Theatre in Ottawa and the region. Archives - Page 3 of 10 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Matchstick: A great story with a lot of potential

By Rajka Stefanovska | January 25, 2016

The story of Matchstick starts as a familiar cold war-era propaganda machine in action: An orphan girl lives in a cold, restricted – undesirable – land and dreams about America, a free land of opportunities. She meets a prince charming – Alik – who takes her heart by storm and sends her hopes soaring! But, life is rarely what we hope for. The story leaves the realm of the cliché and enters different, darker waters after they marry and come to the promised land. Little by little, Matchstick realizes that Alik is a paranoid liar, and her life is as far from the freedom and big opportunities she dreamed of as can be. Through her life of misadventures, Matchstick comes to the realization that fairy tales do not happen in a real life. Even more than that, she understands – only too late – that real freedom and opportunities exist where you are loved and where your family and friends are.
The topic of the play is very interesting and worth serious exploration. Digging deeper, going beyond the facts and basic emotions, would make it great theatre. For now, the narrative in Matchstick has some very touching moments and some cleverly constructed dialogues, but the story stays on surface.
Its execution is reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and her Children,” as it uses the elements of storytelling, a simple but effective set with the projection of city in the center, actors who change characters, and a few songs sprinkled throughout the play to accentuate the theme. Only in Matchstick, due to lack of depth, the writer misses an opportunity to boggle our minds. …

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Freezing : Canadian answer to the British Panto aimed at a younger audience.

By Alvina Ruprecht | December 21, 2015

Photo: Courtesy of Matt Cassidy

British Pantos are not unknown to Ottawa audiences. Ross Petty and his super-slick group of dancers, singers, actor’s choreographers and writers of witty dialogue used to bring us their special versions of fairy tales to brighten our Christmas fun. These tales, reworked to fit the contemporary taste for parody, satire, and all kinds of naughty suggestions for the whole family that respected the particular conventions of the Panto, were regular features at the National Arts Centre. Then suddenly they stopped coming and we never understood why.

Now producers Matt and Sarah Cassidy have decided to bring back their version of the family panto to Ottawa and take up the lost tradition which Ross Petty and his collaborators introduced here many years ago. This company is made up of professionals who have been working in Toronto but many of them are originally from Ottawa. They have decided to make Ottawa their home as they work out their vision of what these new Pantos could be. Freezing is an example of this new musical narrative aimed at the whole family but drawn from childhood memories about living through cold Canadian (Ottawa) winters and revelling in the snow, the ice, hockey, and all the winter activities that made life so magical.

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GCTC’s Angel Square — A Buoyant Delight

By Jamie Portman | December 10, 2015

Photo: Barb Gray

On one level, GCTC’s sterling production of Angel Square might seem to offer no more than a series of impressions of a particularly beguiling kind.

But they’re impressions that beautifully evoke another time and place — Lowertown Ottawa in the 1940s. And out of them there emerges a delightful stage work of genuine shape and substance.

It’s through the prism of an observant youngster named Tommy that these moments unfold. Even if we weren’t actually there ourselves, we find ourselves engulfed in his childhood world. And its components resonate with us today.

It’s a world of Woolworth stores — remember them? — with creaking wooden floors. Of Ottawa’s majestic Union Station, now an underused government conference centre, but in this production exerting a ghostly remembrance of things past, courtesy of designer Jock Munro.

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Anget Square at the GCTC: A warm antidote to a dark December.

By Patrick Langston | December 6, 2015

Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 5 2015. Photographer, Vartanova

Ottawa’s Lowertown could be a rough place for 12-year-olds in the mid-1940s. Racism, pitched battles with other kids, nasty teachers: such hurdles sometimes made life something to be survived more than celebrated. But while Angel Square, Janet Irwin’s loving and vibrant stage adaptation of Brian K. Doyle’s 1984 novel of the same name, sharply limns the rough side of life, it also excites our envy of those urban kids of long ago – their freedom, their resilience, their sense of place and community.

