Theatre in Ottawa and the region Archives - Page 56 of 92 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Hello Dolly!: Suzart Production puts on good show in the face of last minute problems

By Iris Winston | May 28, 2016

Hello Dolly
Book by Michael Stewart
Music and lyrics by Jerry Herman
Based on The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder
Suzart Productions
Directed by Sue Fowler Dacey

Kudos to Suzart Productions for their dedication to the show-must-go-on principle at the heart of show business.

Just a week before opening night, the leading lady fell ill. What do you do when you have no understudy to play Dolly Levi in the musical that revolves around her every move in the business of matchmaking/meddling?

Some companies might have postponed the show. Not Suzart.

Musical director (vocals) Holly Villeneuve stepped into the massive role at the last minute. The cast and crew, particularly the costume department, who made a new wardrobe for the new Dolly, and leading man Gerry Jacques, went into high gear. Hello Dolly opened on May 26 as scheduled and delivered a creditable production that gave no indication of the crisis. …

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Tuneful Patsy Cline in Gananoque

By Capital Critics Circle | May 26, 2016

Tyler Murree, Alison MacDonald and David Archibald; Photo: Barbara Zimonick

A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline
By Dean Regan
Produced in association with Western Canada Theatre, Kamloops, BC
Directed by Daryl Cloran
1000 Islands Playhouse

I’m not sure what to say about “A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline” by Dan Regan, except that it’s not really a musical. It’s more a terrific concert or night club act. Loosely structured as a radio show tribute to Patsy Cline, it’s emceed by Little Big Man, played by the energetic and versatile Tyler Murree. We see Patsy, the excellent Alison MacDonald, only in performance, never in her off-stage persona. A few sparse biographical details are supplied by Little Big Man. Entertaining diversions are added by the insertion of old radio commercials for Mr. Clean and Ajax, performed by Little Big Man and the great on-stage band.

Ross Nichol’s versatile set has a raised broadcast booth stage right, the 4-piece band is on raised platforms center, and the whole framed stage left by two dimensional giant radios. There’s a scrim up center on which are projected the names of the various venues where Patsy performs. Of Patsy’s multiple costumes by Jayne Christopher, by far the most flattering is the Act II long black gown. Davida Tkach’s lighting is good and Ben Malone’s sound is excellent and well balanced. …

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The Shaw Festival Triumphs with Bernard Shaw’s once notorious Mrs. Warren’s Profession

By Jamie Portman | May 20, 2016

Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Written by Bernard Shaw

Directed by Edna Holmes

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — It’s an explosive mother-daughter confrontation — and it’s a lulu.

It happens near the end of the Shaw Festival’s marvellous revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, George Bernard Shaw’s once-banned play about the economic benefits of brothel-keeping. On the one hand, you have feisty young Vivie Warren (Jennifer Dzialoszynski) coming to terms with the knowledge that she owes her university education and her place in society to her mother’s illicit earnings. In the other corner, there’s Mrs. Warren (Nicole Underhay) defiant in the face of her daughter’s scorn and scarcely able to comprehend that she’s about to be shown the door by her ungrateful child.

It’s a moment of high drama in an outstanding production that shows how pertinent many of the issues raised by this late Victorian play remain today. Director Eda Holmes underlines its continuing relevance through an audacious device. At the beginning we’re in the kind of private men’s club that still exists in today’s London and is notorious for resisting change. The four males we encounter are clearly of the present — there may be an ancient gramophone in the corner of the panelled drawing room (designed by Patrick Clark for this production with a bow to the sumptuous trappings of class and privilege) but this is also a world of text messaging and mobiles. …

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Our Town: A testament to the ensemble glories of the festival acting company

By Jamie Portman | May 17, 2016

Our Town

By THORNTON WILDER

Directed by MOLLY SMITH

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — It’s doesn’t take the Shaw Festival’s production of Our Town very long to establish its kinship with Thornton Wilder’s sublime play. This not so much a case of the festival asserting its authority over the material as it is one of achieving harmony with a script that seeks to work its wonders on a virtually bare playing area with a minimum of props.

By the time that those two famous step-ladders are centre stage and the young George Gibbs and Emily Webb have mounted them to share with us a few endearing moments of their early courtship, the community of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, is taking shape. We’ve started to know the townsfolk as they were at the beginning of the last century — be they Emily’s father, the local newspaper editor who disarmingly informs us that Grover’s Corners is a rather dull place, or Simon Stimson, the drunken church organist, or Howie Newsome, the local milkman who is always ready to pause for a chin-wag during his local deliveries. …

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Kanata Theatre Delvers a Problematic Calendar Girls

By Jamie Portman | May 12, 2016

Calendar Girls

By Tim Firth

Kanata Theatre

Directed by Tania Carrière

The problem with a play like Calendar Girls is that it’s dangerously easy for it to come across as exploitive theatre and nothing more. Indeed, the sell-out houses currently being enjoyed by Kanata Theatre are clearly due to the subject matter — a group of middle-aged Women’s Institute members posing in the nude for a charity calendar. The original film was a built-in hit for the same reason. And when screenwriter Tim Firth reworked it for the stage, the premiere London production chalked up advance sales of more than $3 million even before the show opened. The promise of titillation sells — but Firth’s script has sturdier aspirations than the need to display a bit of skin. …

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Woyzeck’s Head. Third Wall Returns to Arts Court.

