Poster for Kanata Theatre

American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has created an astonishing new stage version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. It astonishes because of the way it refines and deepens Stevenson’s preoccupation with the idea of a dual nature lurking within every human being, also because of its audacity in offering its own spin on what happens when the respected Henry Jekyll’s lab experiments turn him into the homicidal, cane-wielding Mr. Hyde.

The original novel remains a creepy read. And Kanata Theatre’s sterling production of Hatcher’s play ensures a similar frisson. Director Wendy Wagner, assisted here by Ilona Henkelman, shrouds this piece in atmosphere. Skeletal images lurk behind the fog and gloom, and even the play’s brightly lit moments seem imprisoned in an impenetrable darkness. The existence of creatures and things that go bump in the night seems entirely plausible.

So yes, this is a mood piece. But at Kanata it also moves with a bracing energy and offers a bouquet of fine ensemble acting.

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Ed Hoopman and Laura Latreille. Photo: Mark S. Howard 

Sarah Ruhl’s haunting epistolary play Dear Elizabeth, now at Boston’s Lyric Stage, is drawn from poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell’s thirty year correspondence, ended by Lowell’s death. The relationship began in 1947 at a party when they met at an important point in each of their lives. At age thirty, Lowell had won the Pulitzer Prize and the thirty-six year old Bishop’s first book of poems had just been published. They instantly took to one another as fellow poets, although Lowell’s attraction to Bishop was also sexual. A lesbian, Bishop loved him as an irreplaceable friend. Fittingly, the written word was their means of communication. They seldom saw each other; Bishop lived in Brazil with her lover Lota while Lowell resided mostly in the US.

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Photo: Maria Vartanova

The most fascinating aspect of the world’s longest-running play is its amazing longevity. Now in its 62^nd year in London’s West End, The Mousetrap has become as much part of the “must-see” list of attractions for tourists as the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace.

It is generally agreed that Agatha Christie’s murder mystery, while carefully constructed with clever twists and the occasional red herring, creaks a little after all this time. Characters tend to be stereotypes and the script often seems wordy and built around a formula. Thus, the starting point for The Mousetrap is to have a small group of strangers, one of them the murderer, trapped — in this case, in a guesthouse in a snowstorm.

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Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, is a biting satire of Victorian artifice. You wouldn’t think a play criticizing a society where appearance trumps substance, so close to our own image-obsessed society, would require too much tweaking. What makes this play so funny, other than Wilde’s mastery of language, is precisely that it works within the social conventions of late Victorian London. The play works best when the characters let their actions speak for themselves, without added trappings. I talk a lot about directors’ seeming lack of faith in their audience’s ability to get and be amused by a more subtle type of comedy. It often feels like there’s a fear that, unless we’re repeatedly beaten with slapstick-type humour (with side-winks, just in case we forget to laugh), we will fall asleep in our seats. Ted Dykstra’s version of The Importance of Being Earnest falls into this category, as he inserts needless physicality and self-reflexiveness in the presentation. This denies the play its gravitas by reducing it to something trivial and renders the production forgettable.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a story about two friends, Algernon (Alex McCooeye) and his friend Jack (Christopher Morris) who, having little else to do in their privileged lives, make up imaginary friends and relations in order to get away from real-life ones, who they can’t stand. The characters in this version of The Importance of Being Earnest roll their eyes, throw muffins at each other, and, most inappropriate of all, hide under the skirts of their beloveds in the presence of the latter’s (very proper) mother. They leap over settees and foot stools in a way that would have undoubtedly gotten them thrown into Bedlam in a second.  …

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Published on: October 26, 2014 for the Ottawa Citizen.

Natasha Greenblatt and Alex McCooeye star in The Importance of Being Earnest at the NAC. Photo: Andree Lanthier

A food fight. A dogpile. People treating an elegant sofa with all the respect of Tom Cruise. Is it a play mounted in the living room by your children and their young pals? No, it’s Oscar’s Wilde’s sophisticated gem The Importance of Being Earnest under the direction of Ted Dykstra and starring NAC English Theatre’s possibly embarrassed 2014-15 Ensemble.

Seeking a fresh take on a much-seen play, Dykstra has turned to farcical physicality to illustrate Wilde’s pricking of superficiality, social conventions and other Victorian foibles. Problem is, that physicality, especially the near-slapstick variety often employed here, is meant to underscore the surface existence that is one of Wilde’s bugbears but instead draws so much attention to itself and so limits the actors that the playwright’s intentions and subtlety vanish in the shuffle.

