The most puzzling thing about Cat’s Cradle, which tottered onto the Kanata Theatre stage the other day, as why anyone thought it was worth doing n the first place.

Furthermore the fragile fortunes of Leslie Sands’s dull psychological thriller are not boosted by the general lethargy of Susan Monaghan’s production.

When you start glancing at your watch to find out why the first act seems endless, only to discover you’re only 45 minutes into the performance, that’s a sign of a show in trouble.

To be sure, this February offering does have a few things going for it. Set designer Rom Frigon has given us a splendid representation of a vintage country inn in the England of the early 1960s. Marilyn Valiquette has supplied serviceable costumes. Actress Caro Coltman is persuasively in character as the landlady who may or may not have secrets to conceal. Martin Weeden exudes terrier-like authority as Sir Charles Cresswell, the embodiment of local privilege. And Douglas Cuff convinces as the world-weary police inspector who has returned to the scene of his greatest failure to make one more effort to discover the truth about the disappearance of a young child years before.

That mystery is supposed to be haunting all the play’s characters as they prepare for the wedding of the young, 19-year-old woman who may, in the blocked recesses of her mind, have knowledge of what actually happened to her missing sibling on that fateful day. But you wouldn’t know it from the tepid emotional temperature of this production. …

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Photo Maria Vartanova

Director Geoff Gruson is dead-on in keeping The Murder Room in top gear. If audiences are given time to think as they watch playwright Jack Sharkey’s send-up of the murder mystery genre unfold, they might focus on the many discrepancies and holes in the zany plot.

But, with Gruson at the helm of the Ottawa Little Theatre production of the quirky 1977 comedy, laughter and just the right level of melodrama are the order of the day.

As Mavis, the gold-digging villain of the piece, Irish O’Brien is appropriately flamboyant, faithless and fast-talking as she tries to murder her husband, Edgar, (a suave Michael McSheffrey) with the honeymoon less than a day old. McSheffrey handles his contrasting double role as the young and slightly bumbling police constable equally well. (The connection is explained, sort of….)

As the long-time housekeeper, Lottie, Kelly Fuoco is effective and funny as she emphasizes her loyalty to Edgar and his daughter, Susan, and her suspicion of Mavis, while Maryse Fernandes, as Susan, must focus on being the dimmest of Barbie types. Yet, despite her empty-headedness, she has attracted the attention of a young American millionaire (played with a strong Southern accent by Phillip David Merriman) and the pair arrives on the scene newly engaged. Rounding off the cast is Michael McCarville as the police inspector with a hidden agenda, charged with investigating Edgar’s sudden disappearance.

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Photo: Maria Vartanova

Who said murderous scenarios can’t be funny? The bumbling gang in Jack Sharkey’s farcical The Murder Room, mounted with vigour and tongue firmly in cheek at OLT, are downright hilarious as they grapple with being either ill-intentioned but wholly likeable baddies or easily distracted but self-absorbed goodies.

The plot, a spoofy spin on the classic British murder mystery with dashes of meta-theatre in the quick-draw dialogue, is straightforward despite the characters’ facility for turning the simplest event into a three-act drama. The lusty and deceptive Mavis Templeton (Irish O’Brien) decides to bump off her credulous new husband Edgar Hollister (Michael McSheffrey) so she can inherit his money and be with her lover. Suffice to say that things get complicated as others are drawn in including Edgar’s clueless daughter Susan (Maryse Fernandes), her dimbulb Yankee beau Barry Draper (Phillip David Merriman, whose American South accent is confusing), Hollister’s bustling housekeeper Lottie Molloy (Kelly Fuoco), and the tippling Inspector James Crandall (Michael McCarville). Also on hand: the investigatively challenged Constable Abel Howard Andrew (McSheffrey again).

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The plot (if that’s not too strong a word) of The Underpants revolves around the embarrassment of a repressed wife losing her underwear in a public place while watching the King’s parade.

Sadly, the primary embarrassment of the Theatre Kraken version of the German comedy is the poor quality of the production and some unfortunate directorial choices.

The play, as adapted from Carl Sternheim’s 1910 farce Die Hose, by actor/comedian Steve Martin, is more scatological and sophomoric in its humour than the social commentary on the German bourgeoisie of the period that seems to have been Sternheim’s intent.

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Steve Martin’s adaptation is the clue to this essentially expressionist based comedy by Carl Sternheim written in German in 1910. Directed by Don Fex, the play concerns a husband drowned in the bureaucracy of the Monarchy echoeing  Gogol’s wild Russian comedy The Revizor and foretelling  Kafka’s alienation within the terrifying bureaucratic state in the Trial (1925). It even suggests  tinges of antisemitism that pop up in the dialogue between Mr. Cohen and Theo, the tyrannical husband, an iconic pre-fascist bully typical of the prewar literatures of central Europe. However, once Steve Martin got his hands on it the time frame, the references all collapsed and gave rise to total chaos. We were left with something that is no longer linked to any particular historical period but that brings them all in as a hysterical salad whose ingredients are clearly left to the choice of director, Don Fex. In the background we hear Marlene Dietrich singing cabaret style songs from the 1920’s in the Blue Angel style; we hear military marches from the Austro-Hungarian pre WWI period, the suggestions lead us to believe we were in a pre-1914 period suggested by the women’s costumes which were quite beautiful . Although Gertrude’s bustle…which wasn’t really a bustle, was out of date already.

