Last weekend, I saw Jordi Mand's latest play, CAUGHT, in the intimate Passe Muraille Backspace. The Backspace is one of my favourite theatres in the city, not for comfort or beauty, but for the intimacy of the playing space, and the way the small room intensifies the experience of being in a theatre.
It was a perfect choice of venue for CAUGHT, which is set in a tiny, soulless, concrete security room in a mall somewhere in Toronto.
A 30-something female security guard (Sabryn Rock) has apprehended a young male suspect (Jakob Ehman channelling his inner weasel) with a backpack full of stuff he's shoplifted. It's an amount of merchandise valued at over $2000, so the police are called. The young man is remarkably inventive and incredibly slimy in his myriad attempts to extricate himself from a situation he's created. The verbal sparring match between the guard and the kid alternates between fraught and frisky.
Then the police officer arrives ( a note perfect Meewun Fairbrother). Turns out he and the security guard know each other, and not just from the mall. Then, the cat and mouse games get really interesting.
Sarah Garton Stanley balances tension and humour in the production to
good effect. There's great chemistry between the actors and the
performances are all good. Rock is particularly impressive, showing us
the anger and bitterness in a woman who works in justice, but receives
almost none in her own life.
Mand is a very smart writer. As she did in BETWEEN THE SHEETS she uses a highly charged situation to explore issues of status and power: who has it, who wants it, and what people will do to turn a situation to their advantage and make a power grab.
In CAUGHT, she examines what it really means to be trapped in a range of contexts: in an illegal act, in a dead-end job, on a rung of the professional ladder, in a bad relationship. Who escapes, how, and why are all touched on, although some of the issues she raises feel like they get short shrift.
The program says the play runs 75 minutes but I think it was closer to an hour, not really enough time to fully delve into the rich subject matter. I really enjoyed most of CAUGHT. The ending, alas, while blackly droll, feels rushed, and not as evolved as the rest of the play. I think there's more to this story, and that perhaps Mand hasn't quite finished writing the play yet.
What's here is taut , provocative and very engaging, with a lot of food for thought about who gets off the hook, and why.
CAUGHT continues at THEATRE PASSE MURAILLE's Backspace until April 24. http://www.passemuraille.ca or call: 416 504 7529
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Sunday, April 10, 2016
REVIEW: Performing Misogyny: KILLER JOE at COALMINE THEATRE
I had an experience on Friday night that I don't have very often. I walked out of a theatre at the end of a performance, shaking with disgust and rage.
Coalmine Theatre is currently staging Tracy Letts' 1993 play, KILLER JOE.
The actors: Madison Walsh, Matthew Edison, Matthew Gouveia, Paul Fauteux, Vivian Endicott-Douglas all do fine work, physically and emotionally. The play is very well directed by Peter Pasyk who cranks up the characters' despair, and the danger of their situation to terrifying effect. The set and lighting by Patrick Lavender work really well. Jenna McCutchen's costumes are appropriate, if a bit on the nose.
The play itself, alas, is ghastly. This is a great production of a singularly nasty, misogynistic piece of writing, rooted in textbook Southern Gothic territory, with not a cliche left unturned.
Letts wrote AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, the Pulitzer Prize winning play about a dysfunctional family with a drug addict matriarch. We're in similar territory here in terms of familial dysfunction, but with a whole lot less finesse and a lot more violence, sexual and otherwise.
KILLER JOE was Letts' first play. He wrote it when he was 25. The set up is not bad, some of the dialogue is pretty good, and occasionally, someone gives a good speech. It's not that the guy didn't show promise.
Letts claims to have been heavily influenced by pulp fiction noir when he wrote it. His plot owes a debt to noir, and its characters to both David Mamet and Sam Sheppard.
His female characters here makes Mamet look like a guy at the vanguard of feminism. The women in KILLER JOE are a sloppy mash-up of tropes derived from violent porn and bad television crime drama. I suspect if Letts had not won a major prize for a latter creation, this ugly, pointless little tome would never see the light of day.
The action is confined to the interior of a grimy trailer somewhere in Texas, complete with a junkyard dog outside, and and a big television inside. The dog barks a lot and the TV is usually on. The occupants of the trailer are the Smiths: father Ansel (Fauteux with a Duck Dynasty beard), step-mother Sharla (Madison Walsh oozing sexual agency), and Ansel's daughter from a previous marriage, Dottie (Vivien Endicott-Smith as a hot mess of a kid). The Smiths drink beer from a can, smoke weed and eat tuna casserole.
On a dark and stormy night (yes, really) Chris, Ansel's son from his previous marriage (a terrific Matthew Gouveia), arrives to borrow money. Sharla greets him at the door wearing a cropped t-shirt and nothing else. There's a good page of dialogue about her state of dishabille in the middle of the night, in her own home. Why the man of the house wasn't the one to answer the door at that hour is never discussed or explained. Can you say gratutious nudity for shock value?
Sharla takes her naked derriere off to bed, while Chris explains to his father, that his biological mother, the thieving, alcoholic Adele (who we never meet) has thrown him out of the house because he slammed her into the fridge, with reason, apparently. Adele, Chris claims, has purloined a stash of coke he was planning to sell to settle a debt with a drug dealer. Now he has no coke and no money, and the unhappy drug dealer wants him to settle up, stat, or else.
Chris and his father conspire to hire a contract killer, the Killer Joe of the title, to murder Adele, and collect on her life insurance policy, of which Dottie is the apparent beneficiary. How or why Chris and Ansel think they are going to get Dottie's money is one of the play's many mysteries of construction.
Chris would like to use his portion of the money to start a farm, somewhere he can grow dope and raise rabbits. He had a farm and rabbits once upon a time, but raising things requires thought, care and attention and the Smiths are not thoughtful, not careful, and not attentive. They are borderline feral, easily distracted, driven by impulse, and not especially bright. Their schemes do not go well, and this one is no exception.
Since all this machinating goes down in a trailer, which is an acoustically transparent domicile, both Dottie and Sharla are aware of the plans of the menfolk. Also Ansel tells Sharla, well, because, she's his wife. Sharla, it turns out later, has plans of her own.
