Category: Theatre in Ottawa and the region

Student review: Bent at the Gladstone.

Student review: Bent at the Gladstone.

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Bent photo Maria Vartanova

Reviewed by Claire McCracken

Bent is a show with many warnings. The list in the program goes on and on: extreme violence, murder, rape; this is all too real for a play set in Nazi Germany. ToToToo Theatre, the only company in Ottawa that exclusively performs LGBTQ theatre, brings this Tony-award nominated play to life as best as they can. Dealing with difficult subject matter is a challenge, and director Josh Kemp deals with it in a way that avoided melodrama and told the story quite well. …

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Student Review: Fresh Meat Festival

Student Review: Fresh Meat Festival

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Reviewed by Crysania Sprott   THE 4333 A

The second evening of the sixth Fresh Meat festival which was held at the Arts Court theatre on Friday, October 13th offered up an nice selection of new works by artists in the Ottawa theatre community. The first three performances presented a good variety of pieces, and offered something for everyone.

 Le Crisp Bleu       

The first work of the evening provided the most lighthearted and frivolous fun piece of the show. “Le Crip Bleu”, which was conceived by Michele Decottignies, gave us an intriguing twist on a burlesque performance. While the show provided the expected dancing and stripping to sultry jazz music, the twist was that the performers (Frank Hull and Alan Shain) were two men in electric wheelchairs. The piece employed very creative use of wheelchairs to emulate burlesque moves, but adapted them to suit bodies which are otherwise limited. In this way, “Le Crip Bleu was able to challenge conventions of what is considered beautiful and sexy, while also simply being a lot of fun, both for the performers, who were visibly having a great time, and for the audience, who fed off their infectious energy and shouted and cheered them on. …

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King of the Yees trips over its own plot.

King of the Yees trips over its own plot.

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It doubtless started out as a viable, if overstuffed, idea.

Write a comedy about the erosion of Chinese culture and tradition when it’s transplanted to contemporary America. Illustrate the resonant theme of cultural identity by making the two main characters the likeable Larry Yee, a 60-year-old father who honours tradition, and Lauren Yee, his thoroughly westernized, Ivy League school-educated daughter who makes her living as a playwright.

Weave in a loving-but-fraught relationship between father and daughter and a search for personal identity. Set the whole thing in Chinatown, say it’s a true story, and call it King of the Yees. …

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The NAC King of the Yees fails to mesh

The NAC King of the Yees fails to mesh

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King of Yees. Provided by the NAC English Theatre

 

 

So whats exactly happening on the stage of the Babs Asper Theatre at the National Arts Centre? Well now,  let’s see. There are such ingredients as identity angst, the generation gap, urban politics, racial stereotyping, cultural dislocation, a search for “meaning” in life. We also get smidgeons of naturalism, surrealism, dada, Brechtian and absurdist devices glued together by low-vaudeville buffoonery — all hopefully stirred into American playwright Lauren Yee’s dramatic pot in expectation of a coherent whole. A picturesquely conceived lion occasionally makes a manic appearance along with a chiropractor who’s really a sadistic needle-plunging acupuncturist — or is he actually a herbalist? There’s a swaggering caricature of aTong gangster — Shrimp Boy by name — whose presence triggers a street shoot-out that manages to throw an already discordant offering even more off track. …

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King of Yees: cluttered and confusing.

King of Yees: cluttered and confusing.

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King of Yee, courtesy of the NAC

 

 

King of the Yees is not the play that Lauren Yee set out to write — so says the character playing the playwright in the semi-autobiographical work. This is a hint that the comic drama could lack clarity. And it does. King of the Yees is about equal parts amusing and confusing and frequently seems to lack discipline.

The title character is the playwright’s father, Larry, a man steeped in tradition and committed to supporting his community, particularly through the Yee Fung Toy Family Association — a men’s club formed 150 years earlier — in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

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Some strong performers highlight ambience of gentility in Arsenic and Old Lace

Some strong performers highlight ambience of gentility in Arsenic and Old Lace

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Photo: Maria Vartanova

A small glass of elderberry wine seems an appropriately genteel alcoholic drink for two kindly old ladies to serve potential lodgers — except when it is laced with arsenic and spiced with strychnine and cyanide.

