Rumors
By Neil Simon
Ottawa Little Theatre
The frenzy of farce can be tiring, but the alternative of moving at a more measured pace generally gives audiences too much time to think about a flawed, illogical storyline. This is likely the main reason that, in the Ottawa Little Theatre production of Neil Simon’s 1988 farce Rumors, director Joe O’Brien has opted for speed, light and high decibels to compensate for the problem of a rocky opening premise. …
Detroit
Plosive Productions
At The Gladstone
It’s enough to make you think twice about even saying “Good morning” to the guy next door.
Detroit, Lisa D’Amour’s dark comedy about present-day life in the first ring of the suburbs, those subdivisions that sprang up in the 1950s and ‘60s but have lost some of their original neighbourly gloss, is the story of a relationship that opens with goodwill but descends into chaos.
In limning the desolation that lurks behind white picket fences, D’Amour makes clear that a similar malaise infects contemporary life itself.
Plosive Productions’ scrappy and frequently very funny mounting of Detroit — it’s directed by Chris Ralph — marks the Canadian debut of D’Amour’s award-winning play. It tracks the story of an emerging tract-home friendship between Mary (Teri Loretto-Valentik) and Ben (David Whiteley) and their new neighbours Sharon (Stephanie Izsak) and Kenny (the especially good David Benedict Brown).
Ben has lost his banking job and wants to hack out a new career in the jungle of Internet-based financial services, while Mary is an unhappy paralegal and closet boozer. Kenny and Sharon are loose canons, both just out of rehab and more than a little suspect.
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Continues until Feb. 1. Tickets: 613-233-4523, thegladstone.ca.
Photo: Mark S. Howard. Entire Cast on stage.
Working, now playing at Boston’s Lyric Stage, is an updated version of Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso’s 1978 musical based on Studs Terkel’s book. Terkel’s 750 page Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, a compilation of interviews with mostly ordinary (read working-class) people, is unabashedly leftist, as is the show.
While remaining faithful in most respects to Terkel’s vision – albeit with fewer characters – Schwartz and Faso (with the help of Gordon Greenberg) inserted several characters and episodes into their new rendition drawn from today’s ongoing economic crisis such as the jobless young who spring from the middle class, cubicle workers, and a hedge fund manager. The original play’s forty characters have been reduced to twenty-five and its numerous actors shrunk to six. At the Lyric Stage, the casting is laudably integrated, reflecting today’s demographics where color and ethnicity are not as limiting as they were thirty-five years ago.
Photo, Evgenia Eliseeva.
The American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) is celebrating the holiday season with The Heart of Robin Hood, an updated, highly physical, and comic version of the old chestnut, with a little violence thrown in for good measure. The play, written by David Farr and directed by the innovative Gisli Örn Gardarsson, was first presented at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in England.
Gardarsson, a founder of the experimental Icelandic theatre and film company Vesturport, has staged a number of its widely renowned productions, which, like The Heart of Robin Hood, have been adaptations. In order to achieve a Vesturport-like quality at the RSC and the A.R.T., Gardarsson imported most of his technical team from the Icelandic Company.
Photo: Ruel. Artistes Anne Le Beau et Francis Ducharme
La Compagnie Sibyllines, basée à Montréal, explore les rapports entre l’expression corporelle et le théâtre depuis un bon moment. Il suffit de regarder les créations telles que de l’Opéra de quat’ sous, Woyzek, Elles et bien d’autres où le mouvement synchronisé des comédiens devient un langage parallèle à celui de la parole, une tentative d’incarner l’essence même de la création scénique.
Ta douleur est une nouvelle incursion dans la mise en scène du corps qui évacue la parole, ou presque, puisque les quelques citations chuchotées paraissent quasi banales, malgré les références à Pétrarque, au cinéaste algérien Azzedine Meddour et au groupe hip hop indépendantiste québécois Loco Locass. Ce combat entre deux danseurs issus des formations solides, classiques ou contemporaines, se transforme en une rencontre passionnante entre un homme et une femme qui exhibent l’expression de toutes les douleurs possibles.
The highlights of this very ambitious production are fine performances from the lead characters of Shrek and the Donkey and some excellent costumes.
Kraig-Paul Proulx handles the role of the green ogre Shrek with great aplomb and Damien Broomes is simply a delight as his sidekick Donkey.
Among the most attractive costumes are the cleverness of the Donkey’s outfit and the charm of the sunflowers.
Director Sue Fowler-Dacey shows her adeptness at handling the enormous cast, despite some variation of ability among the group (almost inevitable given Suzart’s philosophy of openness to any interested in trying their hand at performing or backstage work.)
Photo. David Cooper
Maria, we learn early in this fresh and invigorating production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s famous musical The Sound of Music, wears curlers beneath her wimple. She’s a postulant, a kind of nun-in-waiting at the time and a burr beneath the abbey’s saddle, her hunger for life too big for the constraints of a black-and-white habit.
As everyone who’s seen The Sound of Music knows — and our numbers are legion thanks to the award-winning stage show which premièred in 1959 and the equally awarded mid-’60s film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer — Maria chucks the head gear. In the process, she unveils her true self and that of the von Trapp family, the motherless gang of seven that Maria joins first as subversive governess and then as wife of Austrian war hero Captain von Trapp.
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Photo: Marnie Richardson. Eliza Jane-Scott as Maris on Parliament Hill
A production of The Sound of Music conceived as more akin to a pantomime than straightforward musical theatre might appeal to some.
The singalong invitation offered at the beginning sets the tone. Such tricks as a deep-voiced male in drag as a nun in the opening section signal the style. Later, an even cheaper trick of having the Nazi admiral with a Hitler look-alike hairstyle is more irritating.
Lepage’s Needles and Opium begins with a paradox, that of acupuncture points that when activated by needles relieve pain, but were discovered in the search for maximum effect during torture. However, the more exquisite paradox of Needles and Opium is present in the dislocation of the human heart as it searches for relief from the suffering of love denied, suspended in the space between longing for the object of one’s desire and the knowledge that such love is now forever beyond reach. Remembered love holds both promise and pain. Thus begins a journey through space and time of the tortured soul buffeted by the physical and emotional gravitational forces of memory and longing.
Photo. Julie Oliver
As if Constance Ledbelly, dressed in the drabbest outfit ever and nibbling at a cheese slice in her office as she labours over esoteric academic pursuits and dreams of true love, didn’t have enough problems.
Then her creator, playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald, tosses the hapless assistant professor of English down a rabbit hole that lands her in the middle of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet. There Constance, against her will, becomes a character in the plays, getting swept up in everything from old-fashioned sword fights involving doublet and gown-wearing folks to equally old-fashioned romantic dilemmas and inadvertently changing the course of the two plays in the process.
No wonder the poor lady looks a little out of her depth. Constance, played by Margo MacDonald (no relation to the playwright), is the centrepiece of this clever and funny 25-year-old play about a voyage through a time warp. “I’ve only ever gone on package tours,” says the academic at one point, as fearful as she’s intrigued by what’s happened to her. The play is also about self-discovery, about re-emerging from the rabbit hole a fuller and more self-aware person.
Alas, this production of MacDonald’s play never quite discovers its own potential (Read more….)http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Review+Goodnight+Desdemona+good+luck/9228243/story.html