Category: Theatre in Canada

Moshkamo: The Unnatural and Accidental Women : the voices of the disappeared still speak to us in this immersive event.

Moshkamo: The Unnatural and Accidental Women : the voices of the disappeared still speak to us in this immersive event.

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The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Set by Andy Moro, Photo  Barbara Gray

Let’s be clear from the outset. This performance has absolutely nothing to do with Surrealism, nor is it too long. Rituals go on endlessly and repeat themselves non-stop.   Clearly this particular theatre-ritual deals with one of the most disturbing and shameful situations we have ever experienced on our collective territory:  the  murder of women from First Nations, Métis Nation,  Inuit groups.     In spite of the hearings, investigations  and apparent concerns for these lives,  no guilty party has ever been identified or punished.  These murders are treated as unsolvable mysteries,  and the women themselves are relegated to  “accidental” beings who perhaps never even existed!  But they do exist, and still exist, as Marie Clements shows us in this  powerful encounter  between her theatrical conception of their lives, and, director  Muriel Miguel’s choreography, along with a list of extremely talented  collaborators  and the voices of the disappeared who  still inhabit the natural world and are still speaking to us through these artists. …

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The Pianist of Willesden Lane : a triumphant musical journey with a strong contemporary message!!

The Pianist of Willesden Lane : a triumphant musical journey with a strong contemporary message!!

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Mona Golabek, photo Hershey Felder and presenters

The Shoah has a well defined meaning in contemporary history but clearly, choosing to produce such a work dominated by the theme of these child refugees from the victims of Nazism, highlighted by the exceptional musical talent of the woman who creates the event, is a courageous undertaking that emerges as a perfectly relevant topic in today’s reality. Given the forced displacement of multiple populations in many parts of the world, as well as the plight of Latin-American children being separated from their parents in desperate situations of survival south of our Canadian border, we are presently confronted with victims of ultra-nationalistic power-hungry collectivity’s whose short-term memories show us that they have not learned very much from the past. The Pianist of Willesden Lane is an excellent history lesson that should revive the curiosity of younger people. …

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1000 Islands Theatre: Asking for It – a multi perspective play invites audience to linger over the questions it raises….

1000 Islands Theatre: Asking for It – a multi perspective play invites audience to linger over the questions it raises….

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Asking for It  with Ellie Moon and Brittany Kay        Photo Randy deKleine-Stimpson

Following the production of The Boy in the Moon, put on by the 1000 Islands Playhouse in August, Ellie Moon’s docudrama Asking For It is the second production at this theatre to broach a more difficult topic. This effort by TIP to branch out thematically in its choice of productions should be applauded, given its status as a magnet for tourists to the Gananoque and 1000 Islands region. Exposing theatre-goers to plays which deal with serious topics and issues helps restore the teaching function back to the art form – theatre, after all, is ideally meant to both delight and instruct. And the subject matter of Asking For It, directed by Carly Chamberlain for this production, is one which could not be more relevant: how sexual consent and assault are understood in today’s society. Conceived of in the wake of the scandal involving former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, Moon’s piece largely takes the form of interviews conducted with both friends and strangers about consent and their own perspectives on the matter. …

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Moshkamo :Historic opening for NAC’s indigenous theatre in Ottawa

Moshkamo :Historic opening for NAC’s indigenous theatre in Ottawa

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Monique Mojica  and PJ  Prudat, The Unnatural and Accidental Women by Marie Clément.   Photo: Justin Tang

No two ways about it: Opening night of Marie Clements’ play The Unnatural and Accidental Women at the NAC was significant.

It marked the revival of a respected writer’s story about murdered Indigenous women that, including its premiere in 2000, has had only a couple of previous productions (yes, alarm bells did chime at that infrequency). More importantly, it was the first show in the inaugural season of NAC Indigenous Theatre, a much-anticipated landmark in Canadian theatre.

Expectation and goodwill had the audience buzzing on Friday.

Kevin Loring, the passionate artistic director of the new Indigenous theatre department, greeted us, as did Jillian Keiley, Loring’s counterpart in NAC English Theatre (the show is a co-production by the two departments).

Algonquin elder Annie Smith St. Georges, who’s been welcoming NAC English Theatre audiences to traditional Algonquin Territory for some time, spoke before the show, concluding her introductory remarks by saying, “Miigwech, and have a great time.”

And there’s the rub.

…

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Stratford 2019: Birds of a kind – a remarkable dialogue between the author and the director

Stratford 2019: Birds of a kind – a remarkable dialogue between the author and the director

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Members of the company in Birds of a Kind. Photography by David Hou.

“Is it really important to cling to our lost identities?  What is a life lived between two worlds?  What is a migrant?  A refugee?  A mutant?”

 There is an important backstory to the Stratford Festival’s brilliant and timely production of  Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad’s Birds of a Kind, which brings a remarkable initiative between the playwright and director full circle.  It was Antoni Cimolino, Artistic Director of the Stratford festival, and the director of Birds of a Kind, who first introduced a pivotal character in the play’s central theme to Mouawad, over a dozen years ago with the hope that a play could come out of it.   After a winding history and a hugely successful production in Paris, the complex drama which grew out of that gift of sorts, now comes home to one of its creative points of origin.     …

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Stratford 2019: Nathan the Wise, A Parable of Tolerance.

Stratford 2019: Nathan the Wise, A Parable of Tolerance.

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Diane Flacks (centre) as Nathan with members of the company in Nathan the Wise. Photography by David Hou.