By Patrick Langston | May 5, 2016

Woyzeck’s Head based on the text by Georg Büchner, adapted by and directed by James Richardson

A Third Wall Theatre Production.

As the title suggests, this interpretation by Third Wall director James Richardson of Woyzeck, Georg Büchner’s unfinished 1837 masterwork about a man who is going mad, focuses on the protagonist’s head, the seat of memory, emotion and intellect. Gone, or at least relegated to the almost-tangential, are the class and other external social concerns that are usually showcased when the original work is performed. That focus is a good and a bad thing.

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Belles Soeurs The Musical: Tremblay passes the test of musical theatre with flying colours!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 2, 2016

Photo: “Ode to Bingo”courtesy of the NAC and the Segal Centre for Performing Arts.

A chorus of unglamorous women of various shapes and sizes files onto the upper level of the proscenium arch that frames the kitchen where Germaine Lauzon (Astrid Van Wieren) and her “soeurs” are about to party, pasting one million trading stamps into those little booklets, making Germaine’s dream of owning all those items in the store catalogue, a reality at last. Little does she know that her dreams will come crashing down before the performance ends.

A band of five talented musicians tucked into either side of the small kitchen space raises the excitement level and carries us beyond a traditional Broadway style of glitzy performance. This new English language production of Tremblay’s Les Belles-soeurs (a reworking of the French musical production presented in 2010), originally staged as a play in 1968, is actually not far from Tremblay’s original conception of the work. True, there is music, there are lyrics in English, and the original joual which was the essence of Tremblay’s statement about Québécois culture, has been replaced by lyrics in standard English. Even the ending has changed radically. Yet it works because director René Richard Cyr, composer Daniel Bélanger, adaptor of the English book Brian Hill as well as the English Lyrics, musical adaptation and additional music by Neil Bartram and the musical direction by Chris Barillaro, have collectively reinvented a stage language that compensates so well for all that has changed.

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Janet Wilson Meets the Queen: Performances outstrip the text.

By Iris Winston | April 22, 2016

A feel-good title and a few members of the audience wearing white gloves and other accoutrements in preparation for a royal meeting give the impression that Janet Wilson Meets the Queen is going to be light and fluffy.

In fact, this world premiere by Beverley Cooper is a depressing look at one woman’s sad little life. Set in Vancouver in the late 1960s, at a time of massive change around the world, Janet Wilson continues with her mundane routine surrounded by her surly teenage daughter and grumpy mother, while trying to cope with her frequently absent unfaithful husband and her American draft-dodging nephew. Also thrown into the cluttered mix are news of Janet’s wife-abusing brother-in-law and a view of her daughter’s sexual experiment with a pencil, plus having Neil Armstrong in spacesuit dropping into her kitchen. Only the thought that, as the representative of the local IODE chapter, Janet is to present a bouquet to the Queen helps her to maintain her equilibrium.

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887 : Memory and history coincide in Lepage’s intimate portrait of Quebec! A Winner!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 15, 2016

http://littquebecoise.weebly.com/speak-white-de-michegravele-lalonde.html

Michèle lalonde reads her poem Speak White in 1970 …scrole down on the Quebec site.

Lets begin at the end! Alone on a darkened stage as the lights are dimming, Robert Lepage reaches the end of his emotional journey into the past. What am I doing here he asks us in his own voice? I have been asked to “remember”, but “remember what?” and his tone becomes angrier and more aggressive and he roars out a thunderous interpretation of Michele Lalonde’s unforgettable anticolonial poem Speak White. The play ends on this rousing high note but the evening’s journey has been full of personal and collective memories that Lepage has gathered together in a most intimate moment with the audience. That ending was hair-raising and even unexpected, because Lepage usually avoids political discussions so one wonders how he really locates himself in relation to this strong statement given Lepage’s career on the international stage, moving from one country to another as his works evolves according to his vision of theatrical process which imiposes constant changes on the event.

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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: a legendary play that had trouble at the Gladstone.

By Alvina Ruprecht | April 11, 2016

Photo: Barb Gray.

One of the most important plays of the contemporary American repertoire (created in 1962) has resurfaced at the Gladstone these days and we should be grateful to the theatre for daring to programme this work. Luckily they were able to bring in a fine director such as Ian Farthing who during his years as artistic director of the Saint Lawrence Shakespeare Summer Theatre company , put the theatre on the map in Prescott. Even the Globe Theatre from London, with its travelling version of Hamlet, made its only Canadian stop in Prescott to perform in the festival arena by the river. …

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