Category: All the world’s a stage

Le nouveau visage de la Nouvelle Scène

Le nouveau visage de la Nouvelle Scène

New director of La Nouvelle Scène: Anne-Marie White. Photo: Robert Patterson.

Le Festival Actoral et le Théâtre du Trillium s’associent pour présenter le meilleur des arts vivants et des écritures contemporaines dans une programmation avant-gardiste ouverte sur la littérature, le théâtre, la danse, la performance, la poésie sonore et les arts visuels. Une occasion unique pour le public d’ici de découvrir des œuvres singulières, des formes originales et des artistes emblématiques. Cette première édition d’Actoral à Ottawa se déroulera du 8 au 10 novembre 2018.

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Ottawa’s Jordan Tannahill wins GG literary award for drama

Ottawa’s Jordan Tannahill wins GG literary award for drama

Tannahill, who lives in the United Kingdom these days, is currently finishing work on a Virtual Reality theatre piece called Draw Me Close which will premiere at the Young Vic Theatre in London in January. The piece is a co-production with the National Film Board and the National Theatre of London. An earlier version was seen at the recent Venice Biennale.

Tannahill is active in a wide range of artistic endeavours including film and writing for dance. His text is featured in the Akram Khan Company production of Xenos which was recently at the National Arts Centre. He has also written a first novel called Liminal.

Tannahill has previously won a GG for Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays in 2014. And his script Concord Floral was a finalist in 2016. Botticelli in the Fire and Sunday in Sodom jointly won the 2016 Toronto’s Theatre Critics Award for Best New Canadian Play.

Tannahill joins Sarah Henstra who won the award for English fiction for her first novel The Red Word (ECW Press) a murky and twisted story about sexual assault on a college campus.

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Fun Home: an extraordinary musical

Fun Home: an extraordinary musical

Photo  Niles Scott

Fun Home, the multi-Tony award winning musical is making its Boston début at SpeakEasy and a fine show it is. Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s popular graphic chronicle of the same name, the musical whose book and lyrics were written by Lisa Kron and the music composed by Jeanine Tesori tells the story in an unusual and nonlinear way.

The character of Alison is played by three different actresses at three different stages of her life. First we meet the adult 43 year old Alison (Amy Jo Jackson) who is in the throes of writing her autobiography and recalling the events of her life that made her the person she is today. It is those events that create the story. In the opening scene Small Alison (Marissa Simeqi), a girl about eight, sings of her need for her daddy Bruce introducing a life-long frustration. Bruce (Todd Yard), a closeted gay man, spends much of his time restoring houses, particularly his own, to their initial beauty. Alison and her two younger brothers John (Luke Gold) and Christian (Cameron Levesque) are expected to help their father who is often brusque with them. Todd Yard captures Bruce’s narcissism in the song “Not Too Bad.”

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Measure for Measure : a stunning production

Measure for Measure : a stunning production

Measure for Measure  Photo Johan Persson

 

Boston’s ArtsEmerson is currently showing Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare’s “problem playsdirected by the widely acclaimed Declan Donnellan of Cheek by Jowl in collaboration with Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre. The production is unusual not only because it is acted in Russian (with English surtitles) but also by virtue of Donnellan’s blocking where most of the cast of thirteen is onstage much of the time often moving in unison. The actors are wonderfully and truthfully emotive.

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We will not be silent, a story of Anti-fascist Youth

We will not be silent, a story of Anti-fascist Youth

We Will Not Be Silent    Photo Andy Brilliant-Brilliant Pictures

David Meyers’ We Will Not Be Silent, now playing at the New Repertory Theatre at the Mosesian Center for the Arts, Boston is a work whose content speaks to today’s audiences in the US. Many believe our democracy is in danger; our country is split, racism and other types of discrimination are widespread. Discussions and books on the rise of Fascism abound.

Most of the play takes place in an interrogation cell in Nazi Germany where Sophie Scholl (Sarah Oakes Muirhead) is being held. It is 1943 and the war is starting to go badly for Hitler. A year earlier Sophie, a religious Christian and student of philosophy at the University of Munich, and her brother Hans (Conor Proft), a medical student at the same university, had founded the White Rose, a small resistance group who believed that if the German people knew the extent of the evil being committed by the Nazis, they would oppose the regime. To enlighten the population, members of the White Rose wrote and secretly distributed anti-war pamphlets.

