The Marvelous Wonderettes

By Roger Bean

A Fundraiser for the Catholic Education Foundation of Ottawa at the Gladstone

Directed and choreographed by Aileen Szwarek

More of a musical revue than a fully-fledged musical, The Marvelous Wonderettes by Roger Bean is a light-hearted concoction that quickly evokes the 1950s and 60s through songs of the era.

The girl group entertaining at the Springfield High School on senior prom night 1958 runs through key pop songs of the era, interspersed with rivalry between the two “frenemies,” Cindy Lou and Betty Jean. Meanwhile, the other members of the singing foursome, organizer Missy and bubblehead Suzy, try their best to restore equilibrium, keep the entertainment on track and everyone on and off stage smiling. …

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Calendar Girls

By Tim Firth

Kanata Theatre

Directed by Tania Carrière

Any production of Calendar Girls presents special challenges. The storyline, a slightly fictionalized version of true events at a Women’s Institute in northern England, is the basis of a 2003 movie starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. It is so well known, that there is little room for any surprises on stage. In addition, the concept — a group of mature women posing discreetly nude behind some protective covering to raise funds for charity — has since been adopted and adapted for numerous assorted fundraising ventures (including at least two in the Ottawa area).

Although the flash of bare flesh on stage for each of the six women who drop their robes for a few seconds is not the main focus of Calendar Girls, it is often the point of concentration of pre-show publicity and audience awareness. The main goal of the script is to focus on the bonding and friendship among the group. But because the key photography/nude scene closes the first act, director and cast are likely to have difficulty in maintaining momentum through Act II. The attempts to fill in the women’s back-stories have limited success and the falling out between the two women behind the calendar project is too under-written to be entirely credible. …

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The Team

Created by Rachel Chavkin, Libby King, Jake Margolin, & Kristen Sieh

The Team, a Brooklyn, NY based company, known for their devised works, draws on American history and culture to develop their quirky, imaginative material which they tour widely. RoosevElvis, currently playing at the A.R.T.’s Oberon Theatre in Cambridge, brings together two American icons, the early twentieth-century President Theodore Roosevelt and the mid- twentieth-century rock and roll artist Elvis Presley. Today, Roosevelt is often thought of as an exaggerated version of the manly man, as he is presented in RoosevElvis and played by actress Kristen Sieh. She also gives the character an extremely funny outmoded aristocratic American accent. Libby King’s Elvis is a gentler soul who toughens up with karate and whose sexual orientation is vague. Each actress plays two roles.

The first scene, perhaps the most comic, has them perched on two high directors’ chairs, Roosevelt, wearing a long waxed mustache and sideburns, and Elvis in an oversized wig and sunglasses. Speaking with increasing rapidity, they discuss their backgrounds. “I never wrote any of my songs,” laments Elvis; “I wrote forty-five books,” brags Roosevelt. The conversation ultimately becomes so competitive that it resembles a game. Their rivalry continues throughout the play as both men try to flaunt their masculinity. Elvis kicks boxes karate style; Roosevelt punches images of buffalos. The fluidity of gender is an underlying theme. In an odd moment, Roosevelt turns into a convincing and graceful ballerina. …

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The Mouse House

By Robert Ainsworth

Ottawa Little Theatre

Billed as a thriller — but actually more of a tale of sibling rivalry — The Mouse House by Peterborough playwright Robert Ainsworth grinds along rather than sending chills down the spine.

Ainsworth has been careful in preparing his situation. His protagonist, Carson, a successful author, returns to the isolated family cottage in 2006 to overcome his writer’s block and complete his latest his novel (on a portable typewriter), turning down his agent’s offer of a cellphone, so that she can keep in contact with him. Isolation confirmed. When a young drug addict breaks into the cottage, Carson cannot easily reach out for help.

Much of the ensuing drama is divided into blackout-separated short sequences depicting the shifting relationship between the two. Carson seems gentle, timid and kind. Troy seems a kid in need of help.

The tug-of-war is eventually resolved because Carson’s anxious literary agent asks his brother, Thomas, a long-haul truck driver, to check on Carson. To say more would be to reveal the twist in The Mouse House tale (tail). …

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Third Wall Theatre re-opens after a two year hiatus with renewed energy, bringing audience’s an atmospheric, deeply psychological portrayal of one of theatre’s most intriguing tragic-heroes. Director James Richardson picked a work that is close to his heart, choosing to create a production that is a personal reflection on some aspects of Georg Büchner’s masterwork, Woyzeck. This post-modern approach to what is considered the first modern drama brings audiences a living hallucination, bolstered by multi-media and casting the audience into the role of clinical observer.

Critic Lyn Gardner summarizes the appeal of Büchner’s Woyzeck—the source piece for this performance—beautifully in her 2003 review of a production by Cardboard Citizens in London, “Büchner never even finished his play; nobody knows in what order the scenes were intended to be played. It is its plasticity that has made this 200-year-old work one of the most influential plays in contemporary drama – that, and its concentrated depiction of alienation and disassociation.” This is certainly true of Richardson’s “elastic” interpretation of the text, playing as part of the TACTICS Theatre Series at Arts Court.

