Theatre in Canada Archives - Page 21 of 24 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

The Charity That Began at Home: A Forgotten Edwardian Comedy That is a Sheer Delight

By Jamie Portman | August 12, 2014

Martin Happer as Hugh Verreker and Julia Course as Margery in The Charity that Began at Home. Photo by David Cooper. .

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — One of the happiest aspects of a Shaw Festival summer is an encounter with its latest archaeological discovery.

The people who run this internationally celebrated theatre are serious about its central mandate — to explore the world of Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. And that, happily, has led to the rediscovery of neglected dramatists from the past. …

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Stratford Unveils A Provocative New Take On Shakespeare’s Dream Play as Chamber Theatre.

By Jamie Portman | August 12, 2014

Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Chamber Play. Photo: Michael Cooper.

STRATFORD — Forty years ago, a movie called Earthquake arrived in cinemas, its impact heightened by a new system called Sensurround. The aim was to give audience members a truly shuddering experience — not just earth tremors but as close to the equivalent of a full-fledged quake as possible. So if you were an audience member, you felt as though both you and the auditorium were in danger of being shaken to bits.

Indeed, the legendary Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard started losing pieces of ceiling plaster when Earthquake opened there. And in Chicago, alarmed city authorities imposed severe restrictions on the use of Sensurround in its movie houses.

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Mother Courage: Stratford’s Seana McKenna offers a tough and memorable performance.

By Jamie Portman | August 12, 2014

Seana McKenna as Mother Courage. Carmen Grant as Kattrin. Photo. David Hou

STRATFORD, Ont. — The image is unforgettable — this drab, middle-aged, grey-haired mother trudging endlessly through her chosen landscape of war and misery and dubious fiscal opportunity, hauling her battered peddler’s wagon behind her, her only concern the survival of herself and her grown children.
Watching a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage And Her Children, you can’t easily label the play’s title character as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Well, perhaps you can in those productions where the play is allowed to turn soppy and sentimental and tug on our emotions — an approach that infuriated playwright Bertolt Brecht but one that still tempts directors disdainful of his alienation theories.
History tells us that when Mother Courage premiered in Zurich some 70 years ago, some critics approvingly commented on the maternal qualities of its central character. Brecht’s enraged response was to rewrite the play to make her even harsher. Heaven help any treatment that allows her to enlist our sympathies.
But of course, she does — regardless of what Brecht might have wanted. However callous she may seem to an outside world, she still has an inner life, and in any good performance, we’re going to be conscious of it.
In the Stratford Festival’s astonishing new production, we’re riveted by the scene in which Seana McKenna’s Mother Courage is forced to gaze down on the corpse of her son, Swiss Cheese, and deny any knowledge of him. She has no other course if she is to avoid arrest and death herself at the hands of the military thugs who killed him. So, without a visible tremor of emotion, she gives her answer — no, she does not know him.

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Cabaret at the Shaw Festival: Director Peter Hinton Goes the Phantasmagoric Route For a World that Emerges From the Dying Embers of the Weimar Republic.

By Jamie Portman | August 12, 2014

Juan Chioran as the Emcee. Photo by David Cooper.

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — You can’t be entirely sure what is happening in the final sombre moments of the Shaw Festival’s production of Cabaret. Indeed, there’s the suggestion that Cliff Bradshaw — the expatriate young American who has come to pursue a writing career in Berlin amidst the dying embers of the Weimar Republic and the rising tide of Nazi Germany — won’t make it home safely. After all, we last see him engulfed in the hellish inferno of designer Michael Gianfrancesco’s skeletal set.

The latter, looking like something lifted out of a Fritz Lang film, is an ominously ambiguous concoction of steps and scaffolding, of blinking lights and yawning voids. It can morph into the infamous Kit-Kat Club — although it’s not really the Kit-Kat Club we have known in previous treatments of this classic musical — or it become Fraulein Schneider’s boarding house — although again it’s doesn’t seem quite right because there’s something fragmented, even intangible, about the way its overlapping worlds are presented to us.

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Crazy For You: Gershwin musical triumphs at the Festival!

By Jamie Portman | August 8, 2014

Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann

STRATFORD, Ont. — “Who could ask for anything more?”
Lyricist Ira Gershwin got it right when he was supplying the words for brother George’s irresistible music for I Got Rhythm.
But you could pretty much apply them to the whole experience of watching the Stratford Festival’s hugely entertaining production of Crazy For You.
The line comes at the climactic moment of one of the great songs in the Gershwin canon — a number that at Stratford erupts into a rambunctious explosion of song and dance in the gun-slinging Nevada town of Deadrock. It’s a feel-good moment, one of many bestowed on us by director choreographer Donna Feore and her wonderful cast. And it wasn’t the only time that you wanted to stand up and cheer at Tuesday night’s opening performance.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Stratford’s production is depressingly foolish and self-indulgent.

By Jamie Portman | July 23, 2014

Stephen Ouimette as Bottom. Photo Michael Cooper.

