All the world's a stage Archives - Page 22 of 30 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Dogfight: The Education of a Misogynist Marine

By Jane Baldwin | May 14, 2016

Dogfight

Music and Lyrics Benj Pasek & Justin Paul
Book by Peter Duchan
Directed by Paul Daigneault
SpeakEasy Stage Company

Dogfight, the 2013 Louise Lortel Award winner for the outstanding Off-Broadway musical of the year is currently being presented by Boston’s SpeakEasy Company under the capable direction of Paul Daigneault. Composers and lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul together with bookwriter Peter Duchan based their show on the 1991 non-musical film of the same name.

Dogfight takes place in two different time frames, 1963 and 1967 with the majority of the action happening in the earlier era. It is a strangely divided two-act musical. The first act deals with male bonding, cruelty, dreams of heroism, misogyny, and naïveté; the second develops into a love story. Early on, three young marine buddies – Eddie Birdlace (Jordan J. Ford), Boland, (Jared Troilo) and Bernstein (Drew Arisco) – who are shipping out of San Francisco the following day for Vietnam decide to spend their last night stateside playing a sadistic and humiliating game. This Marine tradition involves setting up a contest in which each man attending must put in a sum of money and bring an ugly girl. The escort of the homeliest date wins the pot. …

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Creating Communities – Reflecting New Europe: “La nuit des taupes” (Welcome to Caveland) and “Web of Trust” presented at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels.

By Yana Meerzon | May 9, 2016

Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels: “La nuit des taupes” (Welcome to Caveland!) by Philippe Quesne (Nanterre-Amandiers – centre dramatique national) and “Web of Trust” by Edit Kaldor (Stichting Kata, Amsterdam).

Reporting from a theatre festival is a special task. Often a reviewer watches two or three shows in one day, participates in discussions, meets friends and students. The work is hectic. Still the thinking must be done and the critical opinion proposed.

In the following, I provide some observations on two productions I saw in Brussels on May 8, 2016. Although La nuit des taupes (Welcome to Caveland!) by Philippe Quesne and Web of Trust by Edit Kaldor are radically different in their performative styles, they share a specific concern, something that I see more as a unifying-thread in the 2016 edition of Kunstenfestivaldesarts. …

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Toshiki Okada’s “Time’s Journey Through a Room”

By Capital Critics Circle | May 7, 2016

Photo. Courtesy of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, Belgium . Yana Meerzon sends in this comment on the production.

Playwright and director Toshiki Okada; Sound and set design Tsuyoshi Hisakado; Featuring Izumi Aoyagi, Mari Ando, Yo Yoshida; presented at the 2016 Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, Belgium, in Japanese with subtitles in French and Dutch.

Toshiki Okada is one of the most innovative theatre writers and directors from Japan, whose work has continuously appeared at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Belgium. In his recent plays, Okada repeatedly attempted to reflect upon the consequences of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. In Current Location (2012) and Ground and Floor (2013), he was addressing the pressing psychological and social issues of life/death interdependency – the source of much reflexion in Japan in the aftermath of the disaster.

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Last Dream (On Earth): The Intimacy of the Impossible – The Truth of the Unimaginable

By Yana Meerzon | April 26, 2016

Photo: Deanne Jones

Yana Meerzon has seen this production by the National Theatre of Scotland, presented in Romania during the XV Europe Theatre Festival (in English with Romanian subtitles).

In his much quoted dictum that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, Theodor Adorno contemplates the ethical responsibility of an artist to speak about and on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust, the 20^th century’s major horror. This phrase and Adorno’s concern acquire similar echoing today when theatre, literature, film, and other media begin to seek more appropriate ways to represent the atrocities of migration, global terrorism and civil wars through arts.

In its production Last Dream (On Earth), written and directed by Kai Fischer, The National Theatre of Scotland, a recipient of the 13th Europe Prize Theatrical Realities, XV Europe Theatre Festival, approaches this issue with all the elegance, sincerity and respect that representing the current migration crisis on stage demands.

As the title suggests, Last Dream (On Earth) is constructed at the intersection of seemingly unrelated material: the actual transcripts of the tape-recorded communications between Yuri Gagarin and ground control that took place during his flight to space and the interviews Kai Fischer made during his visits to a refugee centre in Malta and his stay in Morocco. The themes of these two story-lines are however closely related. Both of them speak of the courage one needs to encounter the unknown, be it Gagarin’s decision to volunteer for the space program or the peoples’ misery that forces them to flee their homes.

