Ottawa dramatist David Whiteman has created a trio of beautifully-drawn characters in his new play, The Lights Of Shangri-La. Thematically, this piece may have little new to say: its main narrative thrust stems from the fact that its two principals are gearing up to make painful revelations about themselves to others, and have trouble doing so — and really, that’s a pretty ho-hum device these days. Nevertheless, when it comes to character and dialogue, the play shows real strengths, and these are well-served in director Sarah Hearn’s discerning production.

The evening is highlighted by a terrific performance from Shaun Toohey, as Crockett Sumner, a guy who may have given up his acting career but who still feels compelled to make every moment of his waking life a performance. Crockett is gay, somewhat estranged from his male lover, a policeman named Ilya, and still in denial when it comes to admitting that he’s now HIV positive. Toohey’s Crockett is sharp-tongued, self-admiring and often insufferable, but the performance also offers glimpses of a tormented narcissist unable to drop the mask.

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Photo Julie Laurin.

Kathi Langston and Megan Piercey Monafu (the playwright) took their show “Mabel,s Last Performance” to the Halifax Fringe where Kathi was just declared  best female performer

Congratulations Kathi!

Mabel’s Last performance with Kathi Langston. Photo: Julie Laurin.

Reviewed by Kate Watson at the Fringe

Kathi Langston gives a riveting performance as an aging actor facing the descent into the depths of dementia. Her face is a canvas that displays the most subtle shifts of emotion, from the utter elation that happy memories bring, to the clouds of confusion and doubt that scuttle across her mind. Her physicality shows Mabel’s state of mind in the bend of her spine or the skip in her step. The subject matter of the play is somber, but there are lovely moments of lightness and humour. An amazing performance in a play that beautifully explores a difficult subject.

Photo. Barbara Zimonick.

“Waiting for the Parade” by John Murrell has become a Canadian classic. First produced in Calgary in 1977, the play looks at WWII through the eyes of five women on the home front, their relationships with each other and with their families. The play’s structure is flowing and cinematic, consisting of slice of life vignettes and presentational monologues. These are connected by songs and sometimes dances of the period that also allow for minimal costume changes and changes of mood.

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Photo: David Cooper. Featuring Marla  McLean and Gord Rand.

NIAGARA-ONTHE-LAKE, Ont. — We’re not really getting full nudity on the stage of the Festival Theatre, but that’s still what the opening moments of The Philanderer manage to suggest.

We’re privy to a couple still in lustful embrace, and they leave us in no doubt about what has just taken place. The man is Leonard Charteris, an accomplished womanizer whose sexual confidence is only matched by his sense of sexual entitlement. The woman is Grace Tranfield, a current conquest and a young widow who has managed to convince herself that the charismatic Leonard is her new soul mate.

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Fiona Reid in The Sea. Photo: David Cooper.

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont.  —   Edward Bond’s The Sea is perhaps the most personal play he ever wrote in terms of its relationship to his own life, and it’s certainly his most accessible.
But as the Shaw Festival’s sterling new production of this 41-year-old piece reminds us, it’s also a strange and beguiling fable, set a century ago in an East Anglian seaside village and turning its sights on two favorite Bond preoccupations — class and social disorder.
It can seem discordant in performance. The play can touch you to the heart at one moment — witness the poignancy with which its two young protagonists, beautifully played by Wade Bogert-O’Brien and Julia Course, experience a shared loss from a tragic death and also a shared yearning for escape from a repressive environment. Yet, within the compass of this same play, you’ll encounter a funeral service that degenerates into surrealistic farce.

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Photo: Emily Cooper. Featuring  Deborah Hay and Kate Manning.

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — This is the summer when Shaw Festival actress Deborah Hay can do wrong.

She’s been in command of the flagship Festival Theatre stage since April with her brilliant performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. And now, she’s providing some sublime moments in the festival’s problematic lunch-hour production of Tennessee Williams’s neglected one-act play, A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur.

