Category: Theatre in Ottawa and the region

Fresh Meat: Le Crip Bleu, La disparition, Beer Buddies, Honey Dew Me, Badges

Fresh Meat: Le Crip Bleu, La disparition, Beer Buddies, Honey Dew Me, Badges

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Poster: fresh meat theatre festival

Now in its sixth year, Ottawa’s Fresh Meat festival brings 12 short shows over two weekends to invariably enthusiastic Arts Court audiences. The following were reviewed during the first weekend.

Le Crip Bleu

Featuring brave, generous and very funny performances by Alan Shain and Frank Hull – both wheelchair-using actors who celebrate the “able” in disabled – Le Crip Bleu is a wordless burlesque show that reminds us that humour and the glory of the human body in all its guises matter far more than shallow, contemporary conventions of beauty. The two perform a mating dance using their chairs, taunt and tease the audience with stripteases (the show does count on hooting, cooperative viewers), and generally carry on in cheeky, envelope-pushing fashion. One suspects the show could touch the heart of even a die-hard Republican.

La disparition

Marc-André Charette and Anie Richer blend words, movement and song with deep love and compassion in this textured tale of a mother sliding into fragility. Performed with English surtitles on a bare stage with hundreds of sheets of paper as props, La disparition (She’s Gone) is authentic, satisfyingly choreographed and – whether you’ve ever watched your mother slip away into the unknowable world of dementia or not – both powerfully resonant and oddly hopeful. …

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Bent: a problematic production but some substantial performances bring substance to the evening.

Bent: a problematic production but some substantial performances bring substance to the evening.

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Bent Phillip Merriman in the foreground.
Photo Peter Whittaker

 

There are moments in TotoToo’s production of Bent that are as good as anything that this enterprising company has ever done.

Indeed, the excellent performances of Phillip Merriman and Mike Rogoff as two doomed young lovers provide a compelling reason for theatregoers to seek out this sometimes problematic revival of Martin Sherman’s 1979 play about Nazi persecution of homosexuals. …

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Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion,:Well executed but wordy!!

Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion,:Well executed but wordy!!

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Herbie Barnes, Katie Ryerson,
darrell Denis
d

 

The spark for Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion, says playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, was “the Aboriginal equivalent of an urban legend.”

So, with his experience as a standup comic, as well as accolades as a playwright, at the fore, he delivers a road-trip comedy about an attempt to retrieve a medicine bundle now exhibited in a British museum. The method will be arranging an exchange with the bones of Canada’s first Prime Minister — to be dug up from Sir John A’s final resting place in Kingston. …

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Bent: Heartfelt , Passionate Theatre.

Bent: Heartfelt , Passionate Theatre.

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Martin Sherman’s Bent is a story that examines the persecution gay people in Nazi Germany.  It is also a story of the importance of love and how it can continue to endure in the most horrific and challenging of circumstances. It is an acclaimed piece since it’s premiere in London in 1979 and has continued to be recognized for its powerful sensitive understanding of the evil of fascism and the strength of the human spirit in subsequent incarnations. It is a brave choice for any theatre to tackle and explains why ToTo Too is recognized as one of the finest community theatre companies in Ottawa. Bent is not an easy play to watch much of the time, but it is an important play that will always be relevant to people, unfortunately made more timely because of the resurgence of hate groups attacking Muslims, Jews, the LGBTQ community and anybody  that is perceived as different. …

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Laurie Fyffe Reviews from Fresh Meat Festival

Laurie Fyffe Reviews from Fresh Meat Festival

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 Now in its fifth year, Fresh Meat Festival is all about letting artists do what ever the thing is that they want to do. As evidenced by this set of five shows on Thursday, October 12, what artists in Ottawa want to do adds up to a heady mix of theatrical innovation and talent.