Killer Joe is a corrupt cop, a sociopath with nice manners when he chooses, and a thing for little girls. Matthew Edison does a great job of showing us a tightly wound menace.
Since the Smiths can't furnish Joe with his usual cash upfront deposit, he takes their virginal daughter, Dottie, as a retainer. Is Dottie 20, as she initially tells Joe, or 12 as she says later?
Sharla psychologically grooms Dottie, the virgin, for her deflowering by suggesting she serve a salad and rolls with the casserole and wear a dress to dinner. Sharla's collection of penis photos (which turns up again later in a different context) make an initial appearance in this unsavory discourse.
Then Joe arrives with flowers, for their "date" and the family leave Dottie alone with him. Post-casserole, he forces Dottie to get the dress she has told Sharla, then Joe, that she didn't want to wear and put it on. First though, he has her strip naked and put the dress on with nothing under it. After that, he has her stick her hand down his pants. We get to watch this because, apparently, the playwright felt we needed to see both actresses frontally nude. No man takes his clothes off in the entire play, although a few turn up in their underwear. ( In fact, Mr. Edison did respond to a door being kicked opened by appearing buck naked near the end of the play, I have been reminded by the company's publicist. My apologies to Mr. Edison for overlooking this in my earlier report. No slight was intended to his performance or his person. My middle aged eyesight being what it is, perhaps I'm simply losing my ability to see certain things well at a distance, in a fairly dark room.)
After this sexual assault/courtship, Joe moves in with Dottie in the trailer. Why a police officer with a contract killing business on the side doesn't take her somewhere more comfortable for their assignations is never really dealt with. It does serve as a convenient plot devise in machinating the play's graphically violent end.
In an early monologue of Joe's, he's quite clear that he doesn't likes grown women, and doesn't trust them. He does quite enjoy dominating, sexually degrading and brutalizing them, as he viscerally demonstrates, as the play builds towards a bloody climax.
That particular scene is so physically violent I actually feared for the actress' safety. Watching Joe abuse Sharla is like being stuck in the Big Ears Teddy chair on date night at Jian Ghomeshi's place.
Please, don't anyone write me any long-winded comments on how Joe is a metaphor for the way the American state and its agents treat its disenfranchised. Tennessee Williams' 27 WAGON FULLS OF COTTON or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or anything by Faulkner or Steinbeck does a much better job of that.
It's a pity COALMINE has squandered so much talent and effort on such a lousy, sexist play.
KILLER JOE continues at the Coalmine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Avenue, east of Coxwell Station, Tuesday to Sunday at 7:30 PM, until April 24th.
Coalmine Theatre is currently staging Tracy Letts' 1993 play, KILLER JOE.
The actors: Madison Walsh, Matthew Edison, Matthew Gouveia, Paul Fauteux, Vivian Endicott-Douglas all do fine work, physically and emotionally. The play is very well directed by Peter Pasyk who cranks up the characters' despair, and the danger of their situation to terrifying effect. The set and lighting by Patrick Lavender work really well. Jenna McCutchen's costumes are appropriate, if a bit on the nose.
The play itself, alas, is ghastly. This is a great production of a singularly nasty, misogynistic piece of writing, rooted in textbook Southern Gothic territory, with not a cliche left unturned.
Letts wrote AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, the Pulitzer Prize winning play about a dysfunctional family with a drug addict matriarch. We're in similar territory here in terms of familial dysfunction, but with a whole lot less finesse and a lot more violence, sexual and otherwise.
KILLER JOE was Letts' first play. He wrote it when he was 25. The set up is not bad, some of the dialogue is pretty good, and occasionally, someone gives a good speech. It's not that the guy didn't show promise.
Letts claims to have been heavily influenced by pulp fiction noir when he wrote it. His plot owes a debt to noir, and its characters to both David Mamet and Sam Sheppard.
His female characters here makes Mamet look like a guy at the vanguard of feminism. The women in KILLER JOE are a sloppy mash-up of tropes derived from violent porn and bad television crime drama. I suspect if Letts had not won a major prize for a latter creation, this ugly, pointless little tome would never see the light of day.
The action is confined to the interior of a grimy trailer somewhere in Texas, complete with a junkyard dog outside, and and a big television inside. The dog barks a lot and the TV is usually on. The occupants of the trailer are the Smiths: father Ansel (Fauteux with a Duck Dynasty beard), step-mother Sharla (Madison Walsh oozing sexual agency), and Ansel's daughter from a previous marriage, Dottie (Vivien Endicott-Smith as a hot mess of a kid). The Smiths drink beer from a can, smoke weed and eat tuna casserole.
On a dark and stormy night (yes, really) Chris, Ansel's son from his previous marriage (a terrific Matthew Gouveia), arrives to borrow money. Sharla greets him at the door wearing a cropped t-shirt and nothing else. There's a good page of dialogue about her state of dishabille in the middle of the night, in her own home. Why the man of the house wasn't the one to answer the door at that hour is never discussed or explained. Can you say gratutious nudity for shock value?
Sharla takes her naked derriere off to bed, while Chris explains to his father, that his biological mother, the thieving, alcoholic Adele (who we never meet) has thrown him out of the house because he slammed her into the fridge, with reason, apparently. Adele, Chris claims, has purloined a stash of coke he was planning to sell to settle a debt with a drug dealer. Now he has no coke and no money, and the unhappy drug dealer wants him to settle up, stat, or else.
Chris and his father conspire to hire a contract killer, the Killer Joe of the title, to murder Adele, and collect on her life insurance policy, of which Dottie is the apparent beneficiary. How or why Chris and Ansel think they are going to get Dottie's money is one of the play's many mysteries of construction.
Chris would like to use his portion of the money to start a farm, somewhere he can grow dope and raise rabbits. He had a farm and rabbits once upon a time, but raising things requires thought, care and attention and the Smiths are not thoughtful, not careful, and not attentive. They are borderline feral, easily distracted, driven by impulse, and not especially bright. Their schemes do not go well, and this one is no exception.