“ I hear, I hear, come finish with thy tale.  Is it soon ended?”     Nathan the Wise

 There are moments of heightened intensity in the theatre when time seems to stand still, signaling to us that this is the dramatic kernel that distils the central meaning of the play.  

We pay attention to Nora’s frenetic dance of the Tarantella in Ibsen’s A Doll House because we know that her hysterical performance condenses the fullness of her situation.  The Mousetrap play-within-a-play in Hamlet stages in nuce the murderous backstory of the action, but it also supplies the hallucinatory image that the failed revenge hero cannot match to action.  And when Mitch, in A Streetcar Named Desire, tears away the paper lantern that obscures the sordid reality of Blanche’s life, his action is not only an assault on her flight to illusion, but a trenchant commentary on the whole poetic world of Tennessee Williams.   …

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The Tashme Project: The Living Archives – performance and artists talk in Ottawa

The Tashme Project: The Living Archives – performance and artists talk in Ottawa

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is coming to the Great Canadian Theatre Company as part of the 2019 Prismatic Arts Festival Sept 18th – 22nd
 
Artist Talk to be held in room 310 @ 11:30AM,      Friday September 27th at 135 Séraphin Marion

Showtimes: Wed Sept 18 & Thurs Sept 19, 6pm | Fri Sept 20, 7pm | Sat Sept 21, 8pm | Sun Sept 22, 4pm

The Tashme Project is a verbatim theatre piece that traces the oral history and common experience of Canada’s nisei (2nd generation Japanese Canadians) through childhood, WWII internment, and post-war resettlement east of the Rockies. The nisei, now in their 80’s and 90’s, were children at the time of internment and their stories of adventure and play are presented in sharp relief to the more common internment narratives of hardship and injustice.

LINK to Tashme’s Trailer

Generally saddled with a legacy of silence in regards to the past and Japanese identity, the greatest struggle facing the Japanese Canadian community today is the transference of cultural history and pride to its younger generations. Seeking to re-invigorate this process, our intention is to connect younger Japanese Canadians more deeply to their grandparents, and great-grandparents, and hopefully ignite a desire to rediscover their Japanese-ness thereby helping to invigorate a community in sharp decline.  

Performing Tashme across Canada is social and cultural activism: the displacement, incarceration and deportation of the Japanese Canadian community from the West Coast of Canada during the Second World War by the Canadian government was meant to erase our community. In 2019, we face the complete loss of language, ethnicity (most Japanese Canadians are now mixed-race) cultural practice and therefore, identity. By connecting with and sharing the oral history of our elders, we are fighting against what seems an inevitable loss of community in a generation’s time and seek to rebuild a healthy and joyful sense of Japanese Canadian identity.

!Julie Tamiko Manning & Matt Miwa

www.thetashmeproject.ca       www.prismaticfestival/index.php/arts-festival/

1000 Islands PLayhouse: Ring of Fire – the music of Johnny Cash more spectacle than theatre.

1000 Islands PLayhouse: Ring of Fire – the music of Johnny Cash more spectacle than theatre.

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The Ring of Fire  Photo thanks to the 1000 Islands Theatre ,Gananoque

Scheduled for a month-long run as a result of popular demand, Ring of Fire is a production which one would naturally expect much from. Indeed, the musical by Richard Maltby Jr. and William Meade, billed as a celebration of the life and work of prolific American musician Johnny Cash, features numerous songs by him. This production at TIP, under the direction of Brett Christopher (also the artistic director of the theatre itself), certainly starts promisingly. The cast of six actors step out onto the impressive, encompassing set and begin Cash’s story with the origins of his family name in Scotland. The relaying of the journey of Cash’s ancestors is done with a lively echo effect as each of the cast take their turns at speaking. The song immediately following, “Country Boy”, is performed equally energetically. …

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Stratford 2019: The Front Page,a pitch perfect production lurching forward into full-blown farce.

Stratford 2019: The Front Page,a pitch perfect production lurching forward into full-blown farce.

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Ben Carlson, Maev Beaty. Photography by David Cooper

Chicago. 1928. The hard-boiled boozy reporters on the crime beat are sitting around a table, playing poker and wisecracking about the fate of the last murderer to hang before the electric chair arrives on the scene. It isn’t easy passing the time like this, running interference between the police and the mob, making stuff up, unless you’re lucky enough to get the skinny on a real story. And hanging doesn’t even count for the front page any more. …

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Stratford 2019: The Crucible – an intensely imaginative and intelligent visual conception of the gnawing worm at the heart of Salem.

Stratford 2019: The Crucible – an intensely imaginative and intelligent visual conception of the gnawing worm at the heart of Salem.

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Katelyn McCulloch (centre) as Abigail Williams with members of the company in The Crucible. Photography by Cylla von Tiedemann.

Arthur Miller’s classic play about the 17th century witchcraft trials in colonial Salem, Massachusetts has long been seen as a barely disguised parable of the contemporary hysteria surrounding the House Un-American Activities Committee.

It was an historical moment of post-war panic in which Communists were seen as infiltrating every corner of American society. Courtroom oaths of loyalty were weighed against denunciation, rumour, and false evidence in a Red Scare that famously destroyed the livelihood of artists and intellectuals, including whole swathes of the film industry who were blacklisted.   But, as Miller reminds us, there was an earlier, even more dangerous, set of events which made him realize that the Puritan mass frenzy was not an anomaly in history.  The poisonous flowers of Fascist and National Socialist ideology had found fertile soil in the mass hysteria of crowds led by charismatic leaders.   …

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