STRATFORD, Ont. — Some may see the Stratford Festival’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an act of desecration.
Not so. But it is a depressingly foolish and self-indulgent treatment that drains the magic out of Shakespeare’s most magical comedy and opts for sophomoric nonsense instead.
We’re not talking here about director Chris Abraham’s much publicized decision to introduce same-sex relationships into this world. That idea seems inspired.
Indeed, the show begins promisingly with Scott Wentworth’s Theseus bestowing his blessing on the marriage of two males. But then, Theseus turns fickle when confronted by the love between Hermia and Lysander, both portrayed here by women. He doesn’t like the idea

That’s enough, of course, to send Hermia (an enjoyable Bethany Jillard) and Lysander (Tara Rosling) fleeing to the enchanted wood where they and other characters in the story find their true affections thrown into further chaos by Puck’s magic.
Considering that much of the play’s comedy revolves around sexual confusion and misdirected yearnings, the gay aspect introduces an intriguing new dynamic. And mindful that in Shakespeare’s time, female roles were played by males, the production has added another fascinating layer, in that two men, Jonathan Goad and Evan Buliung are alternating this summer as those reigning fairies, Oberon and Titania.
A pity then that an audacious concept fails to reach its potential — perhaps because Abraham had no real idea what to do with it. Instead both it and the play itself are pulverized into stupidity by a director who should know better.
It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that Chris Abraham, who in recent years directed truly memorable productions of Shakespeare’s Othello and Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, should be responsible for this infantile mess.

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The Book of Mormon: Excellent performances but the combination of satire and sappiness is both ridiculous and incongruous.

By Iris Winston | July 18, 2014

Photo. Joan Marcus

It is commendable, but not surprising that the Mormon Church took the high road when reacting to this satirical musical about their religion. The potty-mouthed satire of The Book of Mormon by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (co-creators of South Park) and Robert Lopez (co-creator with Jeff Marx of Avenue Q) is too ridiculous to cause any harm to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Often fun, more often obscene, the combination of satire and sappiness is too incongruous to be classed as great. It is loud. It does poke fun at such other musicals and singers as The Lion King and Bono. But it could hardly be called incisive or consistently witty, except for those who find monstrous parodies of erect penises and loud repetition of “I have maggots in my scrotum” knee-slappingly funny.

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Ottawa Fringe 2014. Einstein…

By Patrick Langston | June 23, 2014

The Story: What do most of us know about Albert Einstein other than that he had crazy hair and dreamed up some incomprehensible stuff about relativity? Deciding that we need to know more, Jack Fry created his one-man show about Einstein’s personal life and valiant struggle to prove that his calculation about energy and mass was accurate. Too bad Fry gets so badly sidetracked in the execution of what started as a good idea.

Pros: Fry does manage to explain, in simple terms and with the help of projections on a large screen, the theory of relativity.

Cons: They’re manifold, from silly sex jokes to Fry’s failed, over-the-top attempt to play with anything approaching conviction his main character let alone the host of others – from fellow scientists to Einstein’s alienated son Hans – whom he introduces. The show is too long, self-regarding and unnecessary.

Verdict : An overwrought, sophomoric look at human complexity.

Einstein!

Jack Fry, Los Angeles, Calif.

Studio Leonard-Beaulne

Ottawa Fringe 2014. Moonlight After Midnight

By Capital Critics Circle | June 22, 2014

Reviewed by Kat Fournier

The play opens with a man seated on a wooden chair, eyes closed, in an otherwise simple setting. A hotel room, we soon learn. A woman enters, and the audience believes they are witnessing a long awaited reunion. Suddenly, the dialogue shifts and from thereon-in it is impossible to know what is real and what is not. This play uses the fictionality of the stage world to keep the audience guessing, and it is a totally mind-blowing experience. The script toys with the audience, constantly shifting the story so that the line between reality and fiction blurs. But there is a constant: These two characters are meeting on a night where a rare comet can be seen just after midnight. The comet will pass by again in precisely ten years, and so they make a pact. Until the final moment, the play delivers no answers and only more questions. This play is everything I’ve ever wanted out of theatre. To say that Martin Dockery and Vanessa Quesnelle’s chemistry is riveting would be an understatement. Don’t miss this play.

Plays at Venu C. Courtroom.

Moonlight After Midnight

Written by Martin Dockery

Ottawa Fringe 2014. Eclipse

By Capital Critics Circle | June 22, 2014

Reviewed by Kat Fournier

A group of kids meet on a beach in time for the eclipse. They are a wayward bunch of characters who are bent on enacting a surreal ritual; an invocation, of sorts, to the eclipse. But when a stranger arrives on the beach, their plan begins to go very wrong. The script, written by British poet Simon Armitage, is strange, repetitive, and hypnotic. It is nonsense verse, rife with bold imagery, rhyming couplets and riddles. A very tall order for this group of young actors, who unfortunately lose their footing in the demands of this challenging text. There are some really powerful moments where text, acting, and staging converge well. However, the staging is also hampered by clutter on the stage floor that interrupts the actors’ movements.

Eclipse

Written by Simon Armitage

Directed by James Richardson