Peter Froehlich and Kate Smith in Snapshot. Photo: Andrew Alexander

To celebrate its 10^th anniversary, Gruppo Rubato has chosen a play that tells us the company is moving into much more sophisticated territory.

Sitting on two sides of the small upstairs space in the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, the audience focusses on the lone figure of Dalton. As played by Peter Froehlich, his reaction is intense, unsentimental, but entirely engulfed in his enormous grief that almost paralyses him. Dalton is talking to his wife who has just died, he seems to be calling her up, saying they will soon be together again. The ultimate gesture is already very clear in the opening monologue as Froehlich slowly picks up the brown case where Dalton has stored his revolver. He sits down and puts the gun to his head! Suddenly his grand-daughter Charlie (Teddy Ivanova) arrives. But does she really?

…

Read More Read More

Very overrated, honeymoons — especially if you run into your ex-spouse on the adjoining balcony of the honeymoon hotel. Even more so when your stormy first marriage ended with an acrimonious divorce and the intensity of emotion is still simmering.

…

Read More Read More

Zoe Tupling  and Penu Chalykoff. Photo: Alan Dean

Being part of the melodramatically inclined Bliss family may be alternately divine or tragic. Being a guest in the Bliss country house is simply a nightmare.

The stark contrast between the Bliss family’s theatricality and the more normal approach to social interaction of the guests is at the heart of Noel Coward’s 1925 comedy of manners/verging on farce.

Coward was inspired to write Hay Fever — it took him just three days in 1924 — after visiting the home of U.S. stage and silent movie queen Laurette Taylor. (The script apparently marked the end of their friendship.)

…

Read More Read More

Photo: Alan Dean. A play that, in the author’s own words, has “no plot at all and remarkably little action,” Noel Coward’s Hay Fever is notoriously difficult to get right. While the playwright provides a sinfully witty script, the onus is on the actors to give meaning. Every phrase must be accompanied with a movement and a glance that is just so in this comedy of manners about a bohemian, slightly unhinged family who torment their unsuspecting weekend guests. The end result should be a comedy that resides in the half pauses and affected looks to be fund in between the words, rather than strictly the script itself. Tim Ginley’s production for the Ottawa Little Theatre is a valiant effort with some solid performances, but ultimately doesn’t quite live up to the script’s promise.

…

Read More Read More

Voilà la musique de « mon pays » explique Claude Naubert alors que la scène s’allume et les interprètes investissent le petit espace du Théâtre de l’ile devant la salle de 119 places plein à craquer. Rendre hommage à Félix Leclerc, la voix exquise de la chanson populaire québécoise, n’est pas une mince affaire et l’équipe de Sylvie Dufour  y a presque réussi.

Bien sûr, il n’était pas question d’imiter le chanteur . Il n’était pas non plus question d’en  faire une grande production bien léchée, bien au-delà des moyens du Théâtre de l’île.  Il s’agissait surtout de cerner l’ambiance intime, parfois poétique ce cette musique qui chante Le petit  bonheur, la vie de tous les jours des petits gens de « chez nous », ceux qui inspiraient  la vie créatrice de Leclerc qui allait des années 1950 jusqu’à la fin des années 1970.

La soirée s’est divisée en deux mouvements, dont chacun avait une orientation très différente.

…

Read More Read More

 

Rekindling memories and relearning language after a stroke are the paths to rebuilding a father/son relationship that has lain dormant for four decades. Ernie stepped out of his son’s life when his marriage failed, as his father did and as it now seems his son, George, is about to step out of his son’s life.

…

Read More Read More

I’ve often railed against the inevitable standing ovations given these days to most productions, however indifferent. For once the one following THE SECRET MASK by Rick Chafe at GCTC was well deserved and I joined in enthusiastically. This delicate play is a rare combination of heartbreak and humor and the first rate cast and production do it justice.

THE SECRET MASK tells the story of forty-year-old George who gets a call out of the blue to come help his father Ernie, who left the family when George was only two. Ernie is recovering from a stroke as well as aphasia, substituting odd words in his struggle to be understood with often laugh-out-loud results. As he says, “I fell down and when I got up I was an idiot.” In the process of getting to know each other they both begin to deal with the pieces that remain, not the ones missing.

…

Read More Read More

Reviewed Thurs., Sept. 13. Posted September 17.

Photo: Wayne Cuddington for the Citizen. Paul Rainville and Kate Hurman.

OTTAWA — It’s not exactly breaking news to say that communication often has little to do with words. But playwright Rick Chafe and the Great Canadian Theatre Company say it so eloquently in this alternately hilarious and touching show which opens the new GCTS season that their message bears almost endless repeating.
Chafe’s story, which he based partly on his experience with his own father, is richly textured emotionally but has a simple enough storyline.
An aging man named Ernie (Paul Rainville) has had a stroke, leaving him with yawning holes in his memory along with aphasia, a speech impairment. He can converse readily but balls up some words, calling his apartment a “square” thing for example.

…

Read More Read More

 

Photo: Wayne Cuddington, Ottawa, Citizen. Paul Rainville, Michael Mancini, Kate Hurman.

At one point in the play someone asks: “Is it possible for a stroke to change a whole personality?” The question seems naïve for anyone who has dealt with the situation first hand! For playwright Rick Chafe however, the answer becomes the premise which propels his play as the author sets up his encounter between Ernie (Paul Rainville) the absent father who has suffered a seriously debilitating stroke, and his angry, stressed out son George (Michael Mancini) who hasn’t seen his father for 40 years and who needs some answers . George only comes into Ernie’s life due to the insistence of the speech therapist Mae (Kate Hurman), a warm optimistic and ever smiling person who works with Ernie, who keeps telling him how wonderful he is and how much progress he is making. She is the intermediary who opens the dialogue, who keeps the communication between the two men flowing, who brings warmth and generosity into Ernie’s life, of which we know almost nothing. At least at the beginning. The play sets about to fill in the gaps.

…

Read More Read More

Richard Gélinas (Jake), Zach Counsil (Charlie). Photo: Andrew Alexander

The award winning Stones in His Pockets by Belfast-based playwright Sarah Marie Jones is set in County Kerry looking over Blasket Sound towards the beautiful Blasket Islands. Artist Merike Olo, has painted them on a flowing canvass, stretched out on a long mural along the back of an otherwise near empty stage. The romantic attraction of those islands is what brings in the Hollywood film crew. Local Irish “extras” with real accents, have been contracted as purely decorative elements, to give another “romantic” touch of authenticity to a passionate irish love story which rings false because all the principals are Americans, trying to master the local speak.

…

Read More Read More