Since all this machinating goes down in a trailer, which is an acoustically transparent domicile, both Dottie and Sharla are aware of the plans of the menfolk. Also Ansel tells Sharla, well, because, she's his wife. Sharla, it turns out later, has plans of her own.
Killer Joe is a corrupt cop, a sociopath with nice manners when he chooses, and a thing for little girls. Matthew Edison does a great job of showing us a tightly wound menace.
Since the Smiths can't furnish Joe with his usual cash upfront deposit, he takes their virginal daughter, Dottie, as a retainer. Is Dottie 20, as she initially tells Joe, or 12 as she says later?
Sharla psychologically grooms Dottie, the virgin, for her deflowering by suggesting she serve a salad and rolls with the casserole and wear a dress to dinner. Sharla's collection of penis photos (which turns up again later in a different context) make an initial appearance in this unsavory discourse.
Then Joe arrives with flowers, for their "date" and the family leave Dottie alone with him. Post-casserole, he forces Dottie to get the dress she has told Sharla, then Joe, that she didn't want to wear and put it on. First though, he has her strip naked and put the dress on with nothing under it. After that, he has her stick her hand down his pants. We get to watch this because, apparently, the playwright felt we needed to see both actresses frontally nude. No man takes his clothes off in the entire play, although a few turn up in their underwear. ( In fact, Mr. Edison did respond to a door being kicked opened by appearing buck naked near the end of the play, I have been reminded by the company's publicist. My apologies to Mr. Edison for overlooking this in my earlier report. No slight was intended to his performance or his person. My middle aged eyesight being what it is, perhaps I'm simply losing my ability to see certain things well at a distance, in a fairly dark room.)
After this sexual assault/courtship, Joe moves in with Dottie in the trailer. Why a police officer with a contract killing business on the side doesn't take her somewhere more comfortable for their assignations is never really dealt with. It does serve as a convenient plot devise in machinating the play's graphically violent end.
In an early monologue of Joe's, he's quite clear that he doesn't likes grown women, and doesn't trust them. He does quite enjoy dominating, sexually degrading and brutalizing them, as he viscerally demonstrates, as the play builds towards a bloody climax.
That particular scene is so physically violent I actually feared for the actress' safety. Watching Joe abuse Sharla is like being stuck in the Big Ears Teddy chair on date night at Jian Ghomeshi's place.
Please, don't anyone write me any long-winded comments on how Joe is a metaphor for the way the American state and its agents treat its disenfranchised. Tennessee Williams' 27 WAGON FULLS OF COTTON or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or anything by Faulkner or Steinbeck does a much better job of that.
It's a pity COALMINE has squandered so much talent and effort on such a lousy, sexist play.
KILLER JOE continues at the Coalmine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Avenue, east of Coxwell Station, Tuesday to Sunday at 7:30 PM, until April 24th.
Sunday, April 3, 2016
REVIEW: A Haunting Production of CRACKWALKER Ends the Factory's Season
Last Saturday night, I saw Judith Thompson's CRACKWALKER at the Factory Theatre. She wrote the play in 1979, and it made her famous.
The text more than stands the test of time. Thompson directs her own remount. While the staging is occasionally problematic, the performers more than make up for any directorial shortcomings. Their commitment and intensity make this a searingly memorable night of theatre.
The floor painting centre stage by Randi Helmers is rendered in the colours of the four directions. As grinding poverty, addiction, mental health problems and just plain bad luck push and pull on the characters, their lives are torn apart.
The Crackwalker of title is a homeless native man, living on the streets in a small Ontario city. Waawaate Fobister makes him a kind of trickster, who floats over and through the story, turning up, like trouble, when you least need or expect him. It's a memorable performance with beautiful physicality.
Another painting hangs above the stage: the headless torso of a woman's body with an open, bleeding womb, positioned between two headlights. The painting depicts an accident in which the viewer is both complicit and paralytic. It mirrors the play in which we witness an awful tragedy that seems impossible to stop.
Theresa is a young, intellectually challenged woman on social assistance, turning tricks in dive bars for pocket money. When Fobister lovingly places a rainbow tutu on Theresa, he appears to be grooming her for a lover. In fact it's a garland draped on a sacrificial lamb.
The play centres on two couples: Theresa and Alan, and Joe and Sandy.
Sandy, a tough, aggressive bartender lives and brawls in a sexually charged, punishing relationship with her alcoholic, abusive partner, Joe. Greg Gale seethes as Joe and plays the character on a knife edge. Joe is a victim of the vagaries of the economy as much as he's an abuser and his drunken fits of rage wax and wane with the state of his employment. When he comes home to try repair their relationship after disappearing months before to get work, Claire Armstrong gives a brilliant depiction of a woman who can't shake her love for an abusive man.
Theresa and her boyfriend Alan are a different kind of heartbreak. He truly loves her, but his obsessions and paranoia caused, in part, by the awful death of his father, have left him wary of institutional medicine and authorities in general. At first, he just seems like a good-hearted crackpot. When their baby arrives, and Joe becomes a breadwinner and a father to a sick baby, he cracks beneath the strain of overwhelming responsibility, with tragic consequences. Stephen Joffe gives an excellent performance as a fragile man in free-fall.
The character of Theresa is the lynchpin of the production. Yolanda Bonnell is fearless in showing a woman who is so passive, she's incapable of acting in her own best interest. She says what she thinks other people want to hear, and does as she's told. In a wrenching scene off the top, she's living on Sandy's couch, having run away from an abusive caregiver. Sandy accuses her of having an affair with Joe. Theresa explains Joe came home drunk and raped her. When Joe comes home, drunk yet again, and molten with suppressed rage, Theresa confronts him and tells him he's going to jail for what he's done. Joe says Theresa threw herself at him. Theresa realizes what ever she says, someone is going to be in trouble. She takes the path of least resistance and recants.
To reinforce this sense of a tragedy happening in community, Thompson puts a portion of the audience on stage. It doesn't serve to shrink the theatre and just looks awkward. Fobister's role is beautifully executed, but sometimes his presence in a scene is a distraction rather than a support to the action.
