Photo: Maria Vartanova

The familiarity of the songs Vera Lynn made famous during World War II settles an audience into a comfort zone as the show begins.

Attractively presented by Arlene Watson in the Ottawa Little Theatre production of Goodbye Piccadilly by Douglas Bowie, all is well with the world through such numbers as We’ll Meet Again until the pianist runs off mid-song — a situation that is not explained until late in the show.

A family drama/comedy/borderline farce about the awkward connection between two families, Goodbye Piccadilly is styled in short sequences that are a constant reminder of the playwright’s background in screenwriting.

Strong direction by Sarah Hearn and some good performances from the five-member cast do much to overcome the slowness of scene changes and the difficulty of suspending belief long enough to accept the premise or the unlikely resolution of the play. Such moments as the angry hymn sing-off between Bobbie and young Cecil are very funny and Watson’s beautiful singing throughout the show would give any script a lift, but can’t rescue it completely.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova.

The cast of Ottawa Little Theatre’s production of Goodbye Piccadilly faces the daunting challenge of finding and maintaining a convincing dramatic line for a play that springs from a preposterous situation and seeks to blend honest pathos with moments of potentially destructive comedy.

Douglas Bowie’s play doesn’t make it easy with sequences that, in less experienced hands, could disintegrate into farce. But under the guiding hand of director Sarah Hearn, the production finds balance and nuance as the play explores the strange circumstances surrounding a beloved local citizen’s death and the upheavals it causes among his survivors.And when it comes to survivors, there are more than we first expected. We initially meet Bess Brickley, sympathetically portrayed by Janet Uren, in a state of bustling excitement over the news that husband Brick has been awarded the Order of Canada. It’s November, and Brick is supposed to be off on his annual late autumn canoe trip in Algonquin Park — but he isn’t. The euphoria Bess has been experiencing is suddenly crushed by an overseas telephone call to the Brickley family’s rural Ontario inn. It comes from London, where Brick has been found dead on a park bench in Leicester Square.

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Photo: Craig Bailey, Perspective Photo. Aimee Doherty and Steven Goldstein.

Big Fish now playing at Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion is the third dramatized version of Daniel Wallace’s magical realist novel, all adapted by John August over many years. As a movie, directed by Tim Burton, its whimsy appealed to a certain audience base. August, a playwright as well as a script writer, decided it had the makings of a musical and teamed up with composer Andrew Lippa. Ten years later, Big Fish opened on Broadway to mixed reviews. Critics found it lavish, opulent and, in some cases, overdone. Despite its fans, the production closed within a few months.

August and Lippa’s belief in the show’s possibilities brought them to Boston and SpeakEasy’s artistic director Paul Daigneault, known for his skill with musicals. All three artists were committed to simplifying the show, emphasizing its Alabama roots, deemphasizing the Broadway pizzazz, and making Edward Bloom (Stephen Goldstein) more understandable, and his son Will (Sam Simahk) more sympathetic.

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When George F. Walker wrote his 1993 play about three 19-year-olds battling a life stacked against them, he imbued it with passion, anger, intelligence and a hedged faith in the future. This Algonquin College Theatre Arts production does all those elements proud.

Set in a garbage-strewn inner city park (design by Attila Clemann), the play focuses on sharp-tongued Tina (Cynthia Guard) and her perpetually befuddled, self-absorbed boyfriend Bobby (Mitchel Johnson). She’s pregnant, he’s the father, and neither one is exactly ecstatic over the situation.

The difference between the two: Tina has the smarts and self-awareness to make the best of a bad deal whereas Bobby – self-pitying but with a sensitivity and a vague desire for a better life that appeal to Tina – falls apart anytime anyone looks at him sideways.

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Photo by Barb Gray.  John Ng and Andy Massingham.

Enzo is a dog who makes his presence felt. He destroys a $250,000 kitchen. He attends to female dogs with joyous enthusiasm. He teaches, through sheer dint of being a canine, his human owners much about clarity, simplicity, open-heartedness.

Thing is, we never see this Italian greyhound. But then Daniel MacIvor’s The Best Brothers, in a rewarding and lucid production at GCTC, is, in part, about what we don’t  see[…]

Suit-and-tie-wearing Hamilton (John Ng) is the elder brother. An architect who knows more about designing the world than living in it, he speaks in perpetually clamped-down fashion, as though words, which if let off their leash could lead to the articulation of deeper things, are the enemy.

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Photo: Richard Termine. Dominic Marsh (Tristan) and Hannah Vassallo (Yseult).

Although new to Boston, Great Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre Company is over thirty years old. Based in Cornwall, the company, composed of ever-changing international actors, tours widely. Their repertoire tends to showcase works drawn from mythology. Tristan and Yseult, the production currently playing at Boston’s Cutler Majestic is representative of their imagistic style, which frequently features acrobatic movement, live folk music, song, and dance. The work was adapted and directed by Emma Rice.

