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.
This tedious solo piece finds writer/performer Sarah Waisvisz on a quest to answer that ancient puzzler, “Who am I?”
In her case, that means a search for her multi-racial roots involving an imaginary journey from St. Martinique to Africa to Europe to Ottawa. It means encountering people who link skin colour to identity. It also means 65 dreary minutes for audiences as Waisvisz drapes her premise – if she’s interested in who she is, then everybody else must be as well – in a blend of song, dance, movement and text that does little to universalize her personal story or effectively link past and present even when she dips into the fraught history of the slave trade. …
It’s a role only its creator, First Nations performing arts legend Margo Kane, has ever played: Agnes, the young aboriginal woman severed from her roots as a child when a government agency snatches her from her family and who then spends years in search of herself and her place in the world.
Now Paula-Jean Prudat is Agnes — sweet, exuberant, with a nervous and expectant laugh — in a new production of Kane’s one-woman show, which premiered in 1990. The revival, part of the undercurrents festival and at the NAC Fourth Stage for Feb. 12 and 13 only, is billed as a workshop, the hope being that the production will be picked up by theatres across the country.
Despite the occasional misstep — a few muffed lines, more conviction in the second than the first part of the show — Prudat gives us a rich, captivating Agnes. Armed with only a suitcase, a drum and serious acting chops (she plays, briefly, multiple characters), Prudat infuses Kane’s mix of storytelling, dance and ritual with her own brand of verve. Funny when lampooning the destructive Hollywood version of First Nations people, touching when displaying Agnes’s hunger for love and acceptance, Prudat, under director Corey Payette, proves a worthy successor to Kane.
Especially powerful is the powwow scene where the teenaged Agnes, having joined the 1960s army of other young people hitchhiking around North America on their own quests, finally gets a glimpse of her heritage as she meets the old men, the young women, the little kids who have come together in celebration just as her family did before she was cut away from home and culture. …
Static it’s not. Life-sized cut-outs of Illyrian townspeople drift across the scene. Paintings in Duke Orsino’s palace spring to life. A couple of castle-topped hills, craggy faces etched into their steep sides, slip across the stage for a brief encounter.
In fact, this immensely imaginative and hilarious production of William Shakespeare’s romantic comedy Twelfth Night doesn’t even have an intermission. Instead — rare treat in our attention-deficit era! – we get to relish the play in one two-hour swoop.
You know the story, right? Siblings Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked on the shores of Illyria. Disguising herself as a man (Cesario), Viola lands a job with Duke Orsino who’s smitten with unrequited love for the Countess Olivia. Cesario pleads Orsino’s case to Olivia who in turn falls for Cesario just as Viola has fallen for Orsino. There’s a bunch of other characters including Olivia’s dipsomaniacal uncle Sir Toby Belch, his space cadet pal Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Olivia’s stuffy steward Malvolio. Disguise, misdirected affections and a lack of self-knowledge are the order of the day, with all coming right in the end.
You may realize earlier or later than your seatmate what is really going on here, but exactly when the penny drops doesn’t matter. What does matter is the intake of breath, the muttered imprecation when you suddenly understand that Matchstick, an odd and intensely original folk musical that starts out in fairy tale-like fashion, is becoming bigger and darker than you ever anticipated. The fairy tale is morphing into real life, and it’s not life as you’d choose to have it.
Playwright Nathan Howe’s story begins in An Undesirable Country where a young, motherless girl named Matchstick (Lauren Holfeuer) is locked out of her home by a cruel father. In Grimm Brothers style, she journeys to a big, soulless city. There, she’s taken in by an aunt (seen only in a photograph that Holfeuer holds aloft while speaking the aunt’s lines) and her reluctant husband (Howe, in one of multiple roles).
At one point in this remarkable show about his own life as a damaged Indigenous person in Australia and the collective experience of colonized Aboriginal people almost anywhere, Jack Charles sings the 1957 Connie Francis hit Who’s Sorry Now?
It seems an odd choice, this very white song by a very white singer from a very white time in America. Charles, backed by the tight, three-piece band that plays on and off through the show, sings the song in a jaunty, absolutely straight fashion, so while you know it’s meant to be ironic (after all, how sorry are we really about our treatment of Indigenous peoples?), his delivery leaves the import entirely up to us. Heck, he may even be singing the song, one of several in the show, just because he likes it.
Who said murderous scenarios can’t be funny? The bumbling gang in Jack Sharkey’s farcical The Murder Room, mounted with vigour and tongue firmly in cheek at OLT, are downright hilarious as they grapple with being either ill-intentioned but wholly likeable baddies or easily distracted but self-absorbed goodies.