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Relax, theatre practitioners: the Hunchinson family is zero threat to your collective livelihood. As we discover early in this clown-based show by Brooklyn/San Francisco-based Under the Table theatre, the trio of Hunchinson siblings is attempting to mount a stage play based on Victor Hugo’s melodramatic and therefore ripe-for-the-pillorying story The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Fortunately for you practitioners and for us audience members who love a good laugh, the clan is as inept as it is dysfunctional.

All of which makes The Hunchbacks of Notre Dame at once absurd, funny and oddly endearing.

Paul Hunchinson (Josh Matthews) is the writer-cum-director of the play-within-a-play who gives his director’s notes using free-form dance moves (theatre itself is just one of the many targets here). When not battling with his un-cooperative brother and sister, he plays the priest in Hugo’s story.

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Photo: Andree Lanthier

Alert for Ted Dykstra: The Importance of Being Earnest is a social satire. It is NOT a farce. One of the key aspects of Oscar Wilde’s brilliant comedy is that it appears to observe the social niceties while subtly undercutting them.

Therefore, bun fights are more than wildly inappropriate. Having the two male leads throwing muffins across the stage at each other violates the playwright’s intent.

It is also completely out of place to have Miss Prism, the spinster governess, fondling the spout of a watering can in pseudo-sexual titillation, while panting after the bachelor vicar. Certainly, Wilde suggests that she longs to be married and he is the nearest eligible bachelor. But in the context of Earnest, they will always behave with complete propriety.

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The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie is one of the longest running plays. It is based on a short story (published only in the short stories collection “Three Blind Mice”), which was inspired by the real-life case of the death of a boy, Dennis O’Neill who died in 1945, while in the foster care of a Shropshire farmer and his wife.

Like all Christie’s work, The Mousetrap has her signature all over it: unexpected twist and turns, a surprising choice of murderer and a full pallet of very realistic characters. The play is a typical ‘who done it’ mystery. It is set in the early 1950s, in the isolated Monkswell Manor run by the young, recently married couple Giles and Molly Ralston. The play takes place on a winter day with heavy snowfall, so that the isolation of the house is highlighted. At the time of the murder in the manor, all five guests have already arrived and settled quite comfortably, as well as a detective who came to investigate a murder committed the previous night in London. When one of the guests is killed, the detective starts interrogating the rest of the people. Anyone can be the guilty party and it is obvious that everybody is trying to hide something from the past.

There is a reoccurring sentence in Agatha Christie’s stories – the leitmotif which helps explain her work. As her popular character, Miss Marple often says, there is a lot of human nature in everyone. So really, although she is a mystery writer – her writing revolves around people; it is mostly character studies. In adaptation of her work to a different media (including theatre), there are two important things to remember: stick to the original time and place, and be sure to develop the characters well. …

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Photo Joan Marcus.

The opening of a mirrored live bar on stage as a means of bringing down the theatrical fourth wall is a gimmick with limited appeal. Once is certainly enough and has even less appeal during the intermission.

Like the large venue, the crowded pub look hurts rather than helps the intimate tone of what should be a chamber musical.

Having said this, Once still has considerable charm as a love story — or, more accurately, a story about love and commitment. It is harder to convey the ambience in this type of stage setting than it is through the flexibility of film, but there are quiet moments or more gentle songs when the intimate nature of the storyline is front and centre as the two principals Guy (played on opening night by Ryan Link) and Girl (Dani de Waal) try not to talk about falling in love and to remain focused on making music and being true to their responsibilities.

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For the Ottawa Citizen.

Photo, Andrew Alexander. Featuring  Anita Majumdar.

Life by its nature is a fraught affair. Try living it as a female Indo-Canadian teenager at predominantly white Port Moody Senior Secondary in British Columbia.

That’s the setting for Anita Majumdar’s Fish Eyes and Boys with Cars, the simultaneously wonderful and disappointing double bill at the Great Canadian Theatre Company.

Majumdar wrote, choreographed and performs both shows. She blends exquisite Indian dance and acting that’s riveting in Fish Eyes but less so in Boys with Cars with issues ranging from teenaged (and, by extension, human) angst to patriarchy and cultural appropriation.

Fish Eyes, which Majumdar has been performing for a decade, finds 17-year old Meena despairing that “everyone’s living the dream” – as in making out and drinking beer – while she’s preparing to participate in an Indian dance festival.

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