Kneehigh has updated the medieval romantic tale of Tristan and Yseult by adding vaudeville, musical comedy, and circus techniques. Wagner’s lush music from his 1865 opera often takes a backseat to recorded bluegrass, Latin music, jazz, Carl Off’s “Carmina Burana” and modern pieces such as Nick Cave’s “Sweetheart Come,” as well as Stu Barker’s compositions written especially for the show, played by the company’s four musicians.

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Photo: Barb Gray. Published in the Ottawa Citizen, Thursday, March 5, 2015

At one point early in Obaaberima, writer/performer Tawiah M’Carthy’s courageous one-man show about sexual identities, we watch the main character Agyeman, still a young boy, slip into a dress. The action, mimed by M’Carthy, is transformative, lighting a glow in Agyeman’s eyes and lending a sudden strength and ease to his posture: this male/female, we realize, is who he really is.

Problem is, Agyeman doesn’t see himself through our eyes. So it takes another couple of decades, years that are fraught with confusion, wrong turns, even a prison term, before he understands that wearing a metaphorical dress while remaining a male – in other words, exploring his male and female sides and ultimately coming out to himself and to the rest of the world — is his only real choice.

The triple Dora-winning play follows Agyeman from boyhood in homosexuality-denying Ghana to adulthood in more-open-but-yet-not-entirely-so Toronto. Such coming-out stories are no longer groundbreaking, but M’Carthy enacts this one (he has said it draws on but is not about his own life) with such intimacy and skill that it becomes one we’ve never before heard.

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It took about a hundred years for Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse François de Sade) to become a figure of great interest and even greater controversy. His sadistic nature (the expression sadism is derived from his name due to his writings and behaviour) and immoralitym completely unacceptable by any social standards, caused him imprisonment more often than not. He spent his last years of life incarcerated in Charenton asylum (Val-de-Marne, France), where he wrote and directed plays with its inmates as actors.

In the 20^th century, artists celebrated him as a founder of free expression in erotic literature; Guillaume Apollinaire even called him “the freest spirit that has yet existed.”

His writings, full of sexual fantasy combined with philosophy of pornography with an emphasis on violence, repel some and fascinate others to this day.

Sade’s life and philosophy inspired many, among them German writer Peter Weiss, who wrote the play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (shortened version “Marat-Sade” ) in 1963. The plot is set inCharenton asylum  in 1808, where Marquis de Sade directs a play about the death of the popular French Revolution leader Jean Paul Marat. Conceptualized as a play within a play, this sharp political theatre deals with abuse of power and the meaning of revolution. In the wake of  Artaud and Brecht vision of theatre, he uses the environment of chaos and madness to show human suffering and class struggle, as well as to question the role of the true revolution – should it change socity and where should the change come from: from the histrorical event itself of from ourselves? …

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Photo: Marianne Duval

Director James Richardson has given us, as his thesis for an MFA in Directing at the University of Ottawa, a creative, focused and altogether compelling interpretation of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade.

The insane asylum that Richardson and his cast of student actors conjure is a fevered and dangerous place, a bubbling pot of injustice and brutality that constantly threatens to boil over.

Except for Charlotte Corday (Emma Hickey) – the narcoleptic who rouses herself long enough to murder Marat (Jeremie Cyr-Cooke), the revolutionary idealist with a really bad case of the itches, as he rests in his bath – the stage seethes and jitters with the non-stop twitches and outbursts of the patients. If ever there was a warning to iron-fisted leaders, whether they be political, cultural or of any other stripe, that repression has a limited shelf life, this is it.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova

The problem with Samuel Taylor’s 1953 comedy, Sabrina Fair, is the film version released by Paramount a year later.

The play begins with Sabrina, a chauffeur’s daughter, returning to the only real home she has known — a wealthy Long Island estate — after five years in Paris. Now an attractive young woman, she radiates poise and sophistication, but an infectious buoyancy also surfaces. The romantic yearnings of her adolescence also re-emerge — yearnings for the unattainable that suggest she doesn’t know her place in the social strata and is therefore destined to send the plot spinning into merry overdrive.

In the film, writer-director Billy Wilder bolstered this material with a solid back story so that we first see Sabrina as the dreamy, dangerously impressionable child she was before going to Paris. Playwright Samuel Taylor was so upset by this that he dissociated himself from the screen version — but the truth is that Wilder had improved on the original, giving it more substance and more social bite. Wilder also was playing an ace card in casting Audrey Hepburn — who, after her triumph in Roman Holiday, was the hottest new actress in Hollywood — in the title role.

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