Theatre in Ottawa and the region. Archives - Page 5 of 10 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Driving Miss Daisy at the 1000 Islands Playhouse.An Impeccably Beautiful Production.

By Alvina Ruprecht | June 1, 2014

Nicola Lipman and Walter Borden

Photo. 1000Islands Playhouse. Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the film adaptation won the Oscar for best picture and best actress (Jessica Tandy) in 1990. How can you go wrong with this one? In fact the Thousand Islands Playhouse kept the tradition and produced a most moving version of this heartwarming and emotionally complex play that worked perfectly from every perspective. Nicola Lipman as Daisy Werthan and Walter Borden as Hoke Colburn, created a sense of complicity as their relationship evolved from its uneasy beginnings to a deep feeling of trust as these two characters bonded over the 25 years that Hoke worked as Miss Daisy’s chauffeur. Following along on the journey was Brian Linds as Boolie, Daisy’s business man son, usually at his wits end around his stubborn mother but who loves her greatly and manages to convince us of that throughout all his emotional upheavals created by his mother’s bossy behaviour.

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Oil and Water: Clear the Clutter and You Have a Great Story

By Iris Winston | April 12, 2014

Photo. Barb Gray. Anderson Ryan Allen as the young Lanier.

Clear the clutter and you have a great story. The problem is that the debris is not out of the way until the last section of the show. That is just too long to wait for the many threads introduced in Oil and Water to come together in a meaningful way.

Built around the true story of the rescue of Lanier Phillips, a black sailor whose ship, the USS Truxton, ran aground in a remote Newfoundland community in 1942, Oil and Water moves between past and present. It parallels the experiences of Phillips’ grandmother, a slave, and his teenage daughter, who faces the violent prejudice associated with racial integration in the U.S., with the harsh life faced by Newfoundland coal miners in the1940s.

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Hedwig and the Angry Inch. An unrecognizable Tim Oberholzer with star quality is stunning. An exciting and expertly mounted musical show that is not to be missed!!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 4, 2014

Photo. Andrew Alexander . Tim Oberholzer as Hedwig and Rebecca Noelle in the background as Yitzak .

The Vanity project’s version of this glizty transvestite gender bender musical inspired much by David BowIe’s feminine Ziggy Stardust personality and her (his) tranformation to the male Bowie, shows us Hedwig , accompanied by her East German colleagues, frantically searching for the other half of her being. The epitome of Post-Wall divided culture, she takes us through her beginnings in post war torn East Germany in the aftermath of the destruction..bringing together all the music of the period including that of the biggest German and international stars of the time. With her ragingly campy non stop poetic banter , Mr. Hansel Schmidt (alias Hedwig) tells us the story of her personal evolution, her need to leave East Germany and her mother, and find freedom. Her escape, thanks to a throaty voiced male American, her tortuous gender shifting, closely linked to the symbolic of a split postwar Germany emasculated and divided by the wall. Identified to other splits such as its destructive German Jewish past. She speaks of ethnic cleansing, of post-wall European and American politics. Her alter ego Tommy Gnossis taunts her and shines across the way and brings us into the world of the "Who” bathed in parodies of the later Beatles, Nina Hagen and all the music of the period. Rebecca Noelle (a Johnny Depp look alike) but the lead singer of the local PepTides group and a magnificent voice that rivals Whitney Houston’s ( I will always love youuuuuu! ) is Hedwig’s sidekick. There are four back-up musicians including Stewart Matthews playing lead guitar!! Who would have believed that!! It’s one big surprise after the other.

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Death of a Salesman: Runs like a well conducted symphony.

By Rajka Stefanovska | March 31, 2014

Venetia Lawless and Donny Laflamme

We all have a dream, don’t we? Sometimes, we turn our dreams into reality and other times, we simply lose ourselves in their pleasant, but non-existent world. The problem starts when we let the fiction in our minds overpower reality, just like Arthur Miller’s memorable character Willy Loman.

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is a story about this. It is a profound look on the so-called “American Dream” and the social standards that impose it. It is all in a dream: great success, huge achievements, big money… Yet, in reality each fulfilled dream comes at the cost of thousands of crushed ones and Miller put his finger on the reasons behind this. He speaks, through his characters, of how unrealistic goals bring self-alienation, estrangement and self-distraction. As Karl Jung says, the sub-conscience knows everything: the past, the present and the future; when and if the sub-conscience breaks the barrier of the conscious mind, madness might occur. Slowly, Willy Lomans’s sub-conscience gets into his reality, breaks through his strong denial system, reveals his true life for what it is, and darkens his mind. On his long way to self-destruction, helped by the unreserved support of his devoted and loyal wife, he unintentionally takes his two sons down with him. Finally, he realizes that he is more worth dead than alive (as his life insurance will bring money, socially the only recognized merit – one that he could not earn during his life). Therefore, he finds the solution to his crushed dreams in death.

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Death of a Salesman:Donnie Laflamme bathes the production in his electrifying presence.

