Theatre in Canada Archives - Page 16 of 24 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

The Shaw Festival delivers a worthwhile Dance Of Death

By Jamie Portman | August 10, 2016

Photo: Emily Cooper.

There’s a peculiar moment in the Shaw Festival’s production of The Dance Of Death when a character arrives on stage carrying a head of cabbage.

But that moment has purpose. And it does have a connection to the emotional mayhem engulfing the stage. It’s also a reminder of director Martha Henry’s crafty approach to this potentially troublesome play. Given its volatile sensibility, why not introduce an an element of absurdity into a dramatic situation mired in marital discord? But no — perhaps “discord” doesn’t really describe the scalding enmity existing between Edgar, this perpetually soured artillery captain, and his resentful spouse, Alice, on the eve of their silver wedding anniversary.

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The Shaw Festival season triumphs again with Fugard play

By Jamie Portman | August 4, 2016

Photo David Cooper.

Master Harold and the Boys, by Athol Fugard, directed by Philip Akin

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the racism that has been quietly simmering beneath the surface begins boiling over in the Shaw Festival’s superb production of Master Harold And The Boys.

But that very difficulty is one of the points of Athol Fugard’s painfully nuanced play, set as it is in South Africa in 1950 when apartheid was tightening its grip. Fugard has a particular fascination for the conventions of day-to-day living in an entrenched racist environment, and for those moments when the conventions crumble and the veneer starts to crack. South Africa’s apartheid government had no problem spotting Master Harold’s lurking sub-text — which is why it banned performances of Fugard’s play in 1982 when it first came out.

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The Stratford Festival scores with its two Breath of Kings plays

By Jamie Portman | July 20, 2016

Photo.David Hou. With Geraint Wyn Davis and Ayala Mengesha

The first point to be made about the Breath Of Kings duo, now at the Stratford Festival, is that they bring Shakespeare’s history plays to renewed, freshly burnished life.

The histories can be a hard sell these days, despite the fact that they contain some of Shakespeare’s finest writing. Richard lll, with its irresistible villain, is of course the exception. But in general the history plays, although indispensable parts of the canon, can often seem problematic when it comes to attracting audiences.

One immediate virtue of Graham Abbey’s masterful distillation of four major works — Richard ll, the two parts of Henry lV, and Henry V — into two epic evenings of entertainment is that they should win over the must reluctant playgoer. That’s because they provide narrative clarity, honour some of the greatest moments of Shakespearean verse, and bring immediacy to a particularly turbulent period in English history. They also make for exciting theatre, thanks to a powerful ensemble cast, which includes Abbey himself in a crucial role, and to the incisive direction of Mitchell Cushman and Weyni Mengesha.

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A Woman of No Importance: The Shaw Festival lays an Egg with Oscar Wilde play.

By Jamie Portman | July 13, 2016

Photo: David Cooper. A Woman of No Importance.

It seemed welcome news when the Shaw Festival announced that it would be tackling Oscar Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance this season. One hoped that the festival would be redressing the wrong done this play in a previous production in 2004. After all, this current revival would be in the capable hands of Eda Holmes, a director responsible for some of the finest moments in the festival’s history.

How quickly can one’s high expectations be dashed. The production now on view at the Festival Theatre seems intent on baring the play’s weaknesses and diluting its strengths. It’s hard to be believe that the same director who unveiled a brilliant production of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in May could follow up with such a mish-mash.

To be sure, A Woman Of No Importance has long been considered the slightest and most problematic of Wilde’s plays. It begins with an extended upper-class gathering, the sort of situation that allowed the playwright to indulge himself with barbed and witty epigrams about society. But it’s a scene fraught with hazards — the most immediate of which is the challenge of keeping the endless talk, talk, talk from turning static.

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Bernard Shaw’s Black Girl Arrives at the Shaw Festival

By Jamie Portman | June 26, 2016

Photo David Cooper. Featuring Natasha Mumba

It might best be described as a 60-minute explosion of zaniness.

It comes to us courtesy of the Shaw Festival, which — in the immortal words of the Monty Python guys — wanted to program “something completely different” for this summer’s lunchtime theatre slot.

At the same time it wanted us to remember the bearded playwright who has provided the essential mandate for one of the largest theatre festivals in the world.

So it commissioned Canadian playwright Lisa Codrington to prepare a stage version of George Bernard Shaw’s controversial 1932 novella, The Adventures Of A Black Girl In her Search for God.

The result, now on view at the venerable Court House Theatre might best be described as inspired mayhem.

To say that Codrington plays fast and loose with the GBS original is to put it mildly. It’s a slyly subversive reworking of an already subversive text, but she doesn’t dishonor the rationalist sensibility that led Shaw to write this satire about the young African girl who offends her missionary mentor by asking too many unanswerable questions about the nature of God and then sets out to find the answers for herself. Instead, Codrington holds Shaw in mischievous affection to the extent of giving the old boy his own place in the script.

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Gilbert without Sullivan takes the stage at the Shaw Festival

By Jamie Portman | June 26, 2016

Photo: David Cooper . Engaged

The Shaw Festival has decided to sprinkle a bit of nonsense into a Niagara summer — but it’s nonsense with a satirical agenda.

