musical theatre Archives - Page 4 of 7 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Tuneful Patsy Cline in Gananoque

By Capital Critics Circle | May 26, 2016

Tyler Murree, Alison MacDonald and David Archibald; Photo: Barbara Zimonick

A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline
By Dean Regan
Produced in association with Western Canada Theatre, Kamloops, BC
Directed by Daryl Cloran
1000 Islands Playhouse

I’m not sure what to say about “A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline” by Dan Regan, except that it’s not really a musical. It’s more a terrific concert or night club act. Loosely structured as a radio show tribute to Patsy Cline, it’s emceed by Little Big Man, played by the energetic and versatile Tyler Murree. We see Patsy, the excellent Alison MacDonald, only in performance, never in her off-stage persona. A few sparse biographical details are supplied by Little Big Man. Entertaining diversions are added by the insertion of old radio commercials for Mr. Clean and Ajax, performed by Little Big Man and the great on-stage band.

Ross Nichol’s versatile set has a raised broadcast booth stage right, the 4-piece band is on raised platforms center, and the whole framed stage left by two dimensional giant radios. There’s a scrim up center on which are projected the names of the various venues where Patsy performs. Of Patsy’s multiple costumes by Jayne Christopher, by far the most flattering is the Act II long black gown. Davida Tkach’s lighting is good and Ben Malone’s sound is excellent and well balanced. …

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The Sound of Music: Maria Connects but tempered voices are tedious

By Patrick Langston | April 17, 2016

If you’re a nun suffering from insomnia, just book a berth in the cavernous abbey depicted in this production of The Sound of Music. The place is so immensely boring, so circumscribed by tempered voices and looming, dark spaces, that you’ll be snoozing in seconds.

In fact, one suspects that the real reason Maria abandons a career in a wimple for life with the von Trapps is to avoid death by tedium.

You already know the storyline of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s famous musical — Maria Rainer, a postulant at an Austrian abbey in the dark days of the advancing Third Reich, takes a temporary job as a governess with the von Trapp family, falls in love with the adorable but emotionally undernourished children and their rule-loving widower father Captain Georg von Trapp, teaches them all to sing again, marries the captain, and flees the Nazis with her new family.

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Matchstick. A pair of winning stage presences but the aura of spontaneity diminishes as the material progresses

By Jamie Portman | January 26, 2016

Photo: Barb Gray

The first point to be made about Matchstick, GCTC’s new winter offering, is that it Nathan Howe and Lauren Holfeuer are a pair of winning stage presences.

The second is that Howe, wearing his creator’s hat, has attempted a genuinely original script — one which, in its fusion of word and often delightful music, tells the story of a young girl named Matchstick whose yearning for a better life leads to a calamitous relationship.

The third point is that the material is delivered in a visually imaginative and often enchanting production package. Director Kristen Holfeuer’s excellent collaborators include David Granger (set), Bill McDermott (lighting) and Jessica Gabriel and Chloe Ziner (projections). Particularly, in the first part of the evening, with bold and colourful fairy-tale images on a scrim and arresting puppet silhouettes that are not quite of this world, this is a show that repeatedly seduces us into its magic.

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Sondheim on Sondheim: An Evening with the Great Man and His Music

By Jane Baldwin | January 20, 2016

Photo Mark S. Howard

Boston’s Lyric Stage, a professional theatre company, demonstrates its commitment to the city by hiring mainly local performers, musicians, and technicians. It shows its commitment to talent through its long-term policy of inclusive casting. The majority of their productions are new American plays that have recently been released to the regionals. Artistic director Spiro Veloudos has a particular fondness for musical theatre.

Veloudos’s current show, Sondheim on Sondheim, devised by James Lapine, is a paean to the great composer-lyricist. It is at once a live musical revue and a filmed documentary. Sondheim wrote one new number for it, the autobiographical God. Set designer, David Towlun and lighting designer Chris Hudacs create the impression of Broadway at the opening with two glittering marquees that cover the Lyric’s upstage balconies. Later, the marquees become screens projecting images that pertain to Sondheim’s life. Center stage, hangs an enormous screen, primarily used to show interviews with Sondheim at various stages of his more than half-century career. The actors perform on a rectangular platform and the stage itself.

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Violet: A Stirring Musical

By Jane Baldwin | January 15, 2016

Photo: Glenn Perry. “Alison McCartan and Dan Belnavis in Speakeasy Stage production of Violet.

The 2015-2016 season marks Boston’s SpeakEasy theatre’s twenty-fifth year. To celebrate the event, artistic director Paul Daigneault has brought back the musical Violet, which he first staged in 2000.

Violet is a dramatic and emotional piece, composed by Jeanine Tesori, adapted from Doris Betts’s story “The Ugliest Pilgrim” by the lyricist Brian Crawley. It is somewhat expressionistic in style in that it is achronological, moving back and forth from Violet’s childhood to 1965, the play’s present. As a young girl (Audree Hedequist), was struck in the face with an axe and left disfigured. How disfigured, the audience never learns, since the actress’s face is unmarked. Other characters comment on her scar, but we see no one shun her. Self-conscious, she keeps a lock of hair covering one side of her face much of the time.

