Photo: Alan Dean

The popularity of the Jim Jacobs/Warren Casey 1972 musical Grease has always surprised me. The storyline is weak. The subliminal message is immoral (Put out if you want to get the guy) and most of the characters are one-dimensional.The positive aspect of the show is that it is a good vehicle for a display of high energy dancing and strong singing voices.While the Suzart production does feature some good voices and occasional bouts of lively dancing, the main impression is of a lack of energy. Verbal exchanges are stilted and punctuated with long pauses as the show drags along painfully slowly. The attractive but over-ambitious set causes further delays. For example, while it may seem a neat idea to have a car on stage, the action would move faster without all the movements required to bring it on and take it off.

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Photo de Marie-Claude Hamel.

Olivier Morin and Renaud Lacelle-Bourdon

This is a striking and engrossing piece of theatre, both because of the originality of the play and the highly imaginative work with the actors by director Catherine Vidal who is also responsible for the adaptation of the novel of the same name. The published work is one part of a trilogy composed of Le grand cahier, La prevue and Le troisième mensonge. The Grand Cahier is narrated alternatively by the voices of two male twin, young men who have been left by their mother in the care of their grandmother with whom they live through a disturbing family experience in an unidentified country ravaged by war.

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Photo: courtesy Axis Theatre Company

On one level, The Number 14 represents a brand of populist entertainment that finds humour in demented street people, fart jokes, picking your nose in public, peeing your pants, randy clerics, mooning and the use of a Cheesy as a phallic symbol.

So notwithstanding the hyperbole surrounding this 20^th anniversary production from Vancouver’s celebrated Axis Theatre Company — including the “classic” label applied to it by Eric Coates, artistic director of GCTC, which under whose umbrella the Ottawa engagement is happening — it seems sensible to keep things in perspective.

Under normal circumstances, much of the material in this zany catalogue of happenings on an imaginary Vancouver bus route could be dismissed as painfully sophomoric, dominated by the sort of calculated, nose-thumbing bad taste associated with mindless adolescents who refuse to grow up. In brief: entertainment for the Jackass crowd.

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Photo Barb Gray

If you’ve never seen the Axis Theatre Company’s clever and very funny production THE NUMBER 14, now’s your chance. Originally directed by Roy Surette, this version in the show’s 20^th season of touring is directed by Wayne Specht and features six incredibly versatile actors from Vancouver. The piece was developed by a group known as The Number 14 Collective.

The series of improvisational sketches provide a hilarious look at a day on a downtown bus. Using wonderful masks created by Melody Anderson, inventive costumes by Nancy Bryant, (one robe has printed on it “William Blake slept here”), and their own mobile and expressive faces the six performers play over sixty characters. Enhanced by Pam Johnson’s cartoon-like bus, Gerald King’s effective lighting and Douglas MacAulay’s excellent music and sound, the high-energy performers have the audience giggling and gasping to keep up.

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“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Lord Acton 1887

In playwright David Mamet’s view, as presented in his 2008 political satire November, Lord Acton’s dictum definitely still applies.

A week before election time, the polls show that current U.S. president Charles Smith is going to be a one-term failure. In a desperate attempt to hang on for a second term, he tries every legitimate and illegitimate way he can find to squeeze funds for a last-minute advertising campaign to boost his ratings.

In the SevenThirty Productions presentation of November, slickly directed by John P. Kelly, Todd Duckworth is simply terrific as the sinking president. Maintaining a knife-edge balance between humour and pathos, he is always believable, despite the excesses that Mamet has injected into his character.

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Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By is a quaint and funny drawing room farce about the rules we all live by and their more often than not absurd nature. The play is quintessentially early 20th century British and is delightfully sharp. Joe O’Brien’s production for the Ottawa Little Theatre stays true to Milne’s fun, light hearted spirit and, despite some off-putting details about the set, provides the audience with an entertaining evening.

