Playwright Stephen Massicotte’s storyline is appealing if predictable: boy (Charlie, played by Nicholas Maillet) meets girl (Mary, played by Emily Walsh) just as World War I breaks out. They fall for each other, ride around a bit on a horse (in this case, a wooden prop that no amount of imagination can turn into anything but a wooden prop), share tender moments, and eventually come to the end that too many young couples do in wartime.
Photo Wendy Wagner
You can never forget your first love, even on the eve of your wedding to someone else. This is the starting point of Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding. Set in 1920, the drama is part love story and part history of one of the lesser-known battles of the First World War.
On the night before her wedding, Mary is dreaming of Charlie, the farmboy who went off to ride into the jaws of death. Still filled with regret that she was too angry at his leaving to join the war effort to say a proper goodbye, she must come to terms with the past before she can embrace her future.
Poverty has a starring role in Irish playwright Marie Jones’ newest work, Fly Me to the Moon. If two personal care workers, Frances and Loretta, employed at minimum wage to look after Davey, an 84-year-old invalid, had not been so desperately poor, they would probably not even have considered pocketing his last pension cheque after his sudden demise. And when his last bet on a horse race comes in at 100-to-one, they might not have decided to cash in on that too.
Photo: Andrew Alexander
FLY ME TO THE MOON by Marie Jones, author of the popular STONES IN HIS POCKETS, is a very funny black comedy. Frances and Loretta are home care workers in Belfast who take care of the elderly Davy. Their normal work day takes a sudden turn when they discover that Davy has died in the loo. Their decision to collect his pension leads to one darkly comedic twist after another. It finally leads to their realization that they knew almost nothing about him, just that he liked Frank Sinatra and playing the horses.
Photo: Claude Haché
We go see plays for a number of reasons. Sometimes, it’s to take refuge from the real world in fiction. Other times, it’s to laugh or cry. Still other times, we seek to be blown away, gutted, stung by a story and left to pick up the pieces, one by one, for ourselves. Coupled with good directing and acting, these are the latter are stories that stay with us indefinitely, make us question what we think, and burrow themselves into our very being. John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God is just one such story and, under Marc-André Charron’s direction, 9th Hour theatre’s production lives up to the story’s potential.
When a stage musical begins as a movie, it is often a challenge to match audience expectations in the new format. This is even more so when the original version was an award-winning animated feature film. Yet, despite the restrictions that transferring the 1991 movie to the stage imposes, the 1994 stage version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast remains popular with audiences.
The touring production now in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre is glitzy, brash and bubbly. Complete with a mass of curlicues and 3-D effects, the set pieces evoke a children’s storybook—appropriately, as Beauty and the Beast began as a fairy tale.
The myth of various forms of “undead” creatures, who survive by feeding on their victims’ blood, has existed for millennia. The word “vampire” was first used in English literature early in the 18th century. Early in the next century, John Polidori was frequently credited with developing the genre in his 1819 novella, The Vampyre. But it was Bram Stoker’s Gothic horror novel, Dracula, that has left the most enduring mark on tales of the undead since its publication in 1897.
The best known stage version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the one originally written in 1924 by Irish actor and playwright Hamilton Deane and later revised by John Balderston. It has enjoyed a long and productive life and, as recently as 1977, received a successful New York revival starring Frank Langella as Western culture’s most famous vampire.
Even so, one can still make a case for a made-in-Canada version. The Death of Dracula, by the late Edmonton playwright, Warren Graves, is a deftly structured piece of theatre and in some ways more lively and less creaky than the Deane-Balderston adaptation. And its considerable virtues are often evident in Jo-Ann McCabe’s production for Ottawa’s Phoenix Players.
Photo by Alan Dean.
Murder can certainly disrupt a quiet weekend in the country and upset the servants. This is the first lady of the Angkatell household’s major worry when one of the houseguests, the philandering Harley Street doctor, John Cristow, is shot dead.
The killing happens after an unusually long and somewhat tedious exposition. In The Hollow, Agatha Christie’s adaptation of the 1946 novel of the same name, the whodunit doyen devotes more time than usual to nuances of character and relationships, so that the murder is close to an also-ran against such issues as estate entailment and love gained, lost and rearranged.
In the Ottawa Little Theatre production of The Hollow, director Jim McNabb has chosen to backdate the play 20 years from its original setting in the 1950s to give a little more leeway for melodrama and the magnification of the flamboyance of some of the characters. This works well with the already flamboyant Lady Angkatell (delightfully and joyfully played by Danielle Silverman) and to a lesser extent with Theresa Knowles as movie star Veronica Craye. (It is a little difficult to understand why she plays the English-born, transplanted to Hollywood actress with a deep south U.S. accent.)
Photo: Ottawa Citizen
Take a fine singer with a pleasant personality equally at home in English or French. Add a first-class accompanist at the piano.Present in an intimate setting.This is a recipe for a terrific concert. And that is just what multi-award winner Louise Pitre provided in Perth on Friday, October 19. Whether she performed one of the songs from the hit musical Mamma Mia, in which she starred in Toronto and on Broadway, or an Edith Piaf song such as La Vie en Rose, she took her own advice to contestants in the CBC show Over the Rainbow — she is one of the judges — to feel the song and interpret the emotions in it honestly.