Still the problems with the staging can't deprive CRACKWALKER of its impact.
The Factory ends a fine season with a haunting revival.
THE CRACKWALKER continues at The Factory Theatre until April 10. http://www.factorytheatre.ca for tickets and information.
The text more than stands the test of time. Thompson directs her own remount. While the staging is occasionally problematic, the performers more than make up for any directorial shortcomings. Their commitment and intensity make this a searingly memorable night of theatre.
The floor painting centre stage by Randi Helmers is rendered in the colours of the four directions. As grinding poverty, addiction, mental health problems and just plain bad luck push and pull on the characters, their lives are torn apart.
The Crackwalker of title is a homeless native man, living on the streets in a small Ontario city. Waawaate Fobister makes him a kind of trickster, who floats over and through the story, turning up, like trouble, when you least need or expect him. It's a memorable performance with beautiful physicality.
Another painting hangs above the stage: the headless torso of a woman's body with an open, bleeding womb, positioned between two headlights. The painting depicts an accident in which the viewer is both complicit and paralytic. It mirrors the play in which we witness an awful tragedy that seems impossible to stop.
Theresa is a young, intellectually challenged woman on social assistance, turning tricks in dive bars for pocket money. When Fobister lovingly places a rainbow tutu on Theresa, he appears to be grooming her for a lover. In fact it's a garland draped on a sacrificial lamb.
The play centres on two couples: Theresa and Alan, and Joe and Sandy.
Sandy, a tough, aggressive bartender lives and brawls in a sexually charged, punishing relationship with her alcoholic, abusive partner, Joe. Greg Gale seethes as Joe and plays the character on a knife edge. Joe is a victim of the vagaries of the economy as much as he's an abuser and his drunken fits of rage wax and wane with the state of his employment. When he comes home to try repair their relationship after disappearing months before to get work, Claire Armstrong gives a brilliant depiction of a woman who can't shake her love for an abusive man.
Theresa and her boyfriend Alan are a different kind of heartbreak. He truly loves her, but his obsessions and paranoia caused, in part, by the awful death of his father, have left him wary of institutional medicine and authorities in general. At first, he just seems like a good-hearted crackpot. When their baby arrives, and Joe becomes a breadwinner and a father to a sick baby, he cracks beneath the strain of overwhelming responsibility, with tragic consequences. Stephen Joffe gives an excellent performance as a fragile man in free-fall.
The character of Theresa is the lynchpin of the production. Yolanda Bonnell is fearless in showing a woman who is so passive, she's incapable of acting in her own best interest. She says what she thinks other people want to hear, and does as she's told. In a wrenching scene off the top, she's living on Sandy's couch, having run away from an abusive caregiver. Sandy accuses her of having an affair with Joe. Theresa explains Joe came home drunk and raped her. When Joe comes home, drunk yet again, and molten with suppressed rage, Theresa confronts him and tells him he's going to jail for what he's done. Joe says Theresa threw herself at him. Theresa realizes what ever she says, someone is going to be in trouble. She takes the path of least resistance and recants.
To reinforce this sense of a tragedy happening in community, Thompson puts a portion of the audience on stage. It doesn't serve to shrink the theatre and just looks awkward. Fobister's role is beautifully executed, but sometimes his presence in a scene is a distraction rather than a support to the action.
Still the problems with the staging can't deprive CRACKWALKER of its impact.
The Factory ends a fine season with a haunting revival.
THE CRACKWALKER continues at The Factory Theatre until April 10. http://www.factorytheatre.ca for tickets and information.
Thursday, March 17, 2016
REVIEW: POWERFUL and DISTURBING, A LINE IN THE SAND is MUST-SEE THEATRE
Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef's A LINE IN THE SAND is currently receiving a potent revival at the Factory Theatre.
The play takes place in the desert somewhere in Afghanistan. Sand covers everything, penetrates everything, becomes everything: as shifting and amorphous as the moral territory the play explores.
A boy, Sadiq, sixteen, a local, meets Mercer, a twenty-three year old male, Canadian soldier in the desert. Sadiq is a supplier of small luxuries and contraband: pornography, hashish, music. In spite of his bravado, Sadiq's a sweetheart of a kid, an innocent trying to scrabble together some cash to help his family and fuel his dream of leaving the desert and going to America, where he has an uncle.
Mercer is the failed son of a successful man. His mentally ill mother has recently died. "What are you doing here?" Sadiq asks him. It's a good question.
Initially Mercer's relationship with Sadiq is indeed mercenary: by turns, uneasy, exploitative, cruel, and insatiable. Sadiq instinctively sees what Mercer really needs: a friend, and they form an unorthodox alliance. Friendship, however, requires that people treat each other as, not the same, but equal. Sadiq and Mercer are not equal. The power imbalance in their relationship, combined with Mercer's moral intransigence lead to a tragic crime of horrific brutality.
The first act is spent with Mercer and Sadiq as their relationship evolves. The second act is spent mostly with Mercer and a Colonel, who is brought in to investigate a crime on the base, to which Mercer has been a party.
Cameras play a significant role in the production. Mercer has a sophisticated camera and at one point, Sadiq insists on having his picture taken with him, a coltish gesture of affection.
The whoosh of the shutter screen is used as a staccato punctuation throughout, reminding us that the watchers are watched too. Images, the creation of their content, and their uses, are one of the many topics explored to unsettling effect.
The crime perpetrated on the base is also photographed. Peacekeepers are allegedly observers in a theatre of war. When does observing a crime, and doing nothing, become a crime itself?
Morgan David Jones plays the troubled Mercer with enough edge to keep the audience guessing what he may be capable of doing. Newcomer, Danny Ghantous as Sadiq is the play's beating heart, and he is crushingly good. John Cleland is a forceful and sympathetic Colonel.
Nigel Shawn Williams direction elucidates the layered narrative, and skillfully explores the complex relationships that drive it. The tension and paranoia inherent in such situations was palpable.
Verdecchia and Youssef's drama will haunt your dreams. It did mine.
