All the world's a stage Archives - Page 28 of 30 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

The Audience: broadcast live across North America (and Ottawa) June 13

By Capital Critics Circle | February 22, 2013

National Theatre Live to Broadcast The Audience Starring Broadway Vet Helen Mirren

By Bethany Rickwald • Feb 22, 2013 • New York City

Helen Mirren in <i>The Audience</i> Helen Mirren in The Audience
(© Johan Persson) The world premiere of Peter Morgan’s (Frost/Nixon) The Audience, starring so-many-awards winner Helen Mirren (Dance of Death), will be broadcast from London’s Gielgud Theatre to movie theaters across North America on June 13. The filmed performance, presented by National Theatre Live, will also show on varying dates internationally and at encore screenings throughout the summer.

Directed by Broadway’s Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot: The Musical, Creative Executive Producer of Ceremonies for the London Olympics), The Audience imagines a series of pivotal meetings between Britain’s Downing Street incumbents and their Queen. These encounters are based on the actual conferences Elizabeth II has held weekly with each of her twelve Prime Ministers for sixty years.

In addition to Mirren, who will be playing The Queen, the cast includes Michael Elwyn (The Iron Lady), Haydn Gwynne (Billy Elliot: The Musical), Robert Hardy (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), Richard McCabe (Yes, Prime Minister), Nathaniel Parker (The Merchant of Venice), Paul Ritter (The Norman Conquests), Rufus Wright (The 39 Steps), Geoffrey Beevers, Maya Gerber, and Nell Williams.

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Calme de Lars Norén : Portrait impitoyable d’une famille qui sombre doucement dans le néant.

By Alvina Ruprecht | January 25, 2013

Lars Norén serait inconnu au Canada si ce n’était pour Brigitte Haentjens , celle qui capte les consciences blessées comme nul autre au pays et actuellement la directrice artistique du théâtre français du Centre national des arts à Ottawa. Au mois de mars (2012) Haentjens a monté le 20 novembre , un monologue de Norén écrit au lendemain de la fusillade dans une école allemande en 2006. Les réactions positives suscitées par cette création québécoise ont confirmé la vision de Mme Haentjens et l’importance de l’auteur dramatique suédois qui mériterait certainement une attention plus suivie chez nous.

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Terminus: Shakespearean feel for verse grapples with bloody images inspired by Catholic mythology in this brilliant production of Mark O’Rowe’s play.

By Alvina Ruprecht | November 27, 2012

Maev Beaty as A. Photo Mirvish Productions.

Since Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus made its debut in 2007 at the Abbey theatre in Dublin, it has turned into a theatrical tsunami, leaving audiences wondering what hit them

This is exactly the feeling I had leaving the Royal Alexandra where Terminus has just begun its run in the Second Stage Series, several months after its Canadian premiere at the SummerWorks Festival in August where it played at the Factory theatre. Not having seen that first production I can’t compare the two performance sites but there is no doubt that the larger space of the Royal Alex could only have enhanced this amazing piece while, at the same time, removing the intimacy of that smaller theatre.

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Paris Commune. A World Premiere of this Musical Docudrama at Boston’s ArtsEmerson

By Jane Baldwin | November 12, 2012

Kate Buddeke

ArtsEmerson’s début play of the 2012-2013 season was a world première, Paris Commune, a musical docudrama created by the Civilians. Founded in 2001 by Artistic Director Steve Cosson and a group of associate artists including writer and composer Michael Friedman, the company is committed to investigative theatre, which means researching topics of socio-political significance to generate a play. Most often the finished work is based on interviews. Paris Commune is the Civilians’ first production adopted from historical documents.

A non-profit organization, the company relies on grants, donations, and artist residencies to fund and develop its productions. Its relationship with ArtsEmerson began three seasons ago with In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards. The Civilians spent part of the development/rehearsal period at ArtsEmerson’s facilities before presenting it here in January 2011. Tales from My Parent’s Divorce, a collective creation directed by Anne Kaufman, underwent a similar procedure in the fall of 2011.

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If This Were A Movie from the Festival of Small and Experimental Theatre in Sarajevo.

By Rajka Stefanovska | October 12, 2012

If This Were a Movie (KAD BI OVO BIO FILM…]

The International Theater Festival (MESS) has been held in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina since the 1960s and welcomes numerous theaters from all over the world. It initially started out as a festival of experimental and alternative performances (MESS is literally an abbreviation for: Small and Experimental Stages, Sarajevo). However, it soon outgrew this format and became one of the major theatre events in Former Yugoslavia. The best classical plays found a place there along with the best accomplishments in alternative theatre. With the beginning of the Bosnian war (1992 – 1995), the Festival was discontinued, but, by 1993 and with a new Bosnian-centric focus, it had already changed into an International Theatre and Film Festival. Regardless of the exceptionally difficult circumstances (as Sarajevo was under siege all four years), many theater plays and documentary films were presented. The MESS also organized numerous art exhibitions and managed to publish a number of new books, as well as to organize the “After the End of the World” film festival at that time.

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Avenue Q by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, a 2004 Multiple Tony Award winner.

By Jane Baldwin | May 15, 2012

Avenue Q, the long-running 2004 multiple Tony Award winner (best musical, best lyrics, and best book) opened at the Lyric Stage here inBoston on May 11 for an eight week run. Such is its popularity that the theatre’s management extended the show for an extra two weeks even before it débuted. The house was full, the audience enthusiastic and on the young side.

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Café Variations. The World on Stage at the Cutler Majestic in Boston

By Jane Baldwin | April 24, 2012

Café Variations. Photo. Paul Marotta

Café Variations arrived in town with lots of promise – a book by experimental playwright Charles Mee, directed by his frequent collaborator Anne Bogart, and music and lyrics by the Gershwin brothers. But despite this seemingly winning combination, the show never quite coalesced.

Rather than an exploration of plot and/or character, the play is an investigation of and disquisition on the problems, joys, and fears of romantic entanglements – with song and dance thrown in. The cast of thirty, composed almost equally of Bogart’s SITI Company actors andEmersonCollegemusical theatre students, varies in musical and dance ability with several students outshining the professionals.

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Ameriville : A production of the Universes Theatre Company, Inc.

By Jane Baldwin | March 17, 2012

Ameriville takes us on a musical tour of the wrongs of America. A devised piece put together by the Universes, a quartet of energetic multi-talented performers who sing, dance, and act, it falls a little short of its mark, which is to entertain, educate, and activate audiences. Despite the company’s claim “to break the bounds of traditional theatre,” their goals and techniques are largely familiar. The political musical revue has a long history.

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Sugar:Author Robbie McCalauley Traces her Own Life

By Jane Baldwin | January 24, 2012

For a number of years, actress, director, performance artist, teacher, and writer Robbie McCauley has been creating socio-political works, which draw on her family history, as in Indian Blood and the OBIE winner Sally’s Rape. In Sugar McCauley traces her own life, beginning in childhood in a still segregated Georgia. Life revolved around family, community, cooking, eating, and the garden which supplied the family with healthful food. A happy and seemingly fit child, her cuts and bruises healed slowly. She was told that she must “have a little sugar,” code for diabetes.

McCauley tells us: “Sugar is complicated” – and it is in this play. It connects to love, pleasure, illness, pain, suffering, overcoming, and slavery. She wrote Sugar to rid herself of the shame she felt about the stigma of diabetes and to bring attention to the growing problem of the disease in the African American community.

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The Blue Man Group is Back with Their Immense Talent and Boundless Imagination.

By Alvina Ruprecht | December 28, 2011

They aren’t white; they aren’t black; they aren’t blotchy, wrinkled or suntanned and they don’t have acne. Their hair isn’t blond, brown, black or red. It isn’t curly or straight, long or short. They are three blue, hairless bodies, they are heads covered with a gooey substance that comes off if you touch it. They don’t talk, they have deadpan faces, big wide eyes and they catch things with their mouths.

They look human but not like any human being you have ever seen. They are not supposed to be aliens because they understand the world around them. They live in their own space, redefining their own art form, as they observe our human world, trying to critique what we do in our world by turning all current performance art on its head. They are actors, mime artists, percussionists, dancers, visual artists, graphic artists, choreographers, sound designers. They are scientists, sculptors, ethnologists, computer specialists, and comedians! The list is long and unending. Their talents are immense and their imagination is boundless.

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