The setting is St. Louis, a city that looms large and traumatically in the playwright’s personal and creative life, and we first meet Dorothea, the character played by Hay, doing calisthenics in the living room. She is another of Williams’s emotionally maimed heroines — not as tragedy-bound as Blanche Dubois, but still vulnerable.

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Photo: David Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Acerbic American critic John Simon once observed that the Shaw Festival probably has the best acting company in the Western Hemisphere.
And the proof is again in evidence with the festival’s uproarious revival of When We Are Married, J.B. Priestley’s 1938 comedy about three Yorkshire couples who make the shattering discovery at their joint Silver Anniversary party that they were never legally wed.
The play is a cunningly executed fusion of character and situation. It is also a probing and at times painfully funny dissection of a particular culture and of a class system that achieves its own unique definition within the West Riding town of Clecklewyke, which is the fictional stand-in for Priestley’s own birthplace of Bradford.

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Calme Fiore as King Lear. Photo: David Hou.

STRATFORD, Ont. — It’s one of the most horrendous scenes in dramatic literature — perhaps the most appalling Shakespeare ever wrote.

So if you know King Lear, you know you have to brace yourself for the sequence where those who have become his adversaries blind the Earl of Gloucester.

The Stratford Festival’s new production is merciless when the moment arrives. As the horror proceeds, it’s as though the participants are seized by an uncontrollable frenzy. There’s a whimpering Scott Wentworth as the wounded Gloucester who, having already lost one eye, is crawling pathetically away from his tormenters. And there’s the excellent Mike Shara, a demonically driven Duke of Cornwall, pouncing on him to complete the job.   Meanwhile, looking on, we have Liisa Repo-Martell’s Regan whose fascinated revulsion seems fixed in amber.

In Antoni Cimolino’s production, the scene has an emotional intimacy that makes what’s happening all the more unsettling. These are people who have known each other in better, more settled lives. But a vicious canker has taken over their world. What unleashed its poison?
The answer, of course, is found at the very beginning of the play when Colm Feore’s aging Lear totters onto the Festival Theatre stage and proceeds to open the gates of hell with his cockeyed plan to portion his kingdom among daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Gaunt, wispy-bearded, voice sometimes quavering, his body language at times uncertain, this Lear may seem a relic, but his vanity and sense of entitlement still burn within him, even though even his aura of decisiveness soon reveals itself as an old man’s terrible foolishness.

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PHoto. David Hou

STRATFORD — There’s no denying that Tom McCamus is delivering a fascinating portrayal of “something” at the Stratford Festival this summer.
Yet, it’s easy to be left with the feeling that it makes little sense, that this seasoned actor is resorting to a mere grab bag of emotions and mannerisms. But yet again, perhaps that’s all to the good.
After all McCamus is playing King John — or rather doing riffs on Shakespeare’s take on one of the more dubious monarchs to rule England. So if John emerges as something of a mess in McCamus’s interpretation, so be it. That’s one way of salvaging a character that often seems to lack definition in Shakespeare’s actual text.

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Kate Besworth as Raine Petkoff. Photo by  Emily Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. —The Shaw Festival’s latest production of Arms And The Man is definitely pint-sized — a shorter version with at least 30 minutes of its normal running time chopped out.

Purists, who relish the play’s philosophical musings about the absurdities of militarism and the follies of romantic illusion, may well take offence at being short-changed in this way — seeing the 2014 season’s opening show less as an act of streamlining than as an act of dumbing-down: in other words, let’s just laugh and enjoy the liveliness of character and situation — but for heaven’s sake, let’s not be forced to think too hard about what’s really on playwright Bernard Shaw’s mind.

But let’s keep things in perspective. The Shaw Festival may be the only organization in the world dedicated to the theatre of Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, but it’s never been the kind of sacred shrine that treats the master’s works like holy writ. There’s also an important place at Niagara for exploration and experimentation — witness the audacity with which it has revisited Saint Joan over the years — and that’s one of the happiest aspects of the festival’s mandate.

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