I awoke to the CBC on the Monday morning after I saw the play, to hear a journalist talking about crimes committed by French peacekeepers in the Congo, who were using food to bribe small, hungry boys as young as nine, to perform sexual acts.
A LINE IN THE SAND may have been written a decade ago, but it still feels ripped from the headlines. This is an excellent production of a challenging play. Go see it.
A LINE IN THE SAND continues at THE FACTORY THEATRE in the Studio Theatre until March 27th http://www.factorytheatre.ca for tickets, times, and further information.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
REVIEW: LOVE CONQUERS ALL: SALT-WATER MOON Gets a POST-MODERN RETELLING at the FACTORY THEATRE
The Factory Theatre's program notes this season open with a discourse on the hermeneutics of the texts being presented, written by the theatre's resident dramaturge.
I know: I know. No one has ever walked out of a theatre humming the narrative deconstruction. Ravi Jain seems to love staging post-modern theory at present, and his current production of David French's SALT WATER MOON nearly drowns under the weight of the intellectual conceits he's tied to the old-school romance.
Fortunately, Jain's warm heart for the project trumps his egg-head inclinations in enough important ways to save it from being more fun to discuss than to watch.
David French's SALT WATER MOON is truly a Canadian classic. The play is so well-written, so passionate in its defense of the dreams of the working poor, so lyrical in its language, and so achingly romantic, that the script is damn nearly impossible to botch.
Jain and his team have made an arresting lovely decision to light the entire stage with candles in the formation of a map of the firmament, literally making heaven on earth. Pure theatrical magic!
Then, he has Kawa Ada as Jacob Mercer, the boy (he's 18 in the text) who has come home to try and win back his beloved, Mary Stone, and wrest his former flame from the clutches of the town's balding, monied schoolteacher. Mercer is the engine of the play, and Ada's charismatic performance propels the narrative with such charm and zeal that it's impossible not to cheer for him, and for them as a couple.
Jain's production also achingly illuminates the struggles of the working poor that French so poignantly wrote about a quarter of a century ago, and that still resonate. Both Awa and Mayko Nguyen as Mary Stone, make us powerfully hear and feel the the myriad constraints and humiliations of the lives they, and their parents before them, have spent in the service of other people's ambitions.
Less fortuitously, Jain also makes a series of directorial decisions so head-scratchingly weird, that even after reading his program notes twice, I wondered what the hell he was thinking.
The company has decided to abandon any pretext of Newfoundland accents, but without making any textual adjustments to the dialogue, which is written with all of the idiosyncrasies of East Coast speech. So when "S" gets left on the end of verbs, " I wants youse out" for instance; without the accent, it just sounds bizarre.
The good people of Newfoundland are descended from the Irish. This production is like hearing Behan or O'Casey performed without the appropriate Irish accent. The musical cadences of the speech are lost.
Then there's the music he opts for instead: a jazz musician, Ania Soul. He leaves her on stage, for the entire play, downstage right. She's dressed for a date in an up-do, lace stockings, boots and a frock, and constantly stealing focus. She sings intermittently through the entire show, which is lovely at times (off the top, before the play starts) and irritatingly distracting (the times when we are told we are hearing Mercer and hear her instead) at others.
Most annoyingly, Jain has her recite the stage directions of the play throughout the show. So things happen like, we're told Mary is in a yellow silk dress, and Mayko Nguyen is wearing skinny jeans and a baggy, wrinkled, washed out looking peach top. When Jacob leaves after Mary has sent him away, back down the road to Toronto, we're told she screams to Heaven. We hear a puppy like whimper, which would be a fine acting choice if it weren't so discordant with a text never meant to be articulated during the performance.
As a fatherless girl with a mentally ill mother, Mary has been a bread-winner since the age of 10, working as a live-in servant. Nguyen plays her as a woman who's decided make the best of a bad business: choosing a practical marriage to a man who can afford to support her, and, moreover, help to rescue her kid sister, who is living under the thumb of a sadistic matron in an orphanage. Mary can't afford a poor husband, or an unreliable one, and Jacob has already left her once.
Mary lives on the edge of the sea alright. She's trapped between a rock and a hard place. Nguyen made me feel Mary's suffering and her struggle last night, but not her love for Jacob, until the absolute last moment of the play.
That moment, where two poor kids fall in love, not with love, but with each other, and let their hearts rule their heads is the triumph of nature over nurture, and the actors played it beautifully. Soul picked that moment to hand her guitar over to a stage manager, before taking her curtain call, like a rock star. Everything the actors had worked 90 minutes to earn was marred by her striding upstage, and then taking her bow between the lovers. Ugh!
French wrote those stage directions for a reason, and that reason wasn't so a musician could sit on stage and recite them. Mary is wearing a yellow dress, as she stands on the on the porch of the house beside the sea, as a potent visual metaphor. She's the moon to Mercer's ocean. The love that brings her and Jacob back together is as inexorable as the tides of the sea.
Even a diva in training couldn't take the magic of their love away from them, or us, last night.
SALT WATER MOON continues at the Factory Theatre until March 13, 2016. http://www.factorytheatre.ca for dates, times, tickets and information.
.
I know: I know. No one has ever walked out of a theatre humming the narrative deconstruction. Ravi Jain seems to love staging post-modern theory at present, and his current production of David French's SALT WATER MOON nearly drowns under the weight of the intellectual conceits he's tied to the old-school romance.
Fortunately, Jain's warm heart for the project trumps his egg-head inclinations in enough important ways to save it from being more fun to discuss than to watch.
David French's SALT WATER MOON is truly a Canadian classic. The play is so well-written, so passionate in its defense of the dreams of the working poor, so lyrical in its language, and so achingly romantic, that the script is damn nearly impossible to botch.
Jain and his team have made an arresting lovely decision to light the entire stage with candles in the formation of a map of the firmament, literally making heaven on earth. Pure theatrical magic!
Then, he has Kawa Ada as Jacob Mercer, the boy (he's 18 in the text) who has come home to try and win back his beloved, Mary Stone, and wrest his former flame from the clutches of the town's balding, monied schoolteacher. Mercer is the engine of the play, and Ada's charismatic performance propels the narrative with such charm and zeal that it's impossible not to cheer for him, and for them as a couple.
