Theatre in Ottawa and the region Archives - Page 61 of 92 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

L’Homme de décembre: Texte de Colleen Murphy, mise en scène de Sarah Garton Stanley.

By Alvina Ruprecht | November 24, 2015

Le 6 décembre 1989, un homme entre dans un amphithéâtre de l’École polytechnique à l’Université de Montréal, muni d’un fusil d’assaut, un Ruger Mini-14. Les étudiants sont priés de quitter la salle. Quelques instants plus tard, les corps de quatorze étudiantes jonchent le sol. La nouvelle se répand rapidement et le Canada tout entier est en état de choc. Selon les témoins, le tueur, Marc Lepine, souhaitait se venger de ces «féministes», qui voulaient occuper les postes traditionnellement réservés aux hommes.
Vingt-six ans après, le pays est encore hanté par ce drame et la question persiste. Comment ne pas se poser des questions sur la manière d’aborder ce sujet-piège dont les moindres détails de la tuerie tragique sont connus de tous, puisque l’événement fut décortiqué par la presse. Comment construire un récit, cerner des personnages, soutenir l’intérêt au-delà d’un voyeurisme réaliste quand l’auteure refuse d’adopter une perspective historique, ou d’approfondir la psychologie des acteurs d’un drame déjà trop connu?

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The December Man: Less Than Meets The Eye

By Jamie Portman | November 24, 2015

Photo: Andrew Alexander

Colleen Murphy’s play, The December Man, comes to the National Arts Centre with its credibility enhanced by a flurry of honours, the most significant of which is a 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language drama. It is a work of decency and integrity, and in its sensitive but lacerating portrayal of a middle-aged Montreal couple that finds no reason to go on living, it offers two rich acting opportunities.

Those excellent performers, Paul Rainville and Kate Hennig, meet their challenges superbly in this production from NAC’s English theatre. When we first meet them, we’re conscious of the delicate emotional interplay that can come only from the intimacy of a long-term relationship. It’s a dynamic that persists in an opening episode which sees them, carefully dressed for the occasion and with the gas turned on, arranging themselves on the sofa with simple dignity to await their deaths.

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The December Man: A Clear Depiction of Survivor Guilt

By Iris Winston | November 22, 2015

Photo: Andrew Alexander

The December 6, 1989 massacre of 14 women — all engineering students at the University of Montreal’s École Polytechnique — was a tragedy with far-reaching proportions.

In her award-winning 2007 drama The December Man, playwright Colleen Murphy shifts the focus away from the murdered women and the mass murderer and on to a fictitious male student, Jean Fournier, and his parents.

Jean is presented as one of the males that murderer Marc LePine separated from the women before his killing spree. Jean’s guilt at living when they died and his remorse at not doing anything to save them destroys him as he succumbs to his survivor guilt. It also devastates his parents — blue-collar workers who had dreamed of their son becoming a successful engineer.

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Anne of Green Gables. The Young Girl from Prince Edward Island Charms Once More.

By Iris Winston | November 22, 2015

Photo. The cast on the Orpheus facebook.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know the story of Anne of Green Gables — the girl who was sent to the Cuthbert household instead of an orphan boy as requested?

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic novel, adapted for the musical stage by Don Harron and Norman Campbell, has been running in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island each summer for the last 50 years.

It was a hit in Ottawa when the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society presented its version in 1999 and it deserves to be a hit once more in the current production, as directed by Joyce Landry with musical direction by Terry Duncan and choreography by Debbie Guilbeault.

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Anne of Green Gables: Orpheus offers a spirited production of this musical adaptation of the novel

By Patrick Langston | November 22, 2015

Photo courtesy of Orpheus Musical Theatre.

Seems we just can’t get enough of Anne Shirley, that spunky young redhead who packs her overheated imagination and drama queen ways along with her clothes when she moves from a Nova Scotia orphanage to a PEI farm. This time around Anne is portrayed by Caroline Baldwin, and Orpheus couldn’t have asked for a better one in its production of the musical adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved novel. Baldwin’s a skilled vocalist, her delivery easy, full and nuanced. Her acting is on par with her singing: the actress is a woman, but the character we see is a young girl and one who’s endlessly interesting and entertaining as she learns about herself, family and community.

While Baldwin shines in this spirited production, her fellow cast members for the most part aren’t far behind. Gilbert Blythe is played with conviction by Storm Davis who transforms himself into a youngster smitten with Anne and who, while easily cowed, inevitably pops back up for another go at whatever he’s after. Davis needs to let loose more when singing: his vocal constraint works against his ability.

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The December Man: a play strangled by its own structure!

By Alvina Ruprecht | November 21, 2015

Photo courtesy of the NAC, English Theatre.

On December 6, 1989, a young man, carrying an assault rifle (Ruger Mini-14) entered the amphitheatre of an engineering course at the University of Montreal (in the École polytechnique), told the boys to leave the room and then shot 14 female students. That evening will be forever engraved in the memory of Canadians but it also fuelled debates on gun control and violence against women across Canada and even in the United States. The play was first performed in 2007 at the Enbridge playwright’s Festival of New Canadian plays (in Alberta) in 2007, directed by Bob white.

