as currency in a world where innuendo and half-truths were the coin of the realm.
William (“Will”) Somers, Henry’s fool for two decades until the king’s death in 1547, navigates that beam with aplomb in Pierre Brault’s fleet, funny and sometimes dark imagining of the fool’s life under the monarch.
Virtually nothing is known of Somers, though plenty is of the bloody era when Henry’s growing intemperance and the conflict between Catholics and Protestants reportedly resulted in the death of 70,000 opponents to the king. The “most frightening man on the planet,” Somers calls his boss at one point.
A quick glance at the storyline might suggest that Mitch Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher’s Tuesdays with Morrie is cornier than Kansas in mid-July: Young man strikes up friendship with a professor; young man lets the friendship slide when he ventures out into the big world; no-longer-young man, now a career-obsessed sports journalist, reunites with terminally ill professor and learns life-altering lessons.
That the play is based on Albom’s own story – first released as a memoir of the same name and then as a television movie starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria before finally coming to the stage in 2002 – may do little to change cynical first impressions.
But to reduce the play and its current, finely tuned production at The Gladstone to a saccharine-sounding summary would be doing both a serious disservice.
Slumped in a police station chair at the beginning of Nicolas Billon’s Butcher, Josef Džibrilovo seems like the furthest thing imaginable from a man with a frightening past. Whatever potential danger his unidentifiable military uniform may signal is negated by the sagging Santa Claus hat on his head and the occasional twitch of his aging hands. But then much of Billon’s charged political thriller is about the shattering conflict between appearance and reality, and about how we can be suddenly caught up in the latter while blithely existing in the former.Butcher is also a difficult play to talk about without talking too much. Littered with enough twists and turns to induce terminal whiplash, it works by drawing you steadily deeper into a narrative web that can’t be revealed in much detail without spoiling the show for those haven’t seen it.
Robert Bockstael in Getting to Room Temperature by Arthur Milner. Photo: Ashley Fraser, Ottawa Citizen
Getting to Room Temperature A Room Temperature Collective Production (Ottawa)
What do we do now? That’s playwright Arthur Milner’s thorny question in Getting to Room Temperature which asks whether we have the right to die – and explores the roles and responsibilities of others in that death – when we’re not terminally ill but, being old, have simply reached the end of life as we choose to live it.
The provocative one-man show, told in storytelling/lecture fashion, is a world premiere. Directed by Milner, it features Robert Bockstael telling what is, essentially, the playwright’s own story.
Some time ago, Milner’s 93-year-old mother Rose, who was not gravely ill, asked her doctor to help her die. He refused. That got Milner exploring the murky politics of old age and dying in contemporary society. He asks us to consider a lot. Some of it, including the financial burden on families and societies of a growing number of lingering elders kept alive by incessant medical intervention, targets our sense of right and wrong.
Milner, through the accessible voice of Bockstael, wraps his questions in warm anecdotes about his family, sprinkles the show with humour, and lovingly depicts his vital, opinionated mother whose life is slowly limited by aging even as her son’s inquiry into dying expands to take in ever-larger ethical and personal territory.
The inquiry, says Milner/Bockstael, is “a conversation I’m having with myself. I’m trying to figure it out.”…