Just as importantly, the family-friendly show makes us appreciate anew Doyle’s depiction of the rich imaginative life of Tommy, the story’s young hero. Fantasizing himself to be Lamont Cranston, AKA the crime-fighting Shadow of 1930s and ‘40s radio drama and print fame, Tommy sets out to solve the mystery of who badly beat the father of his best friend, Sammy Rosenberg. That quest in the days leading up to Christmas, 1945 serves as backbone to a fond recreation of life in a now-vanished Ottawa: the original Ritchie Feed & Seed Store on York Street (a Ritchie bag is key to solving the mystery); the squeaky floored Woolworth’s and the more upscale Freimans department store on Rideau Street; the vast, echoing Union Station, now the Government Conference Centre.

Irwin, who also directs, has cast just four adult actors to recreate

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Angel Square: A place that never loses its innocence, charm and puckish humour

By Iris Winston | December 5, 2015

Photo: Barb Gray

Crossing Angel Square in Lowertown Ottawa may have been risky in the 1940s, but, as recalled by Brian Doyle in his 1984 novel and adapted for the stage by Janet Irwin, it was also a place of warm friendships and special connections.

As adapted and directed by Irwin, this delightful dramatization, depicting the daily life of Tommy a.k.a. The Shadow, his friends, enemies and assorted adults, is anchored by solving the mystery of who attacked his best friend’s father. Honest in its descriptions of rampant racism and extreme poverty, Angel Square never loses its innocence, charm and puckish humour.

Enhanced by Jock Munro’s fine visuals, the set not only evokes a radio of the era but also serves as the focal point for projections of Ottawa landmarks and silhouettes in action.

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TACTICS 2015: Highs and lows abound in interdisciplinary productions from emerging performers

By Kat Fournier | November 17, 2015

TACTICS is an independent, collective series that features work by emerging and professional performers. The plays occur in short runs ––no more than a week in length—and so audiences will have to rush to the theatre if they hope to catch the performances before the next shows take the stage. It goes without saying that original performances and emerging artistry are vital parts of a theatre community. With that mandate comes the potential for some really great or really bad theatre, and the first weekend of this TACTICS series exemplifies this divide.

The first show of the evening, (off) Balance, is the brain-child of Naomi Tessler who both wrote the piece, and acts in the production. The stage is fairly bare and a large, red cloth circle outlines the playing space. This one-woman, autobiographical piece employs monologue, dance, and a live music; the musician sits outside the red circle, and plays African drum and chimes alongside the performance. But even with the intervention of Bronwyn Steinberg’s direction and dramaturgy, the production is underwhelming.

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Menopause The Musical: A funny production celebrating the changes in life

By Iris Winston | October 18, 2015

Janet Martin (Iowa Housewife), Nicole Robert (Earth Mother), Jayne Lewis (Soap Star), Michelle E. White (Professional Woman)

“Good evening, ladies. And you too, sir.”

The producer’s introduction acknowledges the target audience and underlines that the connection with Menopause The Musical is through common experience — past, present or anticipated. (For the record, there were four men in the capacity audience on the evening that I saw the award-winning show and they were laughing almost as hard as the rest.)

Menopause The Musical by Jeanie Linders premiered in 2001, and, according to the show’s official website, some 11 million people — mainly women, often of that certain age — have laughed their way through the 90 minutes celebrating the change of life, courtesy of the four types representing them all: a professional woman, a star of daytime TV, an ex-hippie and a small-town housewife.

The action begins at the lingerie sale counter in Bloomingdale’s department store in New York. The four women — never named to emphasize the universality of hot flashes, memory glitches, weight gain, frequent bathroom visits, mood swings and so on — sing about their menopausal experiences with melodies borrowed from the pop charts of the 1960s and 70s.