Jain's production also achingly illuminates the struggles of the working poor that French so poignantly wrote about a quarter of a century ago, and that still resonate. Both Awa and Mayko Nguyen as Mary Stone, make us powerfully hear and feel the the myriad constraints and humiliations of the lives they, and their parents before them, have spent in the service of other people's ambitions.
Less fortuitously, Jain also makes a series of directorial decisions so head-scratchingly weird, that even after reading his program notes twice, I wondered what the hell he was thinking.
The company has decided to abandon any pretext of Newfoundland accents, but without making any textual adjustments to the dialogue, which is written with all of the idiosyncrasies of East Coast speech. So when "S" gets left on the end of verbs, " I wants youse out" for instance; without the accent, it just sounds bizarre.
The good people of Newfoundland are descended from the Irish. This production is like hearing Behan or O'Casey performed without the appropriate Irish accent. The musical cadences of the speech are lost.
Then there's the music he opts for instead: a jazz musician, Ania Soul. He leaves her on stage, for the entire play, downstage right. She's dressed for a date in an up-do, lace stockings, boots and a frock, and constantly stealing focus. She sings intermittently through the entire show, which is lovely at times (off the top, before the play starts) and irritatingly distracting (the times when we are told we are hearing Mercer and hear her instead) at others.
Most annoyingly, Jain has her recite the stage directions of the play throughout the show. So things happen like, we're told Mary is in a yellow silk dress, and Mayko Nguyen is wearing skinny jeans and a baggy, wrinkled, washed out looking peach top. When Jacob leaves after Mary has sent him away, back down the road to Toronto, we're told she screams to Heaven. We hear a puppy like whimper, which would be a fine acting choice if it weren't so discordant with a text never meant to be articulated during the performance.
As a fatherless girl with a mentally ill mother, Mary has been a bread-winner since the age of 10, working as a live-in servant. Nguyen plays her as a woman who's decided make the best of a bad business: choosing a practical marriage to a man who can afford to support her, and, moreover, help to rescue her kid sister, who is living under the thumb of a sadistic matron in an orphanage. Mary can't afford a poor husband, or an unreliable one, and Jacob has already left her once.
Mary lives on the edge of the sea alright. She's trapped between a rock and a hard place. Nguyen made me feel Mary's suffering and her struggle last night, but not her love for Jacob, until the absolute last moment of the play.
That moment, where two poor kids fall in love, not with love, but with each other, and let their hearts rule their heads is the triumph of nature over nurture, and the actors played it beautifully. Soul picked that moment to hand her guitar over to a stage manager, before taking her curtain call, like a rock star. Everything the actors had worked 90 minutes to earn was marred by her striding upstage, and then taking her bow between the lovers. Ugh!
French wrote those stage directions for a reason, and that reason wasn't so a musician could sit on stage and recite them. Mary is wearing a yellow dress, as she stands on the on the porch of the house beside the sea, as a potent visual metaphor. She's the moon to Mercer's ocean. The love that brings her and Jacob back together is as inexorable as the tides of the sea.
Even a diva in training couldn't take the magic of their love away from them, or us, last night.
SALT WATER MOON continues at the Factory Theatre until March 13, 2016. http://www.factorytheatre.ca for dates, times, tickets and information.
.
Monday, February 22, 2016
REVIEW: Staging Mortality: COLD BLOOD & BETROFFENHEIT at CANADIAN STAGE
I've been to Canadian Stage two weeks in a row, where I saw two very different shows about mortality. Both shows were dance/theatre hybrids. The body often speaks what words cannot.
As a culture, we have a very uneasy relationship with death, and the suffering and sorrow that often accompanies it. Mostly, we avoid thinking about it or talking about it. Even funerals are now often referred to as "celebrations of life." No wailing or gnashing of teeth allowed anywhere, ever. No black armbands, no mourning dress, no public show of grief.
Thank Heaven, for a theatre where you can leave your game face at home, and the artists will let you weep quietly in the dark.
The delightfully eccentric Belgian duo of Michelle De Mey and Jaco Van Dorael decided to look at death from the point of view of dead people: people who died suddenly, inexplicably, by accident or design. COLD BLOOD was weird, wonderful and quite magical. The miniature dioramas used to stage the various nano-dances the company created and live-projected with their tracking cameras, were perfect for the blackly charming, surrealistic tone of the show.
A dark cloud drifted across the massive centre screen, inky and nebulous. We were told we were being hypnotized: in three, in two, in one. We got pulled under: to a Hades of their own invention.
At one moment, early on, a giddily gorgeous, and completely silly finger tap number, in black and white, screened at a drive-in. The camera pulled in tight on fabulously synchronized nano-tap in an art-deco inspired Never-never Land. As memories of late-night Fred and Ginger, and Busby Berkley chorus girls fill our collective imaginations, a voice-over reminded us that when we see these old movies, all the people in them are dead. Nostalgia: bringing the past back to life.
The play moved into darker territory, albeit leavened with uneasy humour.
Plane crashes and car accidents happened. A murderess committed suicide, and an elegiac contemporary solo dance exquisitely conveyed the crushing isolation of her life in a world of concrete high-rises, and Tinder swipes.
The most moving moments of the evening were the last. A man left his wife in the midst of an unresolved spat to walk to work. He donned the gear of an astronaut and headed off into space, never to return. David Bowie underscores his demise: an otherworldly drift into a limitless void. We know The Starman whose music was a part of so many of our youths is gone forever. The silence that followed the music was heart-breaking. There weren't many dry eyes in the house.
The show is still a little raw, and there are places where it feels awkward, struggling to find the right tone. No matter: it was a beautiful and trippy voyage of imagination to a place where we'll all end up, but rarely plan on going.
Last weekend, Crystal Pite, Kidd Pivot and Jonathon Young returned to Toronto with their critically acclaimed show from last summer's Panamania: BETROFFENHEIT. The collaborative creation examines a horrific personal tragedy and its effect on one of the survivors.
