Tag: NAC English Theatre

The Neverending Story: NAC’s production a visual feast which doesn’t quite gel with the story

The Neverending Story: NAC’s production a visual feast which doesn’t quite gel with the story

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Photo Emily Cooper

The Neverending Story is a testament to the importance of imagination and the power of stories. When life seems to be closing in around us, the story reminds us that imagination can be the force needed to start anew and lift ourselves up. It makes sense, then, that director Jillian Keiley’s production for the National Arts Centre – adapted by David S. Craig from Michael Ende’s popular novel – uses a number of different techniques to showcase imagination on stage, almost all of them visual. It’s clear that no expense was spared in creating the visually slick world, filled with magical creatures and highlighter-toned colours. It’s certainly visually striking. Unfortunately, the core story often feels forgotten at the service of the visuals, making the emotional impact of its message fall flat. …

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Old Stock: a Refugee Love Story, an Exploration of Resilience.

Old Stock: a Refugee Love Story, an Exploration of Resilience.

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Photo: Stoo Metz Photography. Old Stock with Ben Caplan

By Kennedy Fiorella, a student in the theatre criticism class of Yana Meerzon

Lived experiences provide a foundation for the creation of theatre which is deeply personal, and far-reaching, allowing all types of audiences some ability to connect with what is onstage. In Hannah Moscovitch’s Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, she carefully examines her own family’s history of immigration while creating an inclusive story of fear, acceptance, and hope. Through intricate weaving of emotionally harrowing scenes and energetic, enchanting musical performances, Old Stockdelivers an evening of captivating exploration that encapsulates the resilience of the settler experience in Canada while shedding light on the horrors of the past.

Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, is more then meets the title. Based on the true story of Moscovitch’s paternal great-grandparents, the play centers on Jewish-Romanian immigrants, Chaya(Mary Fay Coady), who travels with her family, and Chaim(Eric Da Costa), who travels alone, as they each flee their native Romania to escape the pogroms and meet in Halifax in 1908. They meet again once settled in Montreal, where  Chaim proposes that they pursue a happy life together, a difficult task, due to each of them holding onto traumatic memories and snapshots of their former homeland. …

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Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell is a great story that suffers from overproduction

Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell is a great story that suffers from overproduction

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Photo: Claus Andersen

Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell
NAC English Theatre Presentation
By Trina Davies
Directed byPeter Hinton

Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell is a story about love between two geniuses – the famous inventor of the telephone and a woman of exceptional intellect and strength.

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard (later Bell), who lost hearing to scarlet fever when she was five years old, coped with a world of silence with enormous willpower. Thanks to her curiosity, intellect and love for life, she achieved what a woman of her time would rarely dream of. …

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King of the Yees trips over its own plot.

King of the Yees trips over its own plot.

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It doubtless started out as a viable, if overstuffed, idea.

Write a comedy about the erosion of Chinese culture and tradition when it’s transplanted to contemporary America. Illustrate the resonant theme of cultural identity by making the two main characters the likeable Larry Yee, a 60-year-old father who honours tradition, and Lauren Yee, his thoroughly westernized, Ivy League school-educated daughter who makes her living as a playwright.

Weave in a loving-but-fraught relationship between father and daughter and a search for personal identity. Set the whole thing in Chinatown, say it’s a true story, and call it King of the Yees. …

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King of Yees: cluttered and confusing.

King of Yees: cluttered and confusing.

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King of Yee, courtesy of the NAC

 

 

King of the Yees is not the play that Lauren Yee set out to write — so says the character playing the playwright in the semi-autobiographical work. This is a hint that the comic drama could lack clarity. And it does. King of the Yees is about equal parts amusing and confusing and frequently seems to lack discipline.

The title character is the playwright’s father, Larry, a man steeped in tradition and committed to supporting his community, particularly through the Yee Fung Toy Family Association — a men’s club formed 150 years earlier — in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

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Vigilante cast keeps powerful Donnellys saga all in the familly

Vigilante cast keeps powerful Donnellys saga all in the familly

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Photo David Cooper Vigilante

They may sing tunefully and love their ma like crazy, but you wouldn’t want to mess with the Donnelly boys. They’re a potentially dangerous crew with a vigorous sense of survival, and in southern Ontario’s Biddulph Township circa the mid-19th century, that means one for all and all for one.

That spirit of family – especially a family under siege through no real fault of its own – is one of many themes raging like a river of blood through Vigilante, the extraordinarily powerful rock-opera by Edmonton’s Catalyst Theatre now playing the NAC. Catalyst Theatre’s Jonathan Christenson wrote, composed and directed Vigilante, a dark, swaggering and occasionally vulnerable show that spirits the Black Donnellys and their fight for survival to the level of the epic without once losing sight of the fact that these are real people in a real world.

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Power, Passion and Rocking Vigilante Justice

Power, Passion and Rocking Vigilante Justice

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Photo: DBP Photographics
Vigilante

Written, composed and directed by Jonathan Christenson. A Production of  Catalyst Theatre (Edmonton) in collaboration with NAC English Theatre

On February 4, 1880, an armed mob murdered five members of the Donnelly family and burned their farm to the ground. No one has ever been convicted for the massacre of the notorious Irish immigrants, despite two inconclusive trials. The vigilante justice imposed upon them was the culmination of an ongoing feud and conflict over land between the Black Donnellys and their neighbours in the township of Biddulph, southern Ontario. …

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The Colony of Unrequited Dreams: The Heart and Soul of the Rock

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams: The Heart and Soul of the Rock

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The opening night of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams at the National Arts Centre was attended by a who’s who of Newfoundland artists, Canadian politicians and journalists. It was appropriate of course as the play is an adaptation by Robert Chafe of Wayne Johnston’s novel that imagines what early influences might have created a character as enigmatic and colourful as Joseph Smallwood, the last father of Confederation and an enduring symbol of Newfoundland.

A work of fiction that speculates about the heart and soul of a very real character in Canadian history by blending history with invention makes for a compelling evening . It worked on every level. The characters both real and imagined are spellbinding. The dialogue crackles with the wisecracking wit that you find in the best of 40’s cinema. Chafe’s play makes me want to both read Johnston’s novel and discover more about this significant piece of history. …

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

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

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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 20th 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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Alice Through the Looking Glass at the National Arts Centre: nonsensical sense and visual wildfire for the contemporary gaze.

Alice Through the Looking Glass at the National Arts Centre: nonsensical sense and visual wildfire for the contemporary gaze.

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Photographer: Barb Gray. Karen Robinson as the Red Queen, Natasha Greenblatt as Alice.

When Jillian Keiley meets Lewis Carroll and James Reaney, I’m tempted to say that the witty story and vastly playful language of Carroll that hinges on all sorts of sly social comments (“words mean what you chose them to mean” says one of the characters) are soon taken over by a bouncy and colourful staging that plays directly to children’s fantasy. There are balloons, flying things , and all sorts of unimaginable props, with Bretta Gerecke’s complexly designed and striking costumes , Kimberly Portell’s magical lighting , John Gzowski’s sound, Jonathan Monro’s orchestrations and especially Dayna Tekatch,s choreography, all taking us in various directions at once . The production team stars in this fantasy that leads to pure visual chaos and muddles the narrative but it certainly holds the audience’s attention because of the visual excitement it generates, almost for its own sake where staging is based on non-stop gags and costumes that take your breath away.

Obviously the spirit of Carroll has been relocated in the visual which suits a theatrical language for young people because much of the book’s wit has a whole level that is not for children.

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