Category: Theatre in Ottawa and the region

Miss Shakespeare: A bouquet of fine performances

Miss Shakespeare: A bouquet of fine performances

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Photo Andrew Alexander

Miss Shakespeare

Book and lyrics by Tracey Power

Music co-written with Steve Charles

Three Sisters Theatre Company

Directed by Bronwyn Steinberg

There’s a memorable moment in the Three Sisters Theatre Company’s production of Miss Shakespeare when an outstanding Robin Guy transports us back to the early 17th Century with a song called Tumbling.

She’s playing a woman named Katherine Rose who has lost 14 of her children in infancy yet still yearns for them to be alive. She gives utterance to this fantasy in one of this show’s most poignant musical numbers. Guy captures the tearful sensibility of the song brilliantly, but she’s also adding layers to her character. There’s this terrible loss in Katherine’s life, but there’s also a sturdy resilience and enough rebelliousness to make it conceivable that she would join other female characters in agreeing to defy the strictures of the day and act on stage at a time in history when the idea of a woman performer was unthinkable. …

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Fine ensemble work gives Miss Shakespeare its punch

Fine ensemble work gives Miss Shakespeare its punch

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Photo Andrew Alexander Miss Shakespeare

Book and lyrics by Tracey Power

Music co-written with Steve Charles

Three Sisters Theatre Company

Directed by Bronwyn Steinberg

It is more than 350 years since women were forbidden to perform on English stages. The ban was finally lifted after the Restoration in 1660 when King Charles II issued a patent announcing:

forasmuch as many plays formerly acted do conteine severall prophane, obscene and scurrilous passages, and the women’s parts therein have been acted by men in the habit of women, at which some have taken offense…we doe likewise permit and give leave that all the women’s parts to be acted in either of the said two companies may be performed by women… …

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Kanata Theatre scores high with Vania and Sonia and Masha and Spike

Kanata Theatre scores high with Vania and Sonia and Masha and Spike

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One of the pleasures of Kanata Theatre’s latest offering is its success in delivering a succession of plausible, fully-realized characters.

Furthermore director Jim Holmes and his cast are attentive to the nuances, both comic and wistful, of Christopher Durang’s amusing yet curiously heartfelt comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

To be sure, these characters inhabit their own, slightly skewed universe while also providing a conduit for Durang’s own wry reflections on the real world. What’s more, the plays of Anton Chekhov crop up as reference points in this 2012 script — even though you need to know nothing about his works to enjoy what’s happening on the stage of Kanata’s Ron Maslin Playhouse. …

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Kanata Theatre balances comedy and serious intent in first-class production

Kanata Theatre balances comedy and serious intent in first-class production

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Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

By Christopher Durang

Kanata Theatre

Directed by Jim Holmes

Take a helping of Chekhovian despair to spice the lives of three discontented siblings named after characters from the 19th-century playwright’s works. Stir in a blender and deliver a modern domestic drama with absurdist leanings.

This may not sound like the ideal starting point for a satirical comedy/serious assessment of the purpose of life, but in the hands of Christopher Durang — the incisive and controversial author of such dramas as Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You — his 2012 Tony award-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is both funny and thought-provoking. …

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Theatre Kraken’s Cry-Baby triumphs over its material

Theatre Kraken’s Cry-Baby triumphs over its material

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Cry-Baby Photo Maria
Vartanova with Emma Woodside as Allison, Alianne Rozon as Dance Captain, Steph Goodwin as Hatchet Face, and Abbey Flockton as Pepper. Flockton as Pepper.

If you  you lower your defences, Theatre Kraken’s production of Cry-Baby is capable of providing you with an uproariously enjoyable time at the Gladstone Theatre.

This is less due to the material — an uneven stage musical derived from John Waters’s 1950’s  movie starring Johnny Depp —  than to the spirited ensemble work of a 19-member cast and the sturdy contribution of a six-piece band under Chris  Lucas.