Young's only child and two of her cousins died in a fire, at his wife's family summer property, in 2009. Young and his wife were asleep in another cabin. News reports from the time made mention of the fact Young was injured trying, unsuccessfully, to rescue the children. His marriage did not survive the accident.
The show follows Young on a nihilistic journey to the bottom of a void of addiction, despair and loss as he tries to escape, then examine, and finally accept what has happened. He gives a completely committed, utterly harrowing performance as a man nearly destroyed by guilt and grief.
Pite's astonishing and demanding choreography was brilliantly danced by her-jaw-dropping good company, Kidd Pivot. A Weimar-influenced cabaret has seldom seemed so seductive or damaging.
The movement, combined with the sets by Jay Gower Taylor, costumes by Nancy Bryant, fantastic sound design and composition by Owen Belton, Allesandro Juliani and Mae Rae, and evocative lighting by Tom Visser came together perfectly to create an arresting, intense and memorable night of theatre.
Young's text is great in parts (the beginning) and weaker in others (the long speech in Act II) and could, overall, have been pared back, particularly in the second half.
It's hard to be both the writer and the performer when the material is this close to the bone.
Young, Pite and company have salvaged beauty from tragedy and created a deeply moving work of art.
COLD BLOOD and BETROFFENHEIT both appeared at CANADIAN STAGE this February. BETROFFENHEIT continues on an international tour with stops in Vancouver and Victoria later this month: http://www.kiddpivot.org
As a culture, we have a very uneasy relationship with death, and the suffering and sorrow that often accompanies it. Mostly, we avoid thinking about it or talking about it. Even funerals are now often referred to as "celebrations of life." No wailing or gnashing of teeth allowed anywhere, ever. No black armbands, no mourning dress, no public show of grief.
Thank Heaven, for a theatre where you can leave your game face at home, and the artists will let you weep quietly in the dark.
The delightfully eccentric Belgian duo of Michelle De Mey and Jaco Van Dorael decided to look at death from the point of view of dead people: people who died suddenly, inexplicably, by accident or design. COLD BLOOD was weird, wonderful and quite magical. The miniature dioramas used to stage the various nano-dances the company created and live-projected with their tracking cameras, were perfect for the blackly charming, surrealistic tone of the show.
A dark cloud drifted across the massive centre screen, inky and nebulous. We were told we were being hypnotized: in three, in two, in one. We got pulled under: to a Hades of their own invention.
At one moment, early on, a giddily gorgeous, and completely silly finger tap number, in black and white, screened at a drive-in. The camera pulled in tight on fabulously synchronized nano-tap in an art-deco inspired Never-never Land. As memories of late-night Fred and Ginger, and Busby Berkley chorus girls fill our collective imaginations, a voice-over reminded us that when we see these old movies, all the people in them are dead. Nostalgia: bringing the past back to life.
The play moved into darker territory, albeit leavened with uneasy humour.
Plane crashes and car accidents happened. A murderess committed suicide, and an elegiac contemporary solo dance exquisitely conveyed the crushing isolation of her life in a world of concrete high-rises, and Tinder swipes.
The most moving moments of the evening were the last. A man left his wife in the midst of an unresolved spat to walk to work. He donned the gear of an astronaut and headed off into space, never to return. David Bowie underscores his demise: an otherworldly drift into a limitless void. We know The Starman whose music was a part of so many of our youths is gone forever. The silence that followed the music was heart-breaking. There weren't many dry eyes in the house.
The show is still a little raw, and there are places where it feels awkward, struggling to find the right tone. No matter: it was a beautiful and trippy voyage of imagination to a place where we'll all end up, but rarely plan on going.
Last weekend, Crystal Pite, Kidd Pivot and Jonathon Young returned to Toronto with their critically acclaimed show from last summer's Panamania: BETROFFENHEIT. The collaborative creation examines a horrific personal tragedy and its effect on one of the survivors.
Young's only child and two of her cousins died in a fire, at his wife's family summer property, in 2009. Young and his wife were asleep in another cabin. News reports from the time made mention of the fact Young was injured trying, unsuccessfully, to rescue the children. His marriage did not survive the accident.
The show follows Young on a nihilistic journey to the bottom of a void of addiction, despair and loss as he tries to escape, then examine, and finally accept what has happened. He gives a completely committed, utterly harrowing performance as a man nearly destroyed by guilt and grief.
Pite's astonishing and demanding choreography was brilliantly danced by her-jaw-dropping good company, Kidd Pivot. A Weimar-influenced cabaret has seldom seemed so seductive or damaging.
The movement, combined with the sets by Jay Gower Taylor, costumes by Nancy Bryant, fantastic sound design and composition by Owen Belton, Allesandro Juliani and Mae Rae, and evocative lighting by Tom Visser came together perfectly to create an arresting, intense and memorable night of theatre.
Young's text is great in parts (the beginning) and weaker in others (the long speech in Act II) and could, overall, have been pared back, particularly in the second half.
It's hard to be both the writer and the performer when the material is this close to the bone.
Young, Pite and company have salvaged beauty from tragedy and created a deeply moving work of art.
COLD BLOOD and BETROFFENHEIT both appeared at CANADIAN STAGE this February. BETROFFENHEIT continues on an international tour with stops in Vancouver and Victoria later this month: http://www.kiddpivot.org
Saturday, February 13, 2016
REVIEW: Last Chances: THE WINTER'S TALE, THE CHERRY ORCHARD & ONE NIGHT ONLY
Two Fridays ago, I saw one of the most anticipated theatre events of the Toronto winter season to date. Graham Abbey, long-time Stratford leading man has founded his own company, Groundling Theatre. In collaboration with COALMINE THEATRE he is presenting his company's inaugural production, Shakespeare's THE WINTER'S TALE in the intimate confines of Coalmine's new 100 seat venue at 1454 Danforth Avenue in Toronto.
If you join the groundlings in the cheap seats, as I did, for $20 you can have a plump velvet cushion against the wall, at the very edge of the stage, pretty much in the actor's aisle for entrances and exits. The only way I could have been more immersed in the action, was to actually don the motley and go tread the boards myself. Not that the talent on stage needs any help from me or anyone else, thank you very much. It's an excellent production of the play with an absolutely stellar cast.