Having inherited a little money after her father’s death, the adult Violet (Alison McCarten) takes a Greyhound from the small town of Spruce Pine in North Carolina to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the hope of being miraculously cured by a television evangelist (John F. King). She dreams of looking like the movie stars in the magazines she pores over.

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Winnie-the-Pooh: A Retreat Into Nostalgia

By Jamie Portman | December 12, 2015

Photo: William Beddoe. Chris Ralph (Winnie) and David Gerow (Eeyore)

There’s something decidedly inviting about the shared pleasure of spending time with Winnie The Pooh and his friends.

So you’re conscious of a strong sense of community when you arrive at the Gladstone Theatre for Plosive Productions’ latest Christmas bow to the glory days of radio.

In this instance, it’s a simple matter of audience members engaging in a special way with the people at the microphones. And the task of Winnie-the-Pooh: The Radio Show is to recreate through voice and a bit of body language the magical world created by author A.A. Milne in his Pooh Bear tales.

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Anne and Gilbert: A slick, attractive production and a worthy sequel to the 1965 musical Anne of Green Gables.

By Iris Winston | December 7, 2015

Photos by Barbara Gray

Now a decade after its creation, Anne and Gilbert The Musical is firmly established as not only a worthy sequel to the much loved 1965 musical Anne of Green Gables, but also as a Canadian theatre standard.

Based on Lucy Maud Montgomery’s second and third novels about the feisty red-haired orphan, Anne and Gilbert follows her adventures at Redmond (a.k.a. Dalhousie University). She makes a new friend, the wealthy Philippa, finds a new beau in Roy and continues to deny that she loves Gilbert Blythe — when everyone else knows otherwise.

Knowing how the story will end is of no importance. Anne and Gilbert is primarily a celebration of a way of life in a small island village in the early 20^th century. (Little wonder that P.E.I. tourism has set up a booth, complete with assorted Anne souvenirs, in the NAC lobby. A catchy number such as You’re Island Through and Through tempts you to take a trip to the island.)

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THe Adventures of a Black Girl: an ambitious but unsatisfying struggle

By Patrick Langston | October 24, 2015

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Photo: Black Theatre Workshop

The struggle to find and hold onto that hope, love and faith impels the action and characters of Adventures, an ambitious and, in the production that opens the new NAC English Theatre season, ultimately unsatisfying show that blends drama and comedy with song and movement, the ever-present spectre of death amid the bloom of life, and the story of a family and its community.

The play (its name comes from a George Bernard Shaw short story) premiered in 2002, launching Toronto’s black Obsidian Theatre company. It was then picked up for several months by Mirvish Productions. The current revival, directed by Sears as was the première, played Montreal’s Centaur Theatre before coming to the NAC.

With its cast of 22, the play is set in a 200-year-old black community in southern Ontario. At its heart are Rainey, a young black woman played by Lucinda Davis, and her aging father Abendigo.

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Next to Normal: Indie Women productions triumphs at Centrepoint!!

By Alvina Ruprecht | October 23, 2015

Photo: Mike Heffernan. Skye MacDiarmid, Derek Eyamie, Jeremy Sanders.

Singer-actress Skye MacDiarmid, repeats her amazing portrayal as Diana, a bipolar mother suffering from a combination of affective disorders including depression and PTSD as the result of the early death of her son Gabe. MacDiarmid again takes over the stage this time in the Centrepoint studio, just as she did last year at the Gladstone theatre. Her strong acting skills, her dramatic voice, and her immediate burst of talent carries us off to a realm of theatre that makes the reality of the situation much easier to watch. The script is down to earth, the characters are down to earth, and we find great strength in watching this family drama, as it unfolds around a subject matter that is not easy to watch but that keeps us deeply involved.

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Avenue Q is a winner in Every Way.

By Jamie Portman | June 18, 2015

Photo: Courtesy of Allan Mackey.

The cheerful, uninhibited ribaldry of Avenue Q may well jolt some theatregoers. But they’re more likely to be disarmed by this essentially sweet-natured musical satire about life in a run-down apartment building on the wrong side of the tracks.

Ottawa’s Toto Too Theatre’s new production is a triumph — and a notable one. After all, this enterprising local company could have stumbled badly when it decided to tackle this long-running but challenging Broadway hit.

The show’s creators — Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty — have created an infectious combination of witty word-play and toe-tapping music. They have stocked their comic playground with a collection of engaging and generally endearing neighbourhood types. But we’re also getting a mischievous, albeit affectionate, send-up of Sesame Street here, along with some R-rated moments that are clearly not intended for the moppet brigade. That means that puppets — and, more specifically their effective use on stage — are integral to the success of any production of Avenue Q. Without effective puppetry, the material falls flat.

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