La disparition :  Opening the evening with La disparation (She’s gone) created & performed by Marc-André Charette and Anie Richer, en Français with English surtitles, the packed Arts Court studio was treated to a poetic meditation on a mother gone, or swiftly fading. Unsentimental, as they wield their spare, poetic text with keen precision, Anie and Marc-André tell us, “It’s with my mother I spent the most hours of truth.” Here we have a loving family suddenly conscious of a mother’s “budding fragility”. The stage is bare but the picture that emerges of the woman they are losing is beautifully vivid. She’s Gone is a well paced and tightly choreographed presentation that is both homage to love, and to the theatre as a medium in which the audience is pulled into the all consuming embrace of a shared experience. In both the writing and performances, She’s Gone is magical.

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Bent : excellent performances in this ground-breaking play

Bent : excellent performances in this ground-breaking play

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Bent photo Maria Vartanova

 

Bent by  Martin Sherman, directed by  Josh Kemp. a TotoToo Theatre Production

Arbeit macht frei (Work sets you free.)

The horrible irony of the slogan above the gates of  Dachau  and other concentration camps in Nazi Germany where millions died deepens with the demonstration of the futility of the type of forced labour imposed on the two prisoners at the centre of Martin Sherman’s 1979 award-winning drama Bent.

For 12 hours each day, they must move rocks from one pile to another and then move them back again, all the time under threat of death from an armed guard.  It is clear that the most likely escape from the mind-numbing and pointless repetition is death. But, along the way, Sherman aims to show that the human spirit and love survive in the face of cruelty and subjugation. …

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Sir John A: Acts of Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion on stage at the NAC.

Sir John A: Acts of Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion on stage at the NAC.

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 Patrick Langston for Artsfile.ca
John A; Gentrified Ojibway with Darrell Dennis and Herbie Barnes. Photo Andrew Alexander

Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion, , and if you stretch the meaning of offspring to include subsequent generations of First Nations peopleÉ and other Canadians, then the grumpy Old Testament got it right.

Disinterring that toxic – and overwhelmingly complicated – connection between what went before and what exists now drives Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion, Drew Hayden Taylor’s promising but uneven comedy making its world premiere at the National Arts Centre.

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Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion Not Just Your Average Road Trip

Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion Not Just Your Average Road Trip

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photo Andrew Alexander

  The first play in the studio series this year at NAC is Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion. It is also the first commissioned work for Artistic director Jillian Keiley. The play is about an indigenous man’s quest to retrieve his grandfather’s medicine bundle. When all conventional efforts fail he has to resort to a bold act of resistance: Steal the bones of John A MacDonald and trade them straight up for the medicine bundle. I was intrigued by the idea of making a comedic social satire out of such a story. …

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GCTC’s Production of You Are Happy Grapples With Modern Relationships

GCTC’s Production of You Are Happy Grapples With Modern Relationships

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Photo: JVL Photo

We live in a confusing world, a loud word full of what ifs and shoulds. You Are Happy, the Great Canadian Theatre Company’s season opener, criticizes one of those – the pre-conceived notion of love and being part of a couple. Written by Rébecca Déraspe, translated by Leanna Brodie and directed by Adrienne Wong, the play by no means takes a condescending stance. While satirizing modern relationships with an average turnaround time of two years, at its heart always remains our human need for connection and love.  …

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Mothers & Daughters: a light-hearted musical that relies on stereotypes!

Mothers & Daughters: a light-hearted musical that relies on stereotypes!

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Mothers and Daughters
Photo Maria Vartanova

 

Mothers and Daughters: A Musical,  Book by S. Oscar Martin, Music and lyrics by Jeff Rogers, Rich Rankin, Eric McIntyre, Andy Ladouceur, Zach Martin and S. Oscar Martin

SOME Theatre Company, Salt Dining & Lounge

Directed by Maureen Welch

The locker-room humour featured in Mothers and Daughters elicited a fair amount of laughter from the few men in the audience at the performance I attended. There seemed to be little shared hilarity from the female majority. Perhaps this is because they could not identify as easily with the onslaught of crude remarks and gestures, sexual innuendo and detailed references to body parts. In my experience, women rarely (if ever) talk this way, so forced humour of this type falls to the ground with a heavy thud.

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