Photo by Andrea Lanthier

Anne and Gilbert co-written by Nancy White, Jeff Hochhauser and Bob Johnston, is a musical sequel to ANNE OF GREEN GABLES and is based on the second and third books in L. M. Montgomery’s beloved series. Anne is now grown up but she still marches to her own drummer, especially when it comes to her relationships with the opposite sex. There have been a few changes since I first saw the show in 2007 in Gananoque. The major one is that Diana’s Act I solo has been replaced by a duet for Diana, well-played and sung by Brieonna Locche, and Anne. It’s about becoming a wife and is by turns entertaining and serious.

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1940s Ottawa childhoods, particularly those of the traditionally working class neighbourhood of Lowertown, could be as rough as they were exciting. As depicted in Brian Doyle’s classic novel, Angel Square, tensions ran high along racial lines and resulted in daily skirmishes between children in Angel Square, nestled between a Jewish, French-Canadian, and Catholic school. However, just as the children fight on a daily basis, so too are they close friends and allies. Through their eyes, the audience see the foolishness of racism and the value in being able to put aside petty differences and work together to achieve a goal. The Great Canadian Theatre (GCTC) partners with veteran director Janet Irwin to present her adaptation of the novel just in time for the holiday season. It contains some brilliantly vivid characters and evocative scenes, but doesn’t quite manage to match the warmth and atmosphere so plentiful in the novel.

Angel Square depicts the life of Tommy, an imaginative boy in Lowertown Ottawa the first winter after the end of World War Two. Tommy imagines himself as his hero, the crime-fighting Shadow of radio drama fame, which comes in very handy when anti-Semitism results in the injury of his best friend’s father. Together with his Jewish, Irish, and French-Canadian friends, he sets out to solve the mystery and catch the culprit. …

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Photo: Maria Vartanova

There is no denying the enthusiastic reaction of the audience to the opening-night performance of the Ottawa Little Theatre production of A Christmas Story. Neither is there any denying my total bewilderment that this set of charmless vignettes about a nine-year-old boy’s obsession with a BB gun would be of lasting interest.

Recalling the Christmas of 1939, the adult Ralph narrates his memories of his strategy to obtain the gun, as well as his father’s winning an extraordinarily ugly lamp, a young love interest, a friend freezing his tongue to a metal post and overcoming a bully. Ongoing jokes about the repetitive family menu, the whines of the younger brother, father’s battle with the furnace and the neighbour’s dogs wear thin. And a moment as a pink rabbit — don’t ask — is not worth even a snicker.

The OLT production, directed by Brian Cano, is clearly working hard to create a silk purse out of this sow’s ear and one is very conscious of the amount of effort involved.

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The two one-act comedies that make up Phoenix Players’ So This is Christmas, deliver two different takes on the spirit of the season.

In Sleeping Indoors by Jim Holt (retired artistic director of City Lights Theatre, Savannah, Georgia), a literary couple takes in a homeless man to provide him with a taste of the warmth of the season. As they learn more about him from his journal, they also learn more about generosity, individuality and his view of the world.

In The Christmas Tree by Norm Foster, two lonely people duel for the last scrawny tree available on Christmas Eve, using tall tales to engender sympathy as the weapon of choice.

The plays are light. The tone is pleasant and the style of presentation is gentle as director Jo-Ann McCabe leads her casts on their exploration of the Christmas season.

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Photo: Andrew Alexander

We tend to think of the phrases “collateral damage” and “PTSD” only in military terms. “The December Man” by Colleen Murphy that received the Governor General’s literary award for drama, currently running in a terrific production in the NAC Studio, examines them in the context of a university shooting.

In Montreal in 1989, 14 female engineering students were gunned down by a misogynist after he had sent the male students out of the room. Rather than re-tell the grim story of the shooting, the playwright focuses on a male student who was there. He suffers from extreme survivor’s guilt, which has a disastrous effect on his working class parents.

The story is told in reverse chronology and all the production elements work smoothly together to clearly tell this powerful story, beginning with the strong cast. Jean, the student, is believably and remarkably athletically played by Kayvon Kelly. Kate Hennig plays Jean’s mother Kathleen, a devout housewife who dreams of her son’s bright future and has only the church to turn to for help. Benoit, Jean’s father, is played by the always excellent Paul Rainville who finds some nice moments of humor. He paints a moving portrait of an uneducated working man trying desperately to understand and help his troubled son.