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Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia Still a Funny Clever Think Piece

By Jane Baldwin | April 16, 2016

Photo: A.R. Sinclair.

The Nora Theatre Company and the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT are presenting Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (the 1993 Critics’ Circle Award winner) at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge. MIT and the company collaborate yearly to bring plays to the public which promote a greater understanding of science, technology, and theatre.

Arcadia, like other plays in Tom Stoppard’s considerable oeuvre is primarily a comedy, dealing with intellectual topics in witty, stylish language. This play has a little magical realism thrown in for good measure. As is often the case with Stoppard, it is difficult, but entertaining to untangle the plot. Science, math, poetry, landscaping, history are the scholarly issues covered. Although you can enjoy the show without much comprehension of chaos theory, you might want to prepare by checking it out.

Arcadia takes place in two time periods, 1809-1812 and the present, in a room at Sidley Park, a luxurious British country house. In the first story, it is used as the school room for the inquisitive Thomasina Coverly a precocious mathematician and scientist, studying with Septimus Hodge, her brilliant tutor. However, Thomasina has a breadth of vision and imagination well beyond Septimus’s that allows her to reject Newtonian free will and grasp determinism as a result of stirring jam in her rice pudding.

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887 : Memory and history coincide in Lepage’s intimate portrait of Quebec! A Winner!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 15, 2016

http://littquebecoise.weebly.com/speak-white-de-michegravele-lalonde.html

Michèle lalonde reads her poem Speak White in 1970 …scrole down on the Quebec site.

Lets begin at the end! Alone on a darkened stage as the lights are dimming, Robert Lepage reaches the end of his emotional journey into the past. What am I doing here he asks us in his own voice? I have been asked to “remember”, but “remember what?” and his tone becomes angrier and more aggressive and he roars out a thunderous interpretation of Michele Lalonde’s unforgettable anticolonial poem Speak White. The play ends on this rousing high note but the evening’s journey has been full of personal and collective memories that Lepage has gathered together in a most intimate moment with the audience. That ending was hair-raising and even unexpected, because Lepage usually avoids political discussions so one wonders how he really locates himself in relation to this strong statement given Lepage’s career on the international stage, moving from one country to another as his works evolves according to his vision of theatrical process which imiposes constant changes on the event.

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XV Europe Theatre Prize and XIII Europe Prize Theatrical Realities

By Capital Critics Circle | March 30, 2016

Photo: Dave Morgan

Juliet and Romeo, Mat Ecks

Press release from the XVth edition of the Europe Theatre prize taking place in Craiova Romania (April 23 to 26).

Yana Meerzon will be attending the event from Ottawa and will give us a full description of the conferences and theatre productions.

The events of the XV edition of Europe Theatre Prize and of the XIII Europe Prize Theatrical Realities – the most prestigious European award in the field of drama – will take place in Romania, in Craiova from 23^rd to 26^th April 2016. The Prize events will take place under the Patronage and the financing of the City of Craiova (“Candidate City – Craiova Cultural Capital of Europe 2021”) and in cooperation with the Shakespeare Foundation of Craiova and the “Marin Sorescu” National Theatre of Craiova, which also commit themselves to host and organize the events of Europe Theatre Prize in Craiova, with the contribution too of the Romanian Cultural Institute.

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“Ca ira (1) Fin de Louis”, une bombe politico-historique au Centre des Arts.

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 22, 2016

Photo. Elizabeth Carecchio

Ça ira (1), Fin de Louis est une « fiction politique » allant de 1787 (la crise financière en France) jusqu’à 1789, la prise de la Bastille. (Programme du Centre national des arts, Ottawa, hiver, 2016, p.5).

La pièce 1789 de Mnouchkine, qui a transformé le soulèvement populaire de mai ‘68 en métaphore historique nous revient à l’esprit mais si la conception scénique du Théâtre du Soleil s’inspire des documents de l’époque et situe le public au milieu de l’action comme le fait Pommerat, les ressemblances s’arrêtent là.