The plot, a spoofy spin on the classic British murder mystery with dashes of meta-theatre in the quick-draw dialogue, is straightforward despite the characters’ facility for turning the simplest event into a three-act drama. The lusty and deceptive Mavis Templeton (Irish O’Brien) decides to bump off her credulous new husband Edgar Hollister (Michael McSheffrey) so she can inherit his money and be with her lover. Suffice to say that things get complicated as others are drawn in including Edgar’s clueless daughter Susan (Maryse Fernandes), her dimbulb Yankee beau Barry Draper (Phillip David Merriman, whose American South accent is confusing), Hollister’s bustling housekeeper Lottie Molloy (Kelly Fuoco), and the tippling Inspector James Crandall (Michael McCarville). Also on hand: the investigatively challenged Constable Abel Howard Andrew (McSheffrey again).
Published in the Ottawa Citizen on December 30, 2015
Photo: Daniel Swalec
There are some pretty cool videos depicting the tornado that sweeps Dorothy and her dog Toto from a Kansas farm and deposits them in Munchkinland. The broom belonging to the Wicked Witch of the West actually explodes into flame. Oz thunders like a petulant god. But modern technical effects aside, at its heart, the joyously executed musical The Wizard of Oz now playing to families at the NAC remains a story rooted in early 20th century rural America when, at least to our contemporary eyes, a kind of pre-ironic innocence and belief that love and kindness could trump evil prevailed.
The production, drawn from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book and based on the classic 1939 movie with Judy Garland as Dorothy, wisely avoids updating the original story settings or trajectory.
The farm where Dorothy (the wholly convincing and powerfully voiced Sarah Lasko) feels unwanted by her distracted Auntie Em (Ottawa’s Emmanuelle Zeesman) and Uncle Henry (Randy Charleville) is vintage turn-of-the-century complete with a jerry-built generator that needs the whack of an axe to run.
Ottawa’s Lowertown could be a rough place for 12-year-olds in the mid-1940s. Racism, pitched battles with other kids, nasty teachers: such hurdles sometimes made life something to be survived more than celebrated. But while Angel Square, Janet Irwin’s loving and vibrant stage adaptation of Brian K. Doyle’s 1984 novel of the same name, sharply limns the rough side of life, it also excites our envy of those urban kids of long ago – their freedom, their resilience, their sense of place and community.
Just as importantly, the family-friendly show makes us appreciate anew Doyle’s depiction of the rich imaginative life of Tommy, the story’s young hero. Fantasizing himself to be Lamont Cranston, AKA the crime-fighting Shadow of 1930s and ‘40s radio drama and print fame, Tommy sets out to solve the mystery of who badly beat the father of his best friend, Sammy Rosenberg. That quest in the days leading up to Christmas, 1945 serves as backbone to a fond recreation of life in a now-vanished Ottawa: the original Ritchie Feed & Seed Store on York Street (a Ritchie bag is key to solving the mystery); the squeaky floored Woolworth’s and the more upscale Freimans department store on Rideau Street; the vast, echoing Union Station, now the Government Conference Centre.
Irwin, who also directs, has cast just four adult actors to recreate
Seems we just can’t get enough of Anne Shirley, that spunky young redhead who packs her overheated imagination and drama queen ways along with her clothes when she moves from a Nova Scotia orphanage to a PEI farm. This time around Anne is portrayed by Caroline Baldwin, and Orpheus couldn’t have asked for a better one in its production of the musical adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved novel. Baldwin’s a skilled vocalist, her delivery easy, full and nuanced. Her acting is on par with her singing: the actress is a woman, but the character we see is a young girl and one who’s endlessly interesting and entertaining as she learns about herself, family and community.
While Baldwin shines in this spirited production, her fellow cast members for the most part aren’t far behind. Gilbert Blythe is played with conviction by Storm Davis who transforms himself into a youngster smitten with Anne and who, while easily cowed, inevitably pops back up for another go at whatever he’s after. Davis needs to let loose more when singing: his vocal constraint works against his ability.
The shadow cast by great violence is a trap, invisible but as constraining as prison bars. Sentenced to that mental prison, you may find your only escape is self-destruction.
The latter is chosen by Kathleen and Benoît Fournier, the working-class couple in Colleen Murphy’s incisively disturbing drama The December Man (L’homme de décembre).
When we meet them, they appear to be preparing for a big event, perhaps a visit from someone important. They’re carefully dressed. Kathleen (Kate Hennig) has tidied the house and badgers Benoît (Paul Rainville) to clean the glass after he downs a shot of whiskey to calm his nerves. What they’re actually doing is preparing to commit suicide together, having seen their lives shattered some years previously when their only child Jean hung himself. Jean, as we learn, was a survivor of the Montreal Massacre, the 1989 slaughter by Marc Lépine of 14 female engineering students at the École Polytechnique, and guilt drove him to death.