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The shadow cast by great violence is a trap, invisible but as constraining as prison bars. Sentenced to that mental prison, you may find your only escape is self-destruction.

The latter is chosen by Kathleen and Benoît Fournier, the working-class couple in Colleen Murphy’s incisively disturbing drama The December Man (L’homme de décembre).

When we meet them, they appear to be preparing for a big event, perhaps a visit from someone important. They’re carefully dressed. Kathleen (Kate Hennig) has tidied the house and badgers Benoît (Paul Rainville) to clean the glass after he downs a shot of whiskey to calm his nerves. What they’re actually doing is preparing to commit suicide together, having seen their lives shattered some years previously when their only child Jean hung himself. Jean, as we learn, was a survivor of the Montreal Massacre, the 1989 slaughter by Marc Lépine of 14 female engineering students at the École Polytechnique, and guilt drove him to death.

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Retrospective cabaret celebrates the music and wit of award-winning storyteller,  SPEAKeasy Collective presents Songs in the Key of Cree, a one-time musical tribute to the multitalented Cree playwright, author, storyteller and musician Tomson Highway on December 12 and 13, 2015, at Hugh’s Room (2261 Dundas St. W). The evening will showcase the musical achievements and unique wit that have garnered Highwayfans around the world.

A master pianist, composer and songwriter with a repertoire spanning three decades, Highway’s music takes inspiration from a wide range of styles, including country, Brazilian samba, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill and French Canadian folk songs. In addition to his Order of Canada, the Juno-nominated performer was named one of the 100 most important people in Canadian history by Maclean’s magazine.

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Jake’s Gift is a memory play. And it’s a meditation on the tragedy and triumph of war — the grief, the loss, the anger and ultimately the healing that in itself constitutes a sort of victory. So it can also have the texture of a mood piece.

But ultimately this lovely, 65-minute one-hander is about the kindness of strangers. The stranger in this instance is Isabelle, a 10-year-old French girl who lives in a village near the Normandy beaches and who, through sheer goodness of heart, changes the life of an elderly Canadian named Jake.

This crotchety old veteran has made a reluctant return to France for the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. And he seems the quintessential sour-puss — profane and resentful over even being there, yet also consumed with guilt over his failure to have come back sooner.

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There’s the potential for an absorbing theatre piece in the story that Radium Girls has to tell. But that potential is squandered, first by deficiencies in D.W. Gregory’s script, and secondly by Kanata Theatre’s failure to surmount the challenges it poses.

The play deals with the real-life tragedy of the young women who had the misfortune of working for the U.S. Radium Corporation a century ago. They contracted radiation poisoning as a result of a job that involved applying self-luminous paint to watch dials.

And when five of them challenged their their former employers in court, the prolonged litigation led to landmark changes legitimizing the right of employees to sue on the grounds that they have contracted an occupational disease.

The play, frequently awkward in exposition and shallow in its character-drawing, also has structural problems. Gregory offers a series of episodes that don’t always unfold naturally and instead follow jerkily one after the other and lack even the basic requisites for some kind of cinematic flow. Director Tom Kobolak engages in a failing struggle to deal with this material’s deficiencies and bridge the gaps. Karl Wagner’s set and lighting offer some support — there are, for example some evocative back projections courtesy of Justin Ladelpha— and Brooke Keneford’s soundscape contributes some atmosphere. But one is too conscious of the yawning silences between scenes, of the static moments when characters walk on stage to take up positions before a scene starts, of a sense of a production that is lumbering along in fits and starts.

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Photo: Black Theatre Workshop

A chorus of ancestors pour down the aisles from the back of the orchestra and converge on stage, all the while their wordless song grows in intensity. From within that rising chorus of ancestors, Rainey Johnson (Lucinda Davis) mimes holding her infant daughter in her arms—a bundle of cloth that is pulled away from her. Rainey loses her young daughter, and the chorus of ancestors encircles her, their a cappella melody meet Rainey’s pain with a mournful song. Even the very first scene of the play will send shivers down your spine with its ability to be so deeply emotive, and yet so beautifully constructed.

The new season at the NAC has opened with Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, and it sets a high standard for all that is to come. It is an immersive theatrical experience that blends theatre, dance, and song. The result is a seamless performance that is haunting in its depth of portrayal of the human experience of grief. What’s more, the play is equally lighthearted, finding humour and joy even in face of terrible pain. This is the power of Governor General Literary Award winner Djanet Sears’ impeccably crafted production.

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