Even those who have never seen a stage production or of Joseph Kesselring’s 76-year-old dark comedy Arsenic and Old Lace or watched the Frank Capra movie (shot in 1941 and released in 1944) are familiar with parts of the tale of the charitable Brewster sisters, who dispatched lonely gentlemen and then gave them a Christian burial in the basement of their home. …

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Arsenic and Old Lace: A fun night at the theatre delivers laughs

Arsenic and Old Lace: A fun night at the theatre delivers laughs

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Photo: Maria Vartanova

We often make jokes about that which scares or hurts us the most. It’s a way many of us cope with a world that can often feel needlessly cruel and absurd. It’s because of this need to laugh in the face of darkness that a comedy such as Joseph Kesselring’s play Arsenic and Old Lace has such an enduring quality.  After all, there’s something strangely captivating about discovering the layer of rotten silt under a veneer of respectability. The Ottawa Little Theatre’s production  of Arsenic and Old Lace, directed by Brian Cano, is a delightfully relaxing romp, despite its dark plot. There are some minor issues with pacing, but its combination of adept directing, brilliant acting, and sumptuous sets make for a cozy evening at the theatre. …

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Arsenic and Old Lace Classic Play for The Season

Arsenic and Old Lace Classic Play for The Season

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Ottawa Little Theatre’s second play of it’s 105th season is the enduring classic, Arsenic and Old Lace. If there is a better play to stage around the Halloween season I don’t know what it would be. It is dark and creepy enough, but peppered with humour and spiced with a little bit of romance. It is the pumpkin pie of theatre; both a trick and a treat.

The characters are already well known to fans of the the classic 1944 Frank Capra film with Cary Grant. The sweet little old ladies that bury lonely gentlemen in the basement have a nephew that thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, another that is a menacing international criminal and a third that is a theatre critic in love with the preacher’s daughter. Add in some dim witted police officers and sure fire one liners and that’s how to construct a near perfect black comedy. Written by Joseph Kesselring in 1939 it first premiered on Broadway in 1941 and was a welcome distraction from the war that was occurring in Europe at the time. …

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The Phantom of the Opera remains as powerful as the first time round

The Phantom of the Opera remains as powerful as the first time round

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Photo Alastair Muir.

Lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, Book by Andreaw Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe, Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux A Broadway Across Canada presentation of a Cameron Mackintosh production, in association with the Really Useful Group.

In the three decades since Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster musical began breaking records in terms of box office receipts, audience numbers, awards and longevity — Phantom officially became Broadway’s longest-running showing when it topped 100,000 performances in 2012 — the show has thrilled millions around the globe. …

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Fresh Meat, Week Two: In-between, Holding Mercury, Folie, & InSight.

Fresh Meat, Week Two: In-between, Holding Mercury, Folie, & InSight.

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In-between

Created by Helen Thai
Performed by Franco Pang and Helen Thai
Directed by Kristina Watt

Siblings, growing up in a family that didn’t talk a lot about the past, come to understand that Ma and Ba fled the war in Vietnam and the Cambodian genocide. As difficult as it is for the parents to speak about their experiences, it is even more difficult for the children to navigate the silences, and expectations, that hang over a family that once faced annihilation. Ghosts haunt the present, and even Ma’s reliable Eagle Balm curative can’t banish fearful memories. The language is poetic, effectively reflecting the difficulty of communication between generations with vastly different experiences. One is sympathetic to a husband and wife who sacrificed everything to escape their tormented homeland now raising their children in a country that has turned these same offspring, to some degree, into strangers. While the emotionally even delivery helps us absorb a narrative that covers a lot of historical territory, a little more exposure of the past would be helpful. During a day on the beach the sister suddenly panics while playfully burying her brother in sand as she realizes that this innocent act mimics a too common ritual of war. More such jarring juxtapositions between past and present would help us enter a story that is still keeping its ghosts hidden. I look forward to seeing more of this compelling play.

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