I’ve loved this play ever since I saw the incomparable Ruth Gordon enchant her audience and everyone on stage in it as Dolly Levi some 56 years ago. What I did not know was that Wilder completed it in Stratford, Ontario when

Tyrone Guthrie invited him to work there on revising his unsuccessful source-play, The Merchant of Yonkers. In fact, Guthrie, Stratford’s founding director, won a Tony Award for best direction on Broadway with The Matchmaker. It now plays less often than the musical adapted from it, Hello, Dolly! ; but much of Wilder’s beloved wit and even a lot of his madcap farcical comedy get lost in the musical.

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John Muggleton (Valmont) and Venetia Lawless (la Merteuil)  Photo: Alan Dean

What do British singers Adele and David Bowie have in common with pre-French Revolution society?

Very little, it seems. Yet, recordings by the 24-year-old Adele and occasional pieces by 65-year-old Bowie are director Geoff Gruson’s choice of background (and too often intrusively foreground) music for the Ottawa Little Theatre production of Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons.

Based on the 1752 epistolatory novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the drama is about the evil games of rivals and former lovers, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, who use sexual connections to humiliate and destroy their victims.

Perhaps, Gruson intends the jagged disconnection between musical style and setting to raise awareness of the decadence of the French aristocracy and/or to point out that sexual degradation is timeless. However, the effect is more often jolting and starkly inappropriate for a period piece, particularly when a violinist in 18^th-century costume follows the opening of 21^st-century pop music.

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The maiden voyage of the Titanic — fueled by greed, incompetence, indifference and a rigid class structure — was a recipe for disaster. By contrast, the 1997 Peter Stone/Maury Yeston award-winning musical — firmly rooted in historical fact, music that recalls the period and (thankfully) devoid of sentimentality — is a recipe for success.

So is the beautifully sung Orpheus Musical Theatre Society production of Titanic the Musical — a work that is as much opera as it is traditional musical theatre.

The well-researched vignettes about a small selection of crew members and passengers from each of the three classes on board, gives a human face to the massive maritime disaster that is far more powerful than the horrendous statistics: 1,514 people drowned after the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg on April 15, 1912; just 710, most of them first-class passengers, survived. Many more of the 2,224 on board would have lived, if the ship had carried the requisite 54 lifeboats instead of just 20, but the ship’s owner, the White Star Line, and the designer opted for additional space on the luxurious first-class decks and cabins instead of safety. After all, the huge ship was touted as unsinkable, wasn’t it?

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This show is presented by Third Wall Theatre by the  Stichting Vrije Val/Muziektheatre Frank Groothof Production    in association with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands

Why couldn’t Van Gogh, who killed himself in 1890 at the age of 37, have integrated some of the joy of the sunflowers he painted so exuberantly into his own tormented life? That’s just one of the many questions Frank Groothof’s compelling one-man show provokes.

In Ottawa for a single night at The Gladstone Theatre,  the 75-minute production traces Van Gogh’s life from boyhood through the years of exploding creativity and growing obsessive behaviour to, ultimately, his death. Groothof plays both the painter and his younger, devoted brother Theo using a cap and increasingly agitated body language to depict the former and glasses and a gentle demeanour to capture the latter.

Recorded music from the 19th century and images of Van Gogh’s figure studies, portraits, and marvellous land and city scapes displayed on a large screen dovetail with the narrative.

It’s not a perfect piece of work. One wishes for a touch more insight into Van Gogh’s childhood, and Groothof, whose native tongue is not English, does muff lines. But like Van Gogh and his art, the well-paced show is both layered and passionate.

Figuren Theatre from Germany, featuring puppet master Mathais Kuchta has constructed a little village of cuddly almost life size puppets to tell the story of maman goat, her little goats and the big bad wolf. That Grimm fairy tale we have all heard is told in a very kindly grand fatherly way so as not to alarm the small ones, after all it’s not a nice story. This smooth talking seductive wolf weedles his way into the household while Maman goat is absent and swallows all her babies…all seven of them. We even hear his stomach gurgling as he digests his meal. It all works out but not until some terrible things happen to the wolf  and the billy goats run into the audience and hide among the children, much to their delight.

The performance at times did seem to be a bit too wordy but the round cuddly puppets came to life. the children had a great time and no one seemed frightened by that strange wolf with the huge stomach.

Lots of fun for the very young..around 3 years and up.

 

A production of Insite Arts from Australia, written, conceived, created and performed by Fleur Nobel.

This show is in a category of its own. Much too sophisticated to be billed as a children’s show it is essentially an experiment in intermedial performance techniques where film, puppetry, sculpture, drawing, choreography, photography, lighting effects, sound experiments all collide to create an inbetween space where all these techniques and technologies aquire new meanings. The children obviously enjoyed  it because it creates images that they have certainly never seen before and as for the rest of us, we came out wondering what had hit us.

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A prehistoric, prelinguistic fantasy where Moitié la francophone (Emmanuelle Zeesman) and  Please the Anglophone (Sharmila Dey) , wander around  in a world of brightly coloured chaos. They  grunt, and growl  snarl,  grab and roar. They have no inkling of civilised behaviour. Most of all they do not possess langauge, at least at first they don’t appear to,  and they don’t even know what it is to communicate. They express their basic instincts…like cave people.  They are hungry -  they grab food and stuff it in their mouth;  they are frightened – they protect themselves. They feel threatened – they draw territorial limits. they attack. They freeze they find what they can to cover themselves.   They have something they like, they  keep it. They have no concept of sharing of helping.

Then the situation evolves.   When it gets cold they need to exchange clothes. They are attracted to the other’s toys so they feel the desire to exchange toys.  The need for reciprocal comforts makes them try to communicate and eventually to share: Moitié in French, Please in English.  Little by little it works.

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Even the rare person who has never seen a production of Romeo and Juliet knows the fate of the young lovers from the outset. In the first place, William Shakespeare tells all in the prologue. Then, the young lovers’ names are frequently used as a metaphor for love and for a tragic ending to a love story.

In addition, it is one of the Bard’s most frequently performed plays. Not surprisingly, directors often try to insert a fresh take, offering a different time, place or even linguistic view. For example, in one of the most memorable versions that I have seen, Romeo stood on the back of a truck in the famous balcony scene, members of the warring families spoke either French or English and the rumbles (rather than token fights) between Montague and Capulet supporters were really intense.

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A searing and emotional examination of the power of memory and writing, Michel Tremblay’s The Real World? is set in two separate realities, one the here and now, the other the imagined world written and conjured into existence by Claude (Matthew Edison), the youngest of two siblings.

Characters crisscross though time, acting out confrontations between Claude, his mother, Madeleine, sister Mariette, and father, Alex, in the present – which may or may not be ‘the real world’ – and a past Claude has embellished in his play, a work of fiction he has – perhaps mistakenly – given his mother to read. Weaving his way through numerous arches, set against the sky blue backdrop of Charlotte Dean’s so real-you-can-smell-dinner, middle class living room, Claude is an occupant of two worlds, the present and his own envisioned past, the world of his play that his mother insists he created in a vain desire to be ‘interesting’.

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