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Yana Meerzon, who is covering the Festival for the Capital critics circle,  has seen Reikiavik at the  Europe Theatre Festival in Craiova, Romania. It was  performed in Spanish with English sub-titles.

Beckett’s Fin de partie/ Endgame is his masterpiece about the cruelty of time, the ticking clock that measures our minutes, days and years. Reikiavik by Juan Mayorga, a recipient of the 13th Europe Prize Theatrical Realities, XV Europe Theatre Festival, is about a very similar game: the game of chess in which the players are in an impossible combat with death. Dressed up as the story about the 1972 famous match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spasski, when the Soviet Union lost its 24 year chess crown to the USA, this play uses the metaphor of chess and the metaphor of playing (or of the game) to talk about love, death, and hope.

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The world is shifting underneath her feet and yet, Janet Wilson tries very hard not to notice. The world premiere of Janet Wilson Meets the Queen by Beverley Cooper, playing now at the GCTC, turns a family’s home into a microcosm for the rise of political activism and shifting gender roles that mark the 1970s.

The epitome of 1960’s housewife, Janet prepares for Vancouver’s centennial anniversary and a celebratory visit from the Queen of England. Roger Schultz’s set is a perfectly 1960s kitchen with its colourful, floral print wallpaper that blends into a perfectly matching floor. Two additional risers flank the main stage, which become additional rooms inside the Wilson’s home. A large screen hovers over the kitchen, where the opening moments of the play depict Neil Armstrong’s iconic first steps on the moon. As the play progresses, the moon-walking man materializes on stage, visible only to Janet. He becomes a symbol of the impossibility of stagnation; progress is literally invading her home.

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James Richardson takes Georg Büchner’s unfinished textual fragments  (he died at the age of 24) and “plays”with them as much as all other directors have done in the past. More recent scholarship has organized the narrative into a reasonable sequence of events. Sill, directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Denis Marleau , Bob Wilson and Brigitte Haentjens among others have imposed their own stage esthetics to produce meanings of different sorts, often nourished by a particular formalistic departure point. For example, Brigitte Haentjens who was influenced by the physical work of French masters like Lecoq transformed the soldiers into tribal dancers, stamping their feet and creating a collective will behind the seductive routines of the Drum Major. In such an atmosphere, Marie, woyzeck’s wife could not refuse his advances. Scenes with the captain are transformed into torture, humiliation or even into sexually ambiguous and highly grotesque comedy especially when Woyzeck has to crawl between the Captain’s legs to shave his hidden parts. Ostermeier’s rendering of that was hilarious and unforgettable, a sign of the misery of naturalism approaching a more sinister form of critical expressionism that was to erupt onto the German stage and into film in later years. In fact Fritz Lang already seems to be muttering in the wings? . Much has been done with this very disturbing metaphor of oppression, brewing fascism and the rise of power-hungry individuals in an era when the rational thinking of science clashed with the irrationality of  romanticism and the debate becomes heated in this play.

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The World Premiere of Beverly Cooper’s play  currently playing at GCTC never quite gets off the ground and never quite lands. It’s partly due to Director Andrea Donaldson, partly the cast, but most of all the script. Artistic Director Eric Coates mentions playwright Cooper’s “. . . idea that our sense of self constantly evolves.” In Janet Wilson Miss Cooper has created a character that refuses to evolve as the world around her changes.

Set in 1969-1971, housewife Wilson is stuck in a white-glove life. She’s unable to deal with an errant husband who we never see, a rebellious teen-age daughter, Katie Ryerson in a strong and believable performance, her mother, played by an overly cantankerous and at times unintelligible Beverly Wolfe, and her American draft-dodger nephew, in a two-dimensional performance verging on caricature by Tony Adams.

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Yana Meerzon reviewing from the International Shakespeare Theatre Festival in Craiova, Romania. Richard III is  the opening feature of the XV edition of the Europe Theatre Prize held in that city.

 

Lars Eidinger as Hamlet. Photo:
Arno Declair.

Richard III is one of the most famous villains of the Shakespearean canon and thus it would appear that any interpretation other than that of a manipulator of people’s emotions, a cunning and purely evil  murderer  or a monster obsessed with power, would not be possible.  Yet, German director Thomas Ostermeier  who often finds exciting ways to think through the classics, takes such an unexpected turn here . His Richard is someone who can be likeable, charming, open, and simple in his own evil ways. Pretense is the rule by which Ostermeier’s Richard lives; he even becomes a victim, someone with whom we can sympathize.

Although  opposing a long-standing  tradition is a difficult task,  Ostermieier does not shy away from  having his  his leading actor  project good in the evil of  his character. 

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