Photo: Jean-Denis Labelle

The generation gap is at the core of Come Blow Your Horn, Neil Simon’s debut play, first performed in 1961. Like many of the prolific playwright’s later scripts, this comedy is semi-autobiographical, highlighting his sometimes difficult relationship with his older brother and his father.

The ambivalence of his feelings for his older brother is clearly demonstrated in Come Blow Your Horn when 21-year-old Buddy (a.k.a. Simon) leaves the parental home to move in with 33-year-old Alan and emulate his playboy lifestyle. In addition, the sense of responsibility Alan feels for Buddy comes through loud and clear, which is why a number of his actions and words in Act II are a carbon copy of their father’s words and gestures.

In the Classic Theatre Festival production directed by Laurel Smith, Matthew Gorman as Buddy and Lindsay Robinson as older brother Alan are on a seesaw between characterization and caricature, combined with heavy and periodically irritating Brooklyn accents. Fast and funny, but not entirely convincing and never moving, they play up the comedy and play down the reality.

…

Read More Read More

Photo. Joan Marcus

You can’t help but speculate on the reception had The Book of Mormon been served up for Ottawa audiences when the National Arts Centre opened in 1969. Ashen-faced horror? Walkouts? A boycott of the NAC?

As it is, the delightfully offensive and sharply funny musical by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone (known for, variously, television’s South Park and the irreverent Broadway show Avenue Q) garnered thunderous applause Wednesday night. Clearly, we revel in obscenity-laced, slice-and-dice attacks on everything from shiny-faced Mormonism, and by extension all forms of intransigent religious belief, to pop culture heroes like Bono.

…

Read More Read More

Julia Mackey as Jake  Photo: Tim Matheson

Jake’s Gift,” a one-woman show written and performed by Julia Mackey, is a powerful tribute to Canadian veterans, specifically those who participated in the World War II D-Day landing on Juno Beach. Inspired by her trip to Normandy in 2004 for the 60^th anniversary of D-Day, Miss Mackey and Director Dirk Van Stralen created Juno Productions to present and tour this piece across Canada. As Americans we hear mostly about Omaha Beach. It’s good to be reminded that our neighbors to the North also had a major part in the landings. The two main characters are Jake, a veteran in his 70s who has returned for his first visit to Juno Beach since the war and Isabelle, a lively and inquisitive 10 year-old French girl. As they gradually become friends, Jake is finally able to come to terms with his past.

…

Read More Read More

  .

Alison MacDonald.  Photo: Jay Kopinski

The 1000 Islands Playhouse is running a wonderful production of the musical romantic comedy “She Loves Me.” With music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, who also wrote, among other, “Fiddler on the Roof,” and book by Joe Masteroff, it’s always been a favorite of mine. Being a geezer, I saw the original Broadway production in the 60s and, since it’s not often done, was really looking forward to this production. I was not disappointed. “She Loves Me” is just as much fun and as tuneful as I remembered.

The plot revolves around two co-workers in a parfumerie in 1930s Hungary who constantly squabble, unaware of the fact that they are each others’ anonymous pen pals. Your imagination can take it from there.

…

Read More Read More

Glengarry Glen Ross. Photo Maria Vartanova.

One wonders whether that born-again conservative, David Mamet, ever feels like disowning Glengarry Glen Ross, the play that won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Probably not, given that Mamet’s exploration into the slimier recesses of capitalism continues to earn him hefty royalties.

Still, given Mamet’s current political views, there’s undeniable irony in the continuing power of Glengarry Glen Ross, particularly when it gets a production as good as the one served up by The Acting Company at the Gladstone. The show asserts its credentials immediately with that classic opening scene in a Chinese restaurant and the spectacle of a washed-up real estate salesman, a man whose best days are long gone, desperately trying to get back in the game.

…

Read More Read More

Photo. Maria Vartanova

The story It’s enough to make a life-long renter out of anyone. David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, now in an electric revival at The Gladstone, spotlights the desperate, often viciously unethical goings-on at a testosterone-driven real estate office where clients’ cheques, as opposed to their interests, motivate the motley gang of sales agents. With management amping up the pressure to make sales, the office descends into ever-worse lying, cheating, and a plot to steal leads and sell them to another agency: a microcosm, in other words, of human nastiness and spiritual barrenness circa the 1980s, all done up in classic and funny Mamet style.

