Carmen Aguirre doesn’t shy away form touchy or embarassing topics in her passionate monologue, Carmen Aguirre’s Blue Box. The show relays the seemingly disparate stories of Carmen’s distant past as a Chilean resistence fighter against the Pinochet regime and her longstanding affair with a Chicano” television star over a decade later. It’s an exercise in fearless bluntness, whose peppery language would make even the more open-minded blush. Unconiditonal love is at the core of both stories, though it’s Aguirre’s tales of Chile that really capture the audience and contain the emotional crux of the performance. …

Read More Read More

BLUE BOX, written and performed by Carmen Aguirre, deals with two aspects of her life, both concerned with passion of different kinds. There is her passion as a youthful revolutionary in the Chile of Pinochet and there’s her romantic passion for a Hollywood movie star when in her early thirties.  The structure of what is essentially a monologue is problematic.  It shifts abruptly and constantly in time and place with no apparent reason or connection, making it difficult to follow. …

Read More Read More

Time changes everything. Or at least it does when it comes to this show, a Nightswimming production directed by Brian Quirt.

I saw it last year at GCTC’s undercurrents festival and liked it. Delivered in storytelling fashion, it seemed a fresh, funny and smart retrospective on a young woman’s entree into the very adult worlds of political action (the narrator was a resistance fighter in General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile), love (she was drawn irresistibly to a dim but sensually magnetic Mexican she called “Vision Man”), and sex (she does enjoy it and worked in the sad, tawdry phone sex business for a spell).

My reaction to seeing it again, this time as part of GCTC’s regular season? The show is self-congratulatory, emotionally tepid and far too long.

Was it the intimate space of GCTC’s Studio theatre that helped make the show captivating last year? Was Aguirre just having an off-night when the show opened on the much larger main stage last week?

Hard to say, but revisiting the show was a disappointment. The terror that we should have felt when she was being followed by Chilean bad guys, for instance, was almost non-existent. The crazy affair with Vision Man? A little dull, actually, maybe because Aguirre’s sexual frankness – she immediately dispenses with the euphemism of “box,” for example – quickly loses its shock value, becoming predictable and (am I missing something here?) pointless.

There are some good moments when the narrator’s deeply felt anger about social injustice emerges, but such scenes are rare.

This remounting suggests the show should have just remained on the festival circuit.

 

Photo de Maria Vartanova

Family or country? Money or morality? These are the choices at the core of Arthur Miller’s 1947 drama All My Sons.Sparked by the case of an Ohio manufacturer, whose daughter reported him to the authorities for supplying the military with faulty machinery, All My Sons was Miller’s first award-winning drama.

Like Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955), All My Sons offers a portrait of a society, firmly rooted in its time and place, as well as focusing on human flaws and individuals at a pivotal point in their lives.

…

Read More Read More

 

Great dancing, plenty of glitz but little heart and no subtlety.

It seems virtually impossible that the brilliant 2000 movie Billy Elliot, adapted into a highly acclaimed award-winning musical could become such an unmoving show.

But, despite some strong performances and the occasional – very occasional – touching moment, this touring production does little more than go through the motions.

The story of the motherless Geordie kid from a poor mining town, who dreams of being a ballet dancer, should tug at the heartstrings, particularly set against the backdrop of a bitter strike in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s.

…

Read More Read More

 

Dec. 27th & 28th 8:00pm
Dec. 29th & 30th 3:00pm at The Gladstone Theatre

Blacksheep Theatre welcomes the Canadian Fringe Festival smash hit Vernus Says SURPRISE …

As Ken Godmere breathlessly thanked all his  team that created the soundscape of his new show -  where he only utters one single word -  he could scarcely contain his excitement, his  immense gratitude and the thrill of this first performance of his Ottawa Fringe appearance. It was  greeted with a  spontaneous  explosion of emotion and  pleasure  by an audience that hung on every movement, every facial twitch, every  recorded shuffle,  ring, knock, tick, rustle snap,  scrape and vocal sound  that filled the space of the capacity crowd in the  Leonard Beaulne studio. Standing ovations have become so commonplace on the Ottawa stage that they no longer mean anything, but in this case, it meant everything. It was real!  And Godmere deserved it.