THE WINTER'S TALE is a difficult play to do well. King Leontes (a masterful Tom McCamus) the male protagonist is an unsympathetic character, and to a modern audience, incredibly sexist. The tone of the first act is tragic, with a family destroyed by his jealousy and rage: the second act is comic and romantic, as a collapsed marriage gives way to young love among the rustics, reconciliation, and hope.
The action of the show begins with McCamus/Leontes watching his wife Hermione (an elegant and understated Michelle Giroux) and son in a film, a ghostly presence in his house. His late wife's closest ally Paulina (Lucy Peacock, commands the stage as show's heart and its moral compass) hovers. He's tortured by regret and remorse.
McCamus plays Leontes as a man whose narcissistic rage and insecurity drive him to destroy his relationships with all the people he loves. He treats his wife and son like chattel, and drives his brother and his most loyal courtiers away.
The "exit pursued by a bear" at the end of the first half is handled in an extraordinary fashion. Brent Carver morphs from the victim, Antigonius, who is handed the horrifying task of leaving Leontes and Hemione's baby daughter to die in the woods into the beast who consumes him. Carver plays the moment as if his own grief and guilt come out of him to literally, eat him alive. Amazing.
Collectively, the company nails the tonal shift between the two halves, supported by a very simple but evocative design by Steve Lucas and pitch-perfect music by performer and composer George Meanwell. Meanwell also provides a nice cameo in the role of Time at the top of second half of the play.
The second act, with Carver as the singing pick-pocket Artolycus and Mark Crawford and Robert Persichini as two hilariously dim-witted and good-hearted shepherds was an utter delight. As Perdita and Florizel, Sarena Parmar and Charlie Gallant are charming as the young star-crossed lovers, and Patrick Galligan was a suitably outraged Polixenes. The play ends with a real reconciliation between parents and children and then, Leontes and Hermione: tenuous but tender, and hard won.
There are rush seats at the door, but you need to arrive early, as they are coveted and few. I'd be hard pressed to think of a more romantic place for a theatre-lover to spend this Valentine's Day weekend, then as a groundling watching this polished, intelligent and very intimate production of Shakespeare. It's a night at the theatre to cherish.
If your Valentine likes having their funny bone tickled, you might want to head over to the Factory Theatre tonight and catch ONE NIGHT ONLY.- THE GREATEST MUSICAL NEVER WRITTEN this weekend.
An exceptionally good crew of improvisors: Ashley Botting, Carly Heffernan, Ron Pedserson, Jan Caruna, Reid Janisse and Alex Tindal, in tandem with a kick-ass band led by Jordan Armstrong , and backstage Deus-ex-machina director Melody Johnson, create a musical, based on a series of suggestions from the audience on the spot: For real! -and it totally works!
The Factory's stage, which often feels unwieldy is put to excellent use here, with a gorgeous red velvet curtain hung in the proscenium arch centre stage, adding glamour and covering quick changes, entrances, and exits. I'm not always a huge fan of improv, but the cast has great chops and work together like a well-oiled comedy machine. After the show, there was a cabaret performance in the bar and an artist painting scenes from the show. I had a great time from start to finish. It's a very fun night out.
It's the last weekend for one of my favourite plays, THE CHERRY ORCHARD by independent company, The Chekhov Collective. It's about a family of charming upper class spendthrifts who have so squandered their fortune, that their family estate is about to be sold out from under them to pay their debts. A hundred years after its debut, it's still a great play about a paradise of carefree innocence lost to folly and fortune's changing tides. It's also a very challenging tragi-comedy, whose tone is tricky to capture. For the most part, this production gets the blend of humour and sorrow just right.
The largely white set by Dimitrii Khilchenko was very pretty to look at, but a little cluttered, and the scale of the set pieces felt too dainty for the space. The director, Dmitry Zhukovsky made vivid tableaux at the top of each act and did a lot of fine work with most of his actors.
This production has some outstanding performances, particularly Andrew Pogson as Lopakhin, the peasant turned successful entrepreneur, Richard Sheridan Willis as Gaev, one of the owners of the orchard, Llyandra Jones as the put-upon adopted daughter, Varya, Joy Tanner as Charlotte, the eccentric governess, and John Gilbert as Firs, the family's old servant. I also really enjoyed the antics of Nina Gilmour as the affected and silly besotted maid, Dunyasha and Yury Ruzhyev, the pretentious footman and object of her affections. Clayton Gray was charming as the sad-sack Yepihodov, the man who actually loves her, and who she wants nothing to do with. Harrison Thomas and Thalia Kane were a credible pair of young lovers as starving student Trofimov, and soon to be penniless daughter, Anya.
As Ranevskya, the family matriarch, Rena Polley seemed to struggle with her role and neither lighting, direction, or her costume did her any favours.
Most of the wardrobe was perfect for the period production, but Polley looked out of place in a dress that was incongruously contemporary. Worse yet, the lighting and blocking frequently left her delivering speeches in the dark.
In one of the play's most powerful moments, when her brother arrives at a party she's decide to throw on the night their house is auctioned off by the bank, they exchange a look and we see she finally grasps that they have lost their home for good. She delivers a moment of great emotional intensity that was barely allowed to register, as she was positioned onstage so she was visible to only a small portion of the audience.
It's worth checking out for both the play itself, and for the many good performances in the production.
THE WINTER'S TALE by GROUNDLING THEATRE COMPANY and presented by COALMINE THEATRE COMPANY continues at the Coalmine Theatre until February 20th http://www.coalminetheatre.com. ONE NIGHT ONLY continues at THE FACTORY THEATRE http://www.factorytheatre.ca and click "What's On"( top upper l/h side) or call (416)504 9971. The CHEKHOV COLLECTIVE'S production of THE CHERRY ORCHARD continues at the Berkeley Street Theatre upstairs http://www.thechekhovcollective.com for dates, times and tickets.
If you join the groundlