Photo by  Justin Van Leeuwen

Charles Marowitz , collaborating with Peter Brook, reduced Shakespeare’s plays to 30 minutes and now Margo MacDonald has reduced Richard II, Henry IV parts 1& 2, and Henry V to two hours and forty-five minutes, including intermission. I`m not suggesting that MacDonald is Peter Brook, far from it but the idea is not new. Still it is an enormous feat of dramaturgy.  Here, she transports us into a punk style hideout of rebels and would be performers. Vanessa Imeson’s costumes, puppets and set design play a central role in this space where history appears to be telescoped forward and backward through time. A graffiti covered portrait of Queen Victoria is stuck up on the walls of what appears to be a backstage area that conveniently becomes a public house, a battle field, the throne room of Henry IV, and various other spaces that house the main events of these four historical plays that MacDonald has collapsed into a single evening as the rough old punks batter the monarchy and take a good swipe at all the institutions of her majesty- Victoria or Elizabeth II. It is not clear but it does not matter.

Prince Hal (Katie Ryerson) sporting a mangy looking dead skunk on his/her head) carouses with his mates at the local tavern along with the huge Sir John Falstaff (Matthew John Landfall), Ned Points (Simon Bradshaw) the tavern wench (Geoff McBride) and other amusing creatures. Hal’s father King Henry IV (Geoff McBride) terribly disappointed with his debauched offspring wishes his son would have been more like Percy (John Doucette) who is stirring up a conspiracy against him in the North, with some disgruntled English Lords and some Scottish lords, namely Glendower (McBride again!) and that hairy creature from the highlands Douglas (played by Melanie Karin).

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Katie Richardson as Prince Hal, Matthew JOhn Lundvall as Falstaff. Photo: Justin Van leeuvan

Who knew that William Shakespeare presaged punk?

That connection is one of many unexpected elements in this anarchically funny, flawed and mostly rewarding adaptation by Margo MacDonald of Shakespeare’s Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and some of Henry V.

At two and three-quarter hours including intermission, the show is a bit of a marathon. That’s true despite MacDonald, who also directs, having cherry-picked from the three plays to tell the story she’s interested in: the ill-fated relationship between Prince Hal, the future king of England who must set aside his rambunctious youth and companions to become a responsible leader, and Sir John Falstaff, the “huge hill of flesh” who is Hal’s principal companion and who never sets aside his wastrel ways…..

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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Theatre+review+Bumpy+enjoyable+ride+both+punks+princes/8873190/story.html

Plays at the Gladstone Theatre September 3-8, at Shenkman Richcraft Studio 10 – 15, at Centrepoine, 17-22.

Published in the Ottawa Citizen, September 5, 2012.

John Lenartz as Vince Lombardi. Photo-Depot Theatre

The Depot Theatre is closing out their 35^th season with a first-rate production of LOMBARDI – yes, CoachVince, THAT Lombardi. Written by Eric Simonson and based on the book “When Pride Still Mattered” by David Maraniss, the play deals with the man behind the myth. We learn not only of his philosophy, but also of his relationships with his wife Marie and three of his players, Dave Robinson, Jim Taylor and Paul Horning. Set largely in 1965, it includes flashbacks to 1958, 1959 and 1964. It’s structured around a series of interviews with a reporter.

Director Chris Clavelli’s simple set of two armchairs and a table backed by a large green-board with the diagram of a play and a cocktail cabinet stage right works very well for the production. The action is enhanced by Isabella Byrd’s excellent lighting that helps focus the changes of time and place. As always, Jean Brookman’s costumes are good, especially Marie’s final dress.

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Photo thanks to Tototoo productions. POSTER.

Confessions of a Mad Drag Queen is the story of a deeply flawed human being told in equally flawed dramatic/melodramatic format.

Miranda Rights, the aging drag queen of the title, is not quite ready for her close-up when her visitor and would-be biographer, John Morgan, arrives on the scene. His role through the extended exposition — much of it a drag in the other sense — is to listen to the pathetic ranting of the campy Miranda, while attempting to keep her on track as she justifies the murderous rampage that landed her in prison for a quarter of a century.

With ruthless pruning, Miranda’s monologue might hold the attention more effectively, but, as written, it is too repetitive and periodically boringly circular. Little wonder that, in the Toto Too production, Barry Daley marred an otherwise excellent performance by needing several prompts that caused glitches in both rhythm and characterization.

The move from the comic and stereotypical sequences of Act I to the melodramatic twists and dialogue (Hallelujah!) of Act II gives natural impetus to conversation and character. Although Act II flows more naturally, the change of pace and tone jar at times. (Confessions started off as a monologue. Playwright David Blue is reported as saying that the second character was not added until the twelfth draft.)

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John Collins and Barry Daley. Photo by Bruce Ecroyd

Drag makes excellent theatre! Take for instance the ground breaking Hosanna (Richard Monette performed the title role in Tremblay’s play, in English, at Stratford many years ago), or La Duchesse de Langeais, that heartbreaking campy monologue by Michel Tremblay interpreted by that great actor Claude Gai who made the role his own. More recently there was that French production of the Changing Room at the NAC which delved more closely into the various possibilities of Drag identities which was extremely revealing as “real” drags and “phony” drags cohabited the stage and the audience was left totally perplexed t trying to figure it all out.

These performances are, after all, about the essence of theatre: dressing up and assuming various roles, even various identities while hiding other identities. David Blue, the playwright has clearly been reading a lot of theatre based on campy drag performance because his text is full of references to so many other similar plays and works by gay writers such as Tennessee Williams as well as female models of female impersonators, that this work almost becomes a compilation of all the stereotypical utterances one could imagine, especially in Act I. It therefore needs a lot of pairing down. I think this play could lose at least 20 minutes and still be just as effective, in fact it might even be stronger. Listening to Miranda Rights (an extraordinary performance by Barry Daley) extolling the virtues of Bette Davis and other icons of female impersonators has something almost pathetic about it when we see what a frump Mme Miranda has really become.

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Leslie Stevens’s 1958 Broadway hit is the sort of period piece that was once considered daring by both producers and audiences. So some may question the wisdom of reviving – more than half a century later – this comedy about a sexy young Swedish blonde who arrives in the household of a college anthropology professor and his wife, who just happens to be that institution’s dean of women, with an astonishing proposition.

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Photo: Jean-Denis Labelle

Set up as his and her takes on marital values, The Marriage-Go-Round by Leslie Stevens was well received as a stage play in 1958 and bombed as a movie three years later.

The premise of the sex comedy is that college professor Paul Delville and dean of women Content Lowell hit the first rough patch in their 25-years of marital bliss in the form of a blonde, Swedish seductress, intent on Paul being the father of the child she plans to have.

On the brink of infidelity, he continues to lecture on monogamy, while Content seeks advice from her best friend on campus, a married man, who halfheartedly tries to seduce her.

In the Classic Theatre Festival production, director Laurel Smith maximizes pregnant pauses and focuses on the highly expressive faces of Rachel Jones as Content and Scott Clarkson as Paul as the two ride the marriage-go-round with aplomb. Meanwhile, Elisabeth Lagerhőf, as the Swedish siren Katrin, makes a concerted effort to reel Paul in and Kevin Hare, as Ross, delivers his insincere attempt to step up from platonic friend to lover.

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Hungarian puppeteer Andres Lenart during the Mikropodium show at the 9th season of the Puppets Up! International Festival in Almonte on August 10th and 11th,

Photograph by: Bruno Schlumberger, Ottawa Citizen

More comments coming…Performance on Sunday at 4pm in the Ultramar  Theatre in  Almonte.

Photo: The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The Thousand Islands Playhouse, 2013. Photography by Mark Bergin                         

A very entertaining and fast moving production of the musical THE 25^th ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE has opened at the 1000 Islands Playhouse. With music and lyrics by William Finn and book by Rachel Sheinkin, Rebecca Feldman and Jay Reiss, the format is that of an actual spelling bee with six young contestants plus four volunteer contestants from the audience. It’s the only show I’ve ever seen where using audience volunteers really works. There’s also a female organizer, the Vice Principal as the judge and Mitch, who’s working out his community service sentence by offering comfort to those eliminated.

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Photo. Wayne Cuddingham, Ottawa Citizen.

Did George Bernard Shaw ever envision Arms and the Man staged like this?

Seizing on the themes of duplicity, self-deception, and confusion of fantasy and reality that underpin Shaw’s biting comedy about love, war and class, director Andy Massingham has given the show a telling Commedia dell’arte twist.

Actors appear in mask or with faces richly painted, many of their costumes big and bright. Characters – at least the worst dissemblers or the most deceived among them — move with exaggerated physicality. And those characters break down into servants, masters and lovers, which is how Shaw wrote the play but is also the classic structure of Commedia.

What Shaw may have envisioned is, in the end, idle speculation. What’s not speculation is that this production — funny, fast and furiously satiric — works.

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