…

Read More Read More

Coming to the Gladstone, Dec. 27-28-29

 Vernus says Surprise!    Technology can speed communication. Ask all the folks who cannot bear to be separated from their BlackBerrys, iPads, cellphones etc. But, for the generations that are more familiar with the horse-and-buggy era of face-to-face communication, it often results in isolation and confusion.

This is the key message of Ken Godmere’s Vernus Says Surprise, in which he presents a beautifully textured, almost wordless presentation of an 89-year-old man trying to navigate an electronically dominated world to buy a special birthday gift for his granddaughter.

The perfectly timed coordination of movement and soundscape, together with the visual of a shuffling, stooped-back old man with his pants up to his armpits and his too-short tie, create an extremely well conceived, well-executed and moving portrait with – as the title says – a surprise ending.

…

Read More Read More

Adapted by Ottawa playwright John Cook and presented by Plosive Productions, this story about belief, generosity and the Christmas spirit is thoroughly engaging family entertainment.

The story is best known in its 1947 film incarnation but translates well to the stage in Plosive’s presentation as a radio drama that takes us inside the broadcast studio. There, several actors and a sound effects person create a sweet-tempered tale about a little girl named Susan Walker (the expressive Kelty O’Brien) who discovers that Kris Kringle (Tom Charlebois) is real.

…

Read More Read More

Poster from the 1947 film featuring Edmund Gwenn. Photo from Art.com. Inc.

During the intermission a tiny tot of 4 years old…one of Santa’s elves no doubt, wearing a red tuque, was wandering through the audience with a big smile on his face. He told me he loved it!  Several other young francophone ladies from Lasalle High School for the arts were standing around munching cookies, also looking very pleased.!! That is the miracle of this play/musical/film/radio drama that Plosive theatre has chosen for the holidays. Bring your young ones. They will have lots of fun and leave feeling good, even if it might seem a bit schmaltzy for the more cynical of the older crowd looking for more interesting theatre. This is a piece of feel good fluff that works its magic, so don’t go expecting anything else. But it is a real treat for the children.

Valentine Davies’ novel has gone through multiple transformations: Four different screen scripts, several books for musical theatre, rewritten as radio plays and as texts for the stage. This version seems to be inspired by the Lux Radio Theatre broadcast adaptation as a radio play in 1948, featuring Edmund Gwenn as Kringle, who also played the role in the first screen version in 1947 where the essentials of this story first appeared on screen. A man who thinks he is Kris Kringle is being committed to a psychiatric hospital (not called that in those days) because no one believes that Kringle/Santa really exists. Lux Radio Theatre adapted some of the best plays of the theater repertoire and they were always performed before live radio audiences and this is where John Cook’s adaptation sends us – back to that era of Radio theatre where we the audience are in the studio watching the actors, musicians and sound effects people putting on a radio play. For me, that is the most interesting aspect of the show.

…

Read More Read More

Photo: Yves Renaud

For the second time this season Boston’s ArtsEmerson is playing host to a Montreal troupe. Early fall saw the return of Les Sept Doigts de la Main, a hybrid company that explores links between theatre and circus. December began with the experimental Lemieux Pilon 4D Art’s presentation of its intermedial La Belle et la Bête, complete with an updated plot.

Onstage actors relate to and with virtual ones. Of the three live characters, the Lady (Diana D’Aquila), Belle (Bénédicte Décary), and the Beast (Vincent Leclerc), only the latter appears in computer generated form, and then rarely. Belle, the young alienated artist usually dressed in black, attempts to work through the loss of her mother by hurling blood red paint at canvasses. The Beast, grief stricken because of the death of his beloved years earlier, lives alone in a castle metaphorically worlds away from Belle’s studio. His ugliness is barely suggested by facial scars, too faint to be seen by audience members sitting at a distance from the stage.

…

Read More Read More