Only the most dedicated sourpuss would be able to resist the trashy pleasures afforded by this cheeky reworking of one of the most durable themes in dramatic literature — the one where the bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks falls for the good girl from a distinctly tony neighbourhood. In this instance we’re have1950s Baltimore and the breakdown in class taboos that occurs when swaggering,  misunderstood delinquent Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker encounters quintessential good girl Allison Vernon-Williams. Don’t, however, expect this story to unfold within a normal dramatic framework. …

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Cry-Baby the Musical: a rollicking show that goes beyond the box!!

Cry-Baby the Musical: a rollicking show that goes beyond the box!!

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Photo Maria Vartanova
Emma Woodhouse (Allison) Nicholas Dave Amott (Cry-Baby) with   Abbey Flockton (Pepper) in between.

 

Cry Baby  The musical  A Theatre Kraken Production adapted from  the film written and directed by John Waters , the book by  Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, songs/music    by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger,  incidental music by Lynne Shankel

 

Not since Tim Oberholzer* and his merry band of performers let loose at the Gladstone  with their cult rock musical productions (The Rocky Horror Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch),   has the Gladstone theatre housed  such an exuberant cult classic event . However, this one had a different twist  and that is what brought the show up a notch . Pianist and artistic director Chris Lucas signaled to his six piece band  and off went the overture  making fun of the way those numbers end, by endless endings that always restart, signaling the beginning of this huge send-up  that already had us  giggling. …

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I think I’m dead: a captivating autobiographical performance of insomnia

I think I’m dead: a captivating autobiographical performance of insomnia

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Think I’m Dead , written and performed by Al Lafrance. Presented by Thunder Blunder Theatre.

Reviewed by Ryan Pepper

Al Lafrance’s one-man show I Think I’m Dead is a captivating autobiographical story of neuroses, obsessions, alternate dimensions, hurricanes, depression, and just wanting to sleep.

The show, performed at the Gladstone Theatre for one night only on April 31, was a well-attended one-hour event by Lafrance in conjunction with the Gladstone’s Snake Oil, for which Lafrance did the lighting design. …

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Cry Baby guarantees laughter

Cry Baby guarantees laughter

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Cry Baby Photo Maria Vartanova. Alivann Rozon as Dance Captain, Emma Woodside as Allison,  Steph Goodwin as Hatchet Face, and Abbey Flockton as Pepper.

 Cry-Baby

Book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan

Music by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger

Based on the 1990 John Waters movie

A Theatre Kraken  production directed by  Don Fex

The opening scene features a character being wheeled around in an iron lung expressing his regret that he didn’t have his polio shot, while the ensemble prepares for theirs, in a bouncy number called The Anti-Polio Picnic.

…

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Up to Low has Universal appeal.!

Up to Low has Universal appeal.!

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Published on: May 6, 2018 | Last Updated: May 6, 2018 11:18 PM EDT
Up to Low by Ottawa author Brian Doyle is set in 1950 and takes the audience from Ottawa’s Lowertown to a family cabin in Low, Que.

By Brian Doyle, adapted and directed by Janet Irwin

NAC English Theatre production

To May 19, Babs Asper Theatre, National Arts Centre

For Ottawa-area audiences, part of the charm of the theatrical adaptation of Up to Low, by Ottawa author Brian Doyle, is that it’s based on a road trip in our own backyard. Set in 1950, the tale takes us from the city’s Lowertown neighbourhood to a family cabin in Low, a classic example of the time-honoured Canadian tradition of getting out of the city in the summer. …

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Up to Low comes home at last to the NAC!

Up to Low comes home at last to the NAC!

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Photo David Hou; Chris Ralph, Brendan McMurtry- Howlett, Attila Clemann

Ottawa to Wakefield in 1950 was a bumpy road covered with pebbles that used to make the car shake until the fenders came loose.  Such was the trip made by local cottage goers into the Francophone Pontiac but nothing as harrowing or as colourful as writer Bryan Doyle suggests . His memories are piled high with everyone’s stories filtered  through the expanding imagination of 15 year old Tommy, producing an epic  tale right out of western Quebec where even the vicious black flies have a role as the great villains of the plot, thanks to the opening solo by Pierre Brault. This is about local Quebec culture but Janet Irwin’s deft staging and the well written adaptation brings this story telling up to the level of mythology that resounds singularly like the magical arctic world captured by Robert W. Service’s  The Cremation of Sam McGee and . …

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