Photo: Andrew Alexandre. Todd Duckworth (Edmund Curtis) and Quelemia Sparrow (Angeline)

The first point to be made about The Edward Curtis Project is that the production itself is exquisite.

Playwright Marie Clements’s direction is assured and imaginative — in the seamlessness of its ever-changing visual imagery, in its crucial attentiveness to mood shifts, in its balancing of naturalism with a more elusive expressionism, in the ethereal beauty of its soundscape.

Furthermore, it’s rare for back projections to be used so well. And their presence is an essential component of Clements’s attempt to revisit the influential but unreliable world of Edward Curtis who once enjoyed international fame for his allegedly “authentic” photographs of First Nations people throughout North America. These blown-up relics from nearly a century ago often dominate the Greenberg Centre stage, providing an eerie visual counterpoint to the more unsettling truths about an obsessive white man who saw it as his mission to document ‘the vanishing Indian” through the medium of the photograph but whose manipulative, orchestrated images constituted an ongoing lie.

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Photo: Guillaume d. Cyr

The Changing Room (texte et mise en scène d’Alexandre Fecteau,) nous ramène vers une époque révolue du théâtre québécois, où les personnages troubles de Michel Tremblay dominaient la scène montréalaise.   Hosanna et La Duchesse de Langeais avaient quelque chose de comique et de pathétique . On retrouve une ambiance semblable ici sauf qu’Alexandre Fecteau a recours à des moyens scéniques plus contemporains. Les techniques de la  téléréalité, le docudrame, le spectacle interactif, l’improvisation et le théâtre Verbatim sont des moyens efficaces pour séduire la salle et lui donner une  expérience des plus inattendues.  Des scènes merveilleuses de « lip synch », de chorégraphie burlesque accompagnée d’une musique pop, des paillettes, des plumes, des talons aiguilles, des robes flamboyantes, le maquillage, les perruques de tous les styles et toutes les couleurs, éblouissent le spectateur.

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For the Ottawa Citizen

Photo Andrew Alexandre

“Arrogant white man!” you think to yourself when Edward Curtis makes his first appearance near the beginning of this richly imagined, multimedia play by Marie Clements.
Why wouldn’t you? There’s the early 20th century American photographer, played with a firm blend of empathy and objectivity by Todd Duckworth, delivering, in stentorian tones, a lecture in Carnegie Hall in which he deconstructs “the Indian” as if discussing an exotic specimen of flora or fauna.

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It is not an easy task to convince an audience of the existence of a six-foot invisible white rabbit. And it never happens in the current Kanata Theatre production of Harvey by Mary Chase.

In fact, the biggest surprise, in view of this presentation, is that Harvey won a Pulitzer Prize. Even in 1944, there were surely more effective and worthy shows than this comedic chestnut.

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Photo: Glendon James Hartle

The big problem in discussing Ira Levin’s clever but nasty thriller is that there’s not much you can say about it without spoiling the audience’s enjoyment. The script revels in unexpected twists and turns, and is adept at orchestrating the kind of shock scene that gives you no advance hint that it’s going to happen.

On the other hand, no production should give you time to think too hard about the play because that will make you aware of just how preposterous it really is. That means maintaining a solid theatrical momentum which drives the story to its gruesome climax. It also means an appreciation of the fact that — for all its cunning with plot devices — the play is also a character piece.

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Photo: Craig Bailey. From left to right, Thomas Derrah, DeLance Minefee, and Michael Kaye.

 

Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer prizewinning Clybourne Park, a SpeakEasy production now playing at Boston’s Center for the Arts, uses Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic, A Raisin in the Sun, as a springboard to discuss race relations in the United States. A White man, living in an era when many believe we are moving towards a “post-racial” or color-blind America, Norris’s perspective diverges widely and wildly from Hansberry’s. A Raisin in the Sun was deeply personal to Hansberry. Its story of a Black family, whose purchase of a house in a segregated middle-class neighborhood aroused the White community’s hostility, was based on her parents’ experience. The oppressive racism of the period permeated her life. A Raisin in the Sun treats a working-class African American family’s efforts to achieve the American dream in the mid-twentieth-century.

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Christian Lapointe as Sebastian. Photo: NAC.

A young man stands alone in the acting space and stares at us for few minutes. He is an actor called Christian Lapointe. The acting space is in a rehearsal room at the NAC where the audience is seated on several rows of steeply raked seats watching him perform like a strange animal. He provokes us, he confronts us, he seems confused, angry, aggressive, and under extreme stress. He leaps about on all fours; he licks a dish full of water like a dog. He finally tells us he cannot take this life any more. He tells us he has one more hour to live, the time of the performance. And after that we will see what happens. “We have been warned”. In fact, the news told it all a few days before because this play by Norén, is based on notes and a video made by Sebastian Borre, an 18 year old school boy who made all this information available on line the day before he went into his former school and shot the students and the teachers. All this took place in 2006. The play was written several weeks later.

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Christian Lapointe as Sebastian.  Photo: NAC

Lars Norén’s play, "20. November," is a monodrama based on the true story of a young man who injured five teachers and fellow students at the Geschwister-Scholl School in Emsdetten and took his own life immediately after. In the process of writing, Norén used parts of the young man’s diary, which was published on the Internet. His protagonist is an angry, confused, tormented misfit who only seeks to be included and accepted for what he is. He tells us the most disturbing truth, the one that we don’t want to know and don’t want to see. Is a young man who counts the minutes of the last hours of his life the only one to blame for his actions? To what extent is society, as it is today, a creator of events like this one?

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It is more than 15 years since friends celebrated the engagement of Bob and Janet in Toronto by putting together a collection of songs, entitled The Wedding Gift.

From this small beginning, the entertainment, now called The Drowsy Chaperone, evolved into a popular show at the Toronto Fringe, then on to larger houses in Toronto courtesy of top Toronto producer David Mirvish, until it became a Tony-award winner on Broadway with numerous productions in London’s West End, Los Angeles, Australia and Japan, not to mention touring across Canada.

Some might say there is more of a story behind The Drowsy Chaperone — a tale akin to the understudy who becomes a star overnight — than to the intentionally slight fictional plot. Certainly, the names of the bride and groom in the show are reminders of its origins and certainly it does exactly what it sets out to do: celebrate the genre while gently spoofing the musicals of the 1920s.

In the past, The Drowsy Chaperone, has run without intermission. While, at its current length, this would be hard on the audience, the first act is too long and drags towards the close. (However, it is difficult to see a better point to break the action.) …

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Photo from Gigcity. ca (The production in Edmonton).

I might say something that many would not like here. In general I like the idea of putting a magical realism piece on the stage. It is rarely done, simply because it is exceptionally difficult. But, then, that can be said for any genre that is not concerned with a classical concept in storytelling. Now, to transfer a genre like this to a completely different medium, like theatre, takes a lot of knowledge and experience. Certainly, it cannot be done “word by word.” I respect Evolution Theatre because they are not afraid of challenging tasks, they experiment, and, above all, they bring to the Ottawa the theatre scene what it needs – new concepts and a daring approach. Their latest play Hroses: An Affront to Reason (in aco-production with Mi Casa theatre) proved to be all that.

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