So, songs such as Puff, the Magic Dragon becomes Puff, My God, I’m Dragging and My Guy becomes My Thighs, as the housewife bemoans the heftiness of her nether regions. To the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, we hear that “In a guest room, on the sofa, my husband sleeps at night.” Meanwhile, The Great Pretender is the vehicle for explaining the handling of forgetfulness. The clever parodies are very funny and the familiarity of the pop melodies increases the humour quotient at every well-orchestrated and well-choreographed turn and through each smooth scene change. …

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The Norman Conquests: Round and Round the Garden an absolute treat packaged in a good laugh

By Rajka Stefanovska | October 2, 2015

AL Connors as Norman and Margo MacDonald as Sarah Photo by David Whiteley — AL Connors as Norman and Margo MacDonald as Sarah
Photo by David Whiteley

The Norman Conquests is a trilogy. It takes place in a family house in the British countryside, where Annie lives with her invalid mother. She plans to spend a weekend with her sister’s (Ruth) husband, Norman, in a hotel. Everything is set. Her admirer and neighbour Tom believes that she is to go alone, but actually wants him to come with her and Annie’s brother Reg and his wife Sara come to stay with their mother for that weekend. However, somehow things come askew, and they all end up spending the weekend together as Annie’s guests.

In the third part of The Norman Conquests, Round and Round the Garden, Ayckbourn still deals with the same domestic issues as in the previous two (Table Manners and Living Together). The characters are the same and it is the same weekend, but while Table Manners takes place in the dining room and Living Together in the living room, Round and Round the Garden is set in the garden. With the last part of the trilogy performed, this outstanding play wraps up in a meaningful way as a combination of a comedy of manners, domestic turmoil and above all, a fantastic character study.

Although comedy might seem to be a lighter genre of drama because of its humorous approach to reality, it is probably the hardest one to pull off. Because it is so easy to go overboard and make it a clownish non-artistic performance, it demands a huge amount of talent and innate sense of balance. …

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4000 Miles: Leads rather than script make 4000-mile journey worthwhile

By Iris Winston | September 19, 2015

Book-ended by the deaths of two unseen characters, 4000 Miles by Amy Herzog focuses on the healing wrought for Leo through the sometimes fractious relationship with his grandmother.

Both characters are based on two of the playwright’s relatives — her grandmother and a cousin. Individual scenes in this drama spiced with comic lines are engaging, apart from a barely credible sequence, in which grandson and grandmother get high on marijuana. (Drug-taking and drunk scenes are frequently repulsive or offensive and, except in rare cases, do little or nothing to add to plot or character.)

In this case, the pot-smoking segment underlines that, without strong performances and chemistry between the two leads, 4000 Miles would not be a journey worth undertaking. (It also makes it all the more surprising that Herzog’s episodic 2011 play was an award winner and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.) …

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Gladstone launches biggest season ever as J.P. Kelly takes on the Norman Conquests!

By Capital Critics Circle | June 15, 2015

Highlights: 40 solid weeks of theatre August 27 – May 28) 12 companies, 18 shows: musicals, award-winners, family shows, premières, Canadian & local works and tons o’ comedy!
Newcomers: the Canadian tour of Menopause The Musical®, Theatre Kraken with the real Steve Martin’s The Underpants, Ottawa legend Pierre Brault with his new solo show WIll Somers, and more! www.thegladstone.ca and call 613-233-4523, email boxoffice@thegladstone.ca or drop in at 910 Gladstone Ave.

The Shows
The 2015-16 season consists of the 3-show Norman Conquests trilogy, several stand-alone offerings, and the 8-show 2016 Subscription series. In 2015, we have the Norman Conquests mini-season and several stand-alone offering:

The Norman Conquests comedy trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn, Aug 28-Oct 10, consisting of Table Manners Aug 28-Oct 10; Living Together, Sept 11-Oct 10 and Round and Round the Garden, September 25 – October 10.
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