William S. Gilbert’s Engaged is an 1877 farce about marriage and money — not an unfamiliar theme but one that has proved of abiding interest throughout centuries of drama.

In this instance, it inspired Gilbert to filter it through his own somewhat sour prism, and the result is perhaps his most enduring stage comedy.

The playwriting half of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership had a view of the universe that ranged from barbed whimsy to outright scorn, and that viewpoint finds particular utterance in this scathing send-up of human greed. Morris Panych’s new production at the Royal George Theatre takes due note of Gilbert’s jaundiced disposition, but he also ensures that Engaged is an airborne delight in performance.

Panych can do frivolity very well, and Engaged is no exception. But he also sustains an undercurrent of irony. At one point in the proceedings, a key character bemoans the mercenary culture of the day: “What a terrible thing is this insensitive craving after money,” he tells us.

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Stratford’s A Little Night Music Could Use More Restraint

By Jamie Portman | June 24, 2016

Photo: David Hou. Yanna McIntosh and Ben Carlson.

There’s an undeniable air of confidence in the Stratford Festival’s new production of A Little Night Music. It’s there in the sumptuous look of the show. It’s there in the assurance with which the performers meet the complex demands of Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics and in the sublime work of the orchestra under the baton of Franklin Brasz. And it’s there in the way the show is staged by Gary Griffin, a director who knows exactly what he wants.

But has Griffin really brought this fabled musical about mismatched relations and tangled passions to the right place, creatively and emotionally? That seems debatable, but the production now at the Avon Theatre nevertheless provides moments that do qualify for the memory books.

As always, Send In The Clowns is the song that everybody is waiting to hear. It’s very familiarity provides a comfort zone for theatre goers, especially those who are less than total cheerleaders when it comes Sondheim’s work. But how often does this song grasp us by the throat and force us to confront what Sondheim is really saying in those sad, rueful lyrics?

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Stratford’s Self-Indulgent As You Like It is More Newfoundland Hoedown than Shakespeare

By Jamie Portman | June 14, 2016

 Photo  David Hou

  When Rosalind dons a pair of jeans to make like a
man, the Stratford Festival's costume department even ensures that the
 legs are fashionably provided with holes.
 
But that apparently isn't  enough, particularly if you want to
emphasize the ludicrousness of Rosalind's bogus masculinity rather
than the fact that she's one of the most divine creations in the
Shakespeare canon.
 
So in the Stratford Festival's new modernized take on As You Like it,
you also have Rosalind  fussing over the rolled-up sock she's stuffed
in the crotch of her jeans. Yes, it's that kind of show.

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Shakespeare In Love is Fun — But Should It Be Happening at Stratford?

By Jamie Portman | June 9, 2016

Photo: David Hou. Luke Humphrey (left) as Will Shakespeare and Stephen Ouimette as Henslowe

The first point to be made about the stage version of Shakespeare In Love is that will give a great deal of legitimate satisfaction to a great many theatregoers.

The second point is that any claim to its being a true Stratford Festival “production” seems dubious.

It may be a sound money-making move to include this shamelessly commercial stage adaption of the Oscar-winning movie in a festival season. It also may seem a little crass and opportunistic — especially given that this is a 400th anniversary year that should surely be taken seriously by an organization of Stratford’s international prestige.

At the same time, it would be unfair to dismiss Lee Hall’s stage adaptation of the original screenplay by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman as some kind of hack job. Hall is a respected British dramatist, a former writer-in-residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a solid output that includes the 2008 stage success, The Pitmen Painters, and the award-winning book for Billy Elliott: The Musical.

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Festival TransAmérique: Go Down Moses de Romeo Castellucci, un parabole énigmatique de la civilisation humaine.

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 7, 2016

Photo: courtesy of the Festival TransAmérique

Go Down Moses, écrit, conçu et mis en scène par Roméo Castellucci. Une production de la Sociètas Raffaello Sanzio.

Toujours attiré par les textes fondateurs de la civilisation judéo-chrétienne, Castellucci a choisi le prophète Moïse, figure centrale de l’Ancien Testament, pour donner l’impulsion créatrice à sa réflexion sur les diverses manières d’appréhender les rapports entre les êtres humains.

Associée à la libération des opprimés, qu’ils soient des esclaves juifs en Égypte à l’époque biblique ou des esclaves africains dans le nouveau monde (la source, célèbre negro-spiritual etats-unien, est mise en évidence dans le titre), la figure de Moïse ouvre toutes les possibilités culturelles, historiques, religieuses, philosophiques et iconographiques pour structurer un événement dans un espace libéré de la matérialité contraignante de la scène. Ainsi, on dirait qu’il souhaite rassembler un bilan des activités culturelles en s’ouvrant à toutes les époques et toutes les formes de création: la culture populaire, des récits télévisuels, des enquêtes policières, des aventures spaciales, une intermédialité cinéma-théâtre, et même des origines de la tragédie grecque (Eschyle) dont l’Orestea, una commedia organica, présenté par Castellucci au FTA en 1997, était déjà l’exemple le plus troublant.

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