Such is the material for real tragedy but structurally, this situation presents a dramaturgical trap because the public is already very much aware of all the details of the drama. So what is left for the playwright to exploit? Is it really possible to construct a narrative, characters, situations, an arc, tension, beautifully written monologues that tear apart the main character, all the elements that are linked to such tragic circumstances when there is nothing left to discover? That kept occurring to me as I was watching Colleen Murphy’s play, in this recent staging by Sarah Garton Stanley.

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Glorious: Linden House Theatre Triumphs Over An Inferior Play

By Jamie Portman | November 12, 2015

Photo: Maureen O’Neil

What do you do if you take on a play that is essentially a one-joke piece?

If you are Ottawa’s Linden House Theatre company you attempt to paper over the cracks and smother the deficiencies with a superior production of Peter Quilter’s comedy, Glorious!

So you do have to applaud actress Janet Uren for her success in delivering a warmly human performance of a real-life figure named Florence Foster Jenkins, an aspiring concert-hall diva who seemed impervious to the realities of her appalling singing voice.

We’re subjected to various displays of uncertain pitch, strangled high notes and faltering technique in the course of the evening. And initially we do get some some amusement from our initial encounter with that voice and from the scarcely veiled horror displayed by Kurt Shantz in the role of a young pianist who, until then, has no idea of what he’s getting into when he applies to become Florence’s accompanist.

But this is a comic situation that is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Keep attempting to ring more fun out of Florence’s awful singing, and the well runs dry.

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Glorious. A production surrounded by a sense of joy.

By Iris Winston | November 10, 2015

Poster from Linden House Theatre. Janet Uren as Florence Foster Jenkins.

There might be some glory in the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, but there is little of similar magnificence in Glorious, the weak semi-biographical comedy by Peter Quilter.

Glorious, set in 1944, the last year of Jenkins’ life, recounts how her conviction that she was a great opera singer was in total contrast to her ghastly out-of-tune, out-of-rhythm performances. Yet, she was eventually invited to sing at Carnegie Hall — prestigious indeed, even if it was at her own expense, and many attendees came to laugh at her — and played to a full house, plus packed standing room, with a reported overflow of another 2,000 people clamouring to witness the concert mounted by the legend of the appalling voice.

While Jenkins is the central focus of Quilter’s script, he tries to grind out extra humour (usually failing to amuse, possibly intentionally to remain in line with the singer’s inability to sing). He forces some witty (not) references to the pianist’s sexual orientation, the randiness of Jenkins’ common-law partner, the lack of communication between Jenkins and her Spanish maid and throws in some particularly irritating sequences around her friend’s dying dog.

However, despite the lack of glory in Glorious, Linden House Theatre’s entertaining production, directed by Robin Bowditch, survives and thrives.

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Glorious: when life is stranger than fiction!

By Alvina Ruprecht | November 9, 2015

Photo: Maureen O’Neil. Janet Uren as Florence Foster Jenkins at Carnegie Hall.

We know this is supposed to be a sendup so it’s perfect community theatre material. We know it seems too ridiculous to even bother suspending our disbelief but the shocking thing is that this is based on a true story and that is what makes this play a lot more complex than one would suspect. Janet Uren plays Florence Foster Jenkins, a wealthy, most cuddly, warm, delightful human being who is adored, mocked, sought after, teased, and who either refuses to face the truth or who cultivates an extraordinary fantasy world all her own.

As we see in the play, Madame who lives in a lush apartment in New York towards the end of the war, is a former coloratura soprano who can no longer hear properly so she is tone deaf, has no sense of rhythm or timing and certainly can’t follow music but continues giving her little private concerts to a very select set of society people. . These concerts are avidly followed by people like Irving Berlin and Cole porter who send her flowers and say ambiguously nice things about her, in spite of the fact that when she opens her mouth she sounds like a hyena being tortured. It’s so unbearable it’s hilarious. But are we the audience laughing with her or at her? Well, I suspect it’s a bit of both. And Janet Uren maintains the ambiguity all the way through, sometimes betraying a slight nervousness at the thought of those people “laughing at the back of the hall” but then completely convinced of her own great talent. .or is she?

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Love’s Labour’s Lost: U of O Students Tackle One Of Shakespeare’s Trickiest Plays

By Jamie Portman | November 7, 2015

Photo. Marianne Duval.

There’s a lovely moment early in the University of Ottawa’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost when Ryan Young, in the role of an affable rustic named Costard. lopes into view and plunges into some nimble word play involving the words “manner” and “form.”

The sequence is a showy indulgence, like so much of this early Shakespearean comedy, but it leaves you in a forgiving mood. An essential requirement of the play is being met: we are getting a delightful fusion of language and character.

It happens again in the scenes involving that fantastical Spaniard, Don Adriano de Armado, portrayed with delicate affectation by an excellent Darcy Smith, and his precocious page, Moth, played with appropriate merriment by Sine Robinson. Language is again the driving force here — with the play’s penchant for elaborate and mannered speech being stretched to its extreme here — but Smith remains grounded in his character. Don Adriano may be a parody of the courtly lover, but here it’s a genuinely affectionate one

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