Pour le spectateur canadien, Ça ira (1), fin de Louis, qui dure quatre heures et demie, est avant tout une expérience physique et intellectuelle dont nous sortons vidés par cette succession rapide de débats, de bousculades, de confrontations violentes entre des idées-choque, et références politico- historiques qui mettent en jeu l’avenir de la France. Surtout, nous sommes plongés dans un « monde parallèle » où le passé et le présent se fondent, comme le titre nous fait basculer entre Edith Piaf et la Terreur. Les costumes et le décor dépouillé évoquent le présent alors que le déroulement des événements nous renvoie à la crise financière du XVIIIe siècle, la confrontation entre les classes sociales et la multiplicité d’opinions qui mettent en relief la prise de conscience du peuple lors du passage du Tiers état à l’Assemblée nationale. Nous nous croyons entendre des débats des comités du quartier face à l’attitude récalcitrante de la noblesse et du clergé alors que soudain, grâce aux phrases qui sonnent plus contemporaines, nous voilà en pleine Assemblée nationale de la France actuelle ou même dans la Chambre des Communes du Canada où les députés hurlent, se contredisent, s’interrompent, applaudissent , insultent leurs collègues, s’interpellent malgré le désarroi du président de la chambre qui a du mal à contrôler la discussion.

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Three Sisters : A New Interpretation by Lev Dodin and the Maly Theatre:

By Jane Baldwin | March 7, 2016

Photo: Viktor Vassiliev

One of the most exciting theatrical events in a season that brought Boston the extraordinary Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 and Mark Ryland in Nice Fish (both at the ART) is Lev Dodin’s Three Sisters now playing at ArtsEmerson’s Cutler Majestic Theatre. Dodin, an illustrious Russian director, began his career more than fifty years ago when he joined the Young People’s Theatre run by Matvey Dubrovin, a pupil of Meyerhold. In the 1960s, he studied at the Leningrad Institute of Theatre under Boris Zon, who was a former student of Stanislavsky. Dodin’s work continues to be influenced by the discoveries of Meyerhold and Stanislavsky.

In 1983, Dodin was appointed artistic director of the Maly Theatre in what was still Leningrad. The Maly has its own long-standing company of actors, some of whom trained under Dodin at the St. Petersburg Academy of Theatre Arts, as the Leningrad Institute is known today. Maly productions tour widely, although this is the first time the troupe has visited Boston. Three Sisters is played in Russian with English supertitles.

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Thierry Gibault dans Une trop bruyante solitude, assume tout le poid tragique de l’humanité : une prestation inoubliable

By Alvina Ruprecht | February 14, 2016

Thierry Gibault. Photo: courtesy of Theatre de l'Incendie, Paris — Thierry Gibault.
Photo: courtesy of Theatre de l’Incendie, Paris

Une trop bruyante solitude de Bohumil Hrabal, a paru à Prague en 1976 sous forme d’une publication clandestine mais il a rapidement circulé en une dizaine de langues . Cette adaptation récente en français, en forme de monologue, par le metteur en scène Laurent Fréchuret fut montée par le Théâtre de l’Incendie et jouée par Thierry Gibault. Le spectacle, actuellement au Théâtre de Belleville à Paris, sera repris en Avignon cette année au théâtre des Halles d’Alain Timar . Cette expérience scenique nous montre que le texte n’a rien perdu de son actualité.

Un vrombissement inquiétant, un claquement de câbles, l’écho d’une mécanique féroce annonce le réveil d’un nouveau “Métropolis” quelque part dans l’obscurité. Les effets de bruitage nous frappent dès le début. Soudain, une seule ampoule s’allume au bout d’un fil suspendu du plafond. Elle éclaire le visage d’un homme dégoulinant de sueur, et tâché d’encre. Puis le corps entier de l’acteur émerge d’un nuage de poussière épaisse pour révéler un homme pris comme un rat dans la saleté d’un trou noir. On a presque de la nausée. .

Voilà Hanta , celui qui a passé trente-cinq ans de sa vie enfoui dans ce lieu sombre, sans fenêtres, en compagnie de sa presse mécanique ronflant doucement comme un monstre en état de veil, conçu pour broyer des tonnes de détritus et cracher du papier condamné au recyclage . Dans cette masse de feuilles réduites a des tas de crasse, se retrouvent des œuvres fondatrices des grandes civilisations du monde. On pourrait dire que Hanta et sa presse participent à la solution finale de la culture du monde sauf que Hanta possède une âme de poète ; il est curieux et il aime lire. La propagande des pouvoirs en place n’ont pas réussi à éradiquer sa soif d’apprendre. Toute la différence est là. Les yeux de l’acteur brillent d’une lueur étrange et le monologue prend des allures d’un délire total. …

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