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 28, 2014

Donnie Laflamme as Willy Loman. Photo. Alvina Ruprecht

Willy Loman is the ultimate tragic hero of the contemporary American stage. His appearance in 1949 confirmed Arthur Miller as one of America’s greatest playwrights of the post-war period along with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neil. The Chamber Theatre of Hintonburg has always been drawn to the special kind of expressionist laced realism of American theatre. Their production of Miller’s A View From the Bridge two years ago(at the Elmdale Tavern) won a CCC best professional actor award for Donnie Laflamme whose performance of the emotionally tortured father, was almost unbearable to behold .

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Algonquin’s Frankenstein brings off some powerful visuals.

By Jamie Portman | March 20, 2014

Photo credit: Andrew Alexander. He’s a grotesque, man-made creature on a rampage of anger and violence — and ultimately murder. But you also sense that he has a soul — of sorts. So you can’t deny his anguish of spirit, his suffering, his feelings of desolation and abandonment as he wanders through a hostile terrain in a poignant search for his maker.

That terrain is as much metaphysical and spiritual as it is horrifying, and this is one of the strengths of Frankenstein: The Man Who Became God, the play that the Algonquin College theatre program has bravely decided to mount.

This is not the Frankenstein of actor Boris Karloff and director James Whale, although their 80-year-old movies continue to have the greatest impact on the popular imagination. This stage piece by Alden Nowlan and Walter Learning is far truer to the purpose of Mary Shelley, the author of the original book, but beyond that, you find it carries its own special resonance.

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Seeds: A taught docudrama deals effectively with a most complex topic

By Laurie Fyffe | March 10, 2014

Liisa Repo-Martell and Eric Peterson, in Seeds.
Photo: Guntar Kravis

In the world of documentary theatre Seeds may reign supreme as one of the most complex topics ever incubated for the stage. The story is one well suited for the headlines-as-dialogue, taunt teaching moments, and characters-as-points of view form of theatrical presentation docudrama uses to construct its world. The little guy – and they don’t get much smaller than the individual farmer – is suddenly and it would appear unjustly targeted by a multi-national corporation because their genetically modified seeds have capriciously settled on his land producing a crop resistant to the weed blasting properties of Round Up herbicide. That’s the simple plot.

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Jesus My Boy at Saint Albin’s. The Christ Story Becomes a Family Narrative.

By Alvina Ruprecht | December 9, 2013

Photo from St Lawrence Shakespeare Company

This monologue, created in 1998 in England by author/actor (John Dowie) and then performed by Tom Conti at the Haymarket theatre the same year, is now appearing in the Ottawa area thanks to Ian Farthing, better known to us as the director of the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival in Prescott. Yes Mr. Farthing is an actor, who has worked and trained in the UK, has done musical theatre in Toronto and London. Now Farthing has taken on the fairly demanding role of the carpenter Joseph, the father of Jesus, as he tells the story of the nativity and the life of Christ from the point of view of a working class fellow, who happens to be the father of Jesus, as well as a poor Jew living under Roman occupation. That obviously changes his perspective of things. He has a very tolerant and unmacho vision of the Virgin birth which was surprising; he has a decidedly good knowledge of the Torah, of the squabbles between the different Jewish movements cohabiting in Judea at that period, and a pretty good political intuition about the way colonising Romans knew how to manipulate their own colonized, making it fairly easy to get rid of this trouble maker whom they eventually crucified.

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Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet): Zach Counsil shines as an agile fencer and a stylish Romeo in this “feninist revisioning” of Shakespeare at the GCTC.

By Iris Winston | December 2, 2013

There is no question that Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is cleverly written. Linguistically attractive in its use of iambic pentameter and very funny in places, it is, in part, an attack on academics, who exploit their top students (a too-common phenomenon in the 1980s.) It also champions feminism, same-sex relationships and gender bending, as it proposes that at least two of Shakespeare’s tragedies were originally intended to be comedies.

Ann-Marie MacDonald, who debuted the lead role of dowdy doctoral candidate Constance Ledbelly 25 years ago, refers to the play as a “feminist revisioning” as she dumps her unlikely heroine at the tragic turning point of Othello and Romeo and Juliet.

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Sylvia : OTS manages this New York doggy spoof with a certain class.

By Alvina Ruprecht | November 23, 2013

Photo: Origin unknown. Jerushah Wright, Madeliene Hall, and Jeremie Cyr-Cook.

Greg and Kate live in a fashionable condo in New York. Greg is in the process of a mid-life crisis and bringing home a stray dog is one of the symptoms. A. Gurney’s play takes the man dog relationship, uses it to spoof all sorts of contemporary identity issues by having “Sylvia” the dog, played by an attractive young girl (a petulant and talented Madeleine Hall) who talks like a human but who thinks and moves like a dog. The dog becomes a fetish object replacing all that is missing in the husband’s life, the incarnation of a submissive woman which all men dream to possess.

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