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Silence at the NAC: the romantic life of a couple behind the invention of the telephone

Silence at the NAC: the romantic life of a couple behind the invention of the telephone

Photo: Claus  Anderson

Silence brings to the spotlight the romantic life of the husband and wife behind the invention of the telephone. The opening night of the 2018–2019 season found the National Arts Centre turning the spotlight on a Canadian icon and his wife, Alexander Graham and Mabel Hubbard Bell, in the play Silence. This Grand Theatre (London, ON) production, brought to life on the national stage by director and former NAC English Theatre Artistic Director Peter Hinton, eschews simple biography and hagiography to focus on the romance between Alec and Mabel, of their endearing courtship and often difficult, but always loving, marriage.

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Sainte Dérivée des trottoirs. la martyrisée du rara haitien en plein Festival des Francophonies

Sainte Dérivée des trottoirs. la martyrisée du rara haitien en plein Festival des Francophonies

Sainte  Dérivée des trottoirs  par Faubert Bolivar,  mise  en  scène Alice Leclerc, interprétation  Vladimir  Delva

Cette nuit-là,  devant le parvis de la cathédrale de Limoges, le public festivalier  a participé  à un événement à  la fois insolite et époustouflant.  Au son du  battement des tambours accompagné de musique de l’église chrétienne,  deux figures  masquées sorties de l’ombre nous invitent  à les suivre  vers le Jardin de l’ Évêché…

Nous voilà du coup,  devant  un tas de déchets – canettes, vieux papiers, surfaces brillantes, filets de pêcheurs  qui se   se met à remuer alors qu’une lumière rougeâtre émane de cet « autel » posé à l’entrée du jardin. Une figure éclaboussée de détritus émerge de ce tas d’ordures, vomissant, crachant, jurant,  hurlant en français et en créole, maudissant ses origines, sa mère,  Jésus et l’éclopé qui était son père, sa manière de dénoncer la bêtise et  la pauvreté dans le monde.  Voici  une nouvelle résurrection d’une apparence christique peu commune; un  corps maigre, carnavalesque, trainant derrière elle tout le  poids de toutes  les souffrances et les obscénités du monde. L’acteur est magnifique mais la figure fait peur  et le public est  tétanisé devant la  ‘Sainte Dérivée qui entreprend son calvaire syncrétique  à travers le jardin de Christ où nous découvrons un monde de folie, de délire, de chaos dans  la fête.

La chose n’est pas simple puisque la  Sainte Folle évoque à la fois  Jésus et   Erzulie , une figure qui invite les spectateurs   à un rituel de ‘rara’  haïtien,  grande procession   de portée mystique  vouée à  cette  Loa, du panthéon vaudou. Erzulie déesse de l’amour, de la sensualité, mais protectrice féroce des enfants est complexe puisqu’elle est douée de personnalités multiples et l’acteur incarne toute la portée de cette figure.

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Hamnet, A Father/Son Play

Hamnet, A Father/Son Play

 

Hamnet
Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platz. F.I.N.D. 2017 Festival Internationale Neue Dramatik  photo. Gianmarco  Besadola 

Hamnet, the fascinating play, created by Ireland’s Dead Centre, now at ArtsEmerson’s Paramount Theatre in Boston revolves around Shakespeare’s only son. Over the years, scholars have speculated that Hamnet who died at age eleven in 1596 was the inspiration for Hamlet given the similarity of the two names. Many believe, as do playwrights Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, that Shakespeare had no contact with Hamnet.

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A Second Time Around for “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze.

A Second Time Around for “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze.

Truth Values, Written and performed by Gioa De Cari
Photo Michael Hoban

Gioa De Cari’s autobiographical one-woman show Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze returned to the Central Square Theatre this September after nine years for a brief run. Although De Cari was a “recovering mathematician” at the time Harvard’s then president Lawrence Summers gave his 2004 speech in which he asserted the reason that fewer women have careers in science and math is the result of innate gender differences, it inspired her to revisit her experience at M.I.T. In 2009, when Truth Values made its début, the reaction to Summers’s speech was still strong. While male chauvinism has not disappeared, today there are considerably more women working in the world of science and math.

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Ostermeier, La Nuit des Rois à Paris

Ostermeier, La Nuit des Rois à Paris

Ostermeier, la «Nuit» où «tout le monde est trans»

Par Anne Diatkine

Le directeur de la Schaubühne à Berlin monte avec la Comédie-Française la pièce de Shakespeare «la Nuit des rois…» qui multiplie les jeux de rôle et de genre.

Thomas Ostermeier à la Comédie-Française ? Une évidence, du genre de celles qui paraissent se sceller sur un coin de table en trois minutes. Erreur ! La rencontre entre la maison de Molière et le directeur de la Schaubühne à Berlin n’aurait jamais eu lieu sans l’attention prolongée d’Eric Ruf, bien avant qu’il n’administre la maison de Molière, pour le travail d’Ostermeier.

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