…

Read More Read More

 

Alexander Gibson’s one-man show about the trials and tribulations of an elementary school French teacher is one of the joys of the 2014 fringe. The script, written by Gibson and Matty Burns, is intelligent, funny and socially aware. And Gibson’s performance, beginning with a breathless monologue (in rhyming couplets, no less) and continuing with a succession of comically illuminating moments, is a tour de force. The guy is a genuine charmer.

Fringe: Portable # 3 — Not Just another French Class.

An SDT Production

Arts Court Sudio

Normally, it would be enough to report that Joyride is a car wreck of a show, devoid of a modicum of true inventiveness. Trouble is, one of its co-creators is Oregon’s Chase Padgett whose wonderful Six Guitars was a highlight of the 2014 Fringe. So one expects more from him than this witless piece of sophomoric excess. Padgett’s partner in crime is an irritating bundle of mannerisms named Stacey Hallal. We first encounter her floundering about the stage like a beached whale while Padgett makes electronic sounds on a keyboard. Then she moves into the audience to portray an emotionally unstable pest who keeps disrupting Padgett’s mind-reading session. By this point, we’re discovering that the feebleness of a sketch’s set-up is rendered even more feeble by the banality of the pay-off moment. Among other treats, if you can call them that, are the sounds of copulation — pants, groans and assorted shrieks perfomed in darkness to the accompaniment of further electronic noises — and the spectacle of a slack-jawed hillbilly repeatedly botching up a televised tribute to the wonders of the rutabaga. Oh well, there’s nothing like mocking the lower orders to remind us of our own brilliance and superiority.

A Stacey Hallal Production

Arts Court Theatre

There’s a possible corpse in Martin Dockery’s absurdist play, Paco V Put To Sleep, along with an ice cream salesman in a state of existential torment, and a pair of parents whose inexplicable emergence in son Dick’s shabby apartment suggests they’re in flight from something unspeakable.

No one’s really connecting here — starting with the feckless Dick and the zombie-like Paco who are first encountered staring at an empty TV screen because they’re incapable of dealing with the problem of a busted remote. That’s not their only problem. They’re out of food, and there are hints their electricity is about to be cut off. Their conversation goes beyond the random and the pointless and the surreal. Even shared cliches of speech, and there are many of those here, become an ineffectual glue to communication. That’s also true of the other characters who eventually show up, talking over each other and past each other, while continuing to occupy their own malfunctioning limbos.

There’s Pinter here and Ionesco and Beckett, a smidgeon of N.F. Simpson, even — for anyone who knows A Delicate Balance — a significant touch of Albee. Director Dave Dawson, working with a responsive cast, creates a fine fusion of sound and silence, managing the play’s elusive rhythms and atmospherics with skill and understanding.

It’s a quirky but rewarding hour of theatre — but why oh why can’t the Fringe and Black Sheep Productions supply playgoers with a proper cast list? It’s a recurring problem with the Fringe and an annoying one.

A Black Sheep Theatre productions

Directed by Dave Dawson

Arts Court Theatre

• De

 

Immolation. William Beddoes and Caitlin Corbett. Photo, Ottawa Fringe

A deeply passionate, romantic music announces  a dramatic encounter between two lovers, that quickly opens the door to the world of Immortals, or vampires or any one of those indestructible mythological creatures who have been together for 5 000 years, who have been constantly reborn in a new shape, have adapted to new life and are still going strong. Their special extra-human status is played out as a long, sinister love story lived as a series of deadly, cruel rituals that cross through the most violent periods of history and give energy to their existence. In this enclosed room, humankinds most deadly moments are remembered as experiences of pure evil, only possible because these individuals are shaped by extraordinary circumstances that nothing can change. Or can it! Or more to the point, why should it? They are accountable to no one; they have no remorse, no guilt. But, is it really loves that binds them, or is it the need for ongoing vengeance, for the heightened pleasure of the sadomasochistic hunt.? The play sets up an interesting state of existence that is extra-human, where the choice of “evil “deeds becomes extremely attractive and opens up a new consciousness.

…

Read More Read More