The situation is delightfully ridiculous: Mr. Pim, portrayed by a delightfully befuddled  Barry Caiger, comes to the Marden’s residence in Buckinghamshire with a letter of introduction. Through his confused, babbling stories, the Marden’s learn that Mrs. Olivia Marden’s husband, whom she thought dead, is very much alive, making her a bigamist and George Marden, her very conservative, proper current husband, a sinner in the eyes of, according to him heaven and society. Of course, this is a farce and things aren’t always as simple as they seem at first glance. The story unravels with a case of mistaken identities and misunderstandings to its pleasant conclusion. Add to this a subplot of two young lovers, Dinah Marden and Brian Strange, trying to convince Mr. Marden to let them get married and you have a both absurd and fun situation. Though not as biting as the likes of Noel Coward (whose play Hay Fever was also part of the OLT’s 100th season), this is a delightful, pleasant comedy of manners, perfect for chuckling and relaxing to. …

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Photo: Alan Dean

Playful, fanciful, unpredictable — all synonyms for whimsical, the adjective that crops up frequently in reference to A.A. Milne’s comedy of manners, Mr. Pim Passes By.

Written in 1919 and first performed by Ottawa Little Theatre in 1922, it is a fitting representative of the decade during the 100^th anniversary season.

It is also a remarkable example of how views on morality and proper behaviour have changed in the intervening 90 years. The crisis created by Pim (or his faulty memory) causes the Marden family much distress in the context of the times. Today, it would probably be shrugged off or, at best, shoved under the carpet. How worried would a 21^st-century couple be to find that their marriage might be invalid and that they have been living in sin (gasp) even if they were the local justice of the peace and his spouse?

Appropriately presented as a period piece, the OLT production, directed by Joe O’Brien and costumed by Glynis Ellens, gives the sense of the early 20^th century, although occasionally performances are a little too campy for my taste.

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It’s easy to dismiss Mr. Pim Passes by as a mere trifle, a 93-year-old relic of British theatre as it once was. But to do so would be to undervalue both the material and A.A. Milne’s cunning and craftsmanship as a popular playwright. Indeed, it’s should be noted that for much of Milne’s long writing career, his immense reputation was not defined by the world of Winnie The Pooh and Christopher Robin but by his success in live theatre.

Plays like The Dover Road, Mr. Pim Passes by and The Man In The Bowler Hat (a deft confidence trick which used to be a staple of one-act play festivals) remain worthy of attention. So does the engaging production of Mr. Pim Passes By now on view at the Ottawa Little Theatre.

Still, one feels that the OLT revival, directed by Joe O’Brien, could have been even more of a romp. The production certainly aims for the right note of whimsy, beginning with a playful set design from Robin Riddihough. And it does feature some solid performances. However, it also seems stylistically uncertain, and this occasionally reduces the laughter quotient.

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Photo. Alan Dean

Yes, you can imagine the author of Winnie-the-Pooh writing this play. Inconsequential, unassuming and surprisingly engaging, A.A. Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By is a gentle bit of entertainment that finds a generally befuddled Mr. Pim (Barry Caiger) accidentally throwing a spanner into the marriage of the ultra-conservative George Marden (Robert Hicks) and his more liberal wife Olivia Marden (Jenny Sheffield). There’s other stuff involving an evolving relationship between a couple of younger folks, a bluff aunt shows up, and all comes right in the end.

Directed by Joe O’Brien, the show is well-paced, its simple beginning slowly gathering complications that are absurd to all but those involved. And like a Winnie-the-Pooh story, the characters tangle with questions of loyalty, right and wrong, and other issues without Milne’s ever becoming heavy-handed about it.

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Photo: Permission of the Théâtre La Catapulte

Marcel Dubé  is  one of those rare  playwrights   who left his mark on  Québécois  theatre in the 1950s, 60’s and 70’s  because of his tough  neo naturalistic  vision of the stage  that  was greatly influenced by American playwrights such as Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neil .  He was no doubt best known for  Un simple soldat (1958),  Les beaux dimanches (1968) and  Au retour des oies blanches  (1969).  Zone,  written in  1956 was first  translated into English is  1982. This version of Zone,  directed by Jean Stéphane Roy who is also the current artistic director of Théâtre La Catapulte has made some very minor changes in the text and  reorganized some scenes to correspond to his almost cinematographic vision of this production which is extremely powerful and   beautifully orchestrated from all perspectives.

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