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Photo:  Keith Pattison 

Like the Tin Man, this version of The Wizard of Oz has a hollow ring because its heart is missing.

The emphasis is on the spectacle and technological wizardry. Such moments as the video of the tornado that transports the heroine, Dorothy, from Kansas to the other side of the rainbow into the fairytale Land of Oz may be breathtaking for some. The broom belonging to the Wicked Witch of the West that breathes fire, dragon-style, or the image of the menacing Wizard that is more over-the-top than Dr. Who may raise a gasp of admiration once. Just once.

But the key aspect of the production should be in caring about the characters, rather than simply viewing their passage through Oz from Munchkinland, through the scary forest and the Wicked Witch’s territory to the Wizard’s castle and back again to awaken in Kansas.

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Published in the Ottawa Citizen on December 30, 2015

 Photo: Daniel Swalec

There are some pretty cool videos depicting the tornado that sweeps Dorothy and her dog Toto from a Kansas farm and deposits them in Munchkinland. The broom belonging to the Wicked Witch of the West actually explodes into flame. Oz thunders like a petulant god. But modern technical effects aside, at its heart, the joyously executed musical The Wizard of Oz now playing to families at the NAC remains a story rooted in early 20^th century rural America when, at least to our contemporary eyes, a kind of pre-ironic innocence and belief that love and kindness could trump evil prevailed.

The production, drawn from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book and based on the classic 1939 movie with Judy Garland as Dorothy, wisely avoids updating the original story settings or trajectory.

The farm where Dorothy (the wholly convincing and powerfully voiced Sarah Lasko) feels unwanted by her distracted Auntie Em (Ottawa’s Emmanuelle Zeesman) and Uncle Henry (Randy Charleville) is vintage turn-of-the-century complete with a jerry-built generator that needs the whack of an axe to run.

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Once upon a time, at the very beginning of human time itself, long before we learned how to write, we told stories. Throughout history, oral stories were an important way of passing down information and a to understand the world. The drive to create, understand, and connect is one of the facets that makes us human and storytelling lets us express that desire. It is, therefore, a universal expression of our humanity. The Ottawa StoryTellers have been around for decades and exist to promote the art of storytelling in the community. Their 2015-2016 Speaking Out/Speaking In debut show, A Winter Tale: The Journey of the Blind Harper, tells of Turlough O’Carolan, Ireland’s famous blind harper of the 18th century. Written by Laurie Fyffe, Kim Kilpatrick and Emily Pearlman and performed by Kim Kilpatrick, Emily Pearlman and harpist Lucile Brais Hildesheim, the story enchants and delivers a cozy evening that spirits us away to far off lands, a long time ago.

A well-crafted story enchants us into its world. It seduces the audience to seamlessly blend their reality and its fiction into one experience. A good story teller sets the atmosphere, but allows the audience to build the sets, cast of characters, and add any details omitted from the telling. This can be overwhelming for the story tellers, but it can be just as intense for the audience. Both, in a sense, are laid bare on the stage. They have nothing to hide behind – no theatrical or technical tricks to hide behind; just words, and imagination.  …

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Photo: William Beddoe.  Lawrence Wall as the narrator.

From the 1920s through the 1940s and beyond, families regularly clustered around floor radios — the main source of electronic entertainment in pre-television days — to hear their favourite dramas. Their imaginations took flight, as the characters they heard (and saw in their minds’ eyes) transported them to new worlds.

One of the earliest of those places was the 100 Acre Wood — first presented by the BBC in a Christmas Day broadcast in 1925. The Wood was the home of Winnie the Pooh, the chief character in A.A. Milne’s classic children’s stories. (The inspiration for Pooh was the teddy bear that belonged to Christopher Robin, the author’s son, and several of the other animals who appear in the tales lived in Christopher’s toy box with the bear.)

Following its tradition of seasonal radio shows, Plosive Productions moves its version of stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends, adapted by David Whiteley, to North America. Eeyore the gloomy donkey, for example, is given a Southern drawl, apparently to make him sound even gloomier.

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Photo: William Beddoe`

This 7^th year of mainstage Radio-Shows by Plosive productions  marks the 90^th anniversary of the Winnie-the-Pooh Radio show as it was first broadcast by the BBC in 1925! What a fitting coincidence for A.A. Milne’s work that has become a classic text of young people’s literature. It can now be re-experienced by the generation that grew up reading Pooh stories, and it can also be rediscovered by the internet generation who might never read him but who has no doubt seen his animated movies.

That endearing bear of “very little brain” and his cohort of pals from the 100 Acre Wood come back to amuse us with this staged reading of David Whiteley’s adaptation from the original book and excerpts taken from the later (1929) version of the radio script. The original radio script was based on portions of articles and poems that the author first published in journals and magazines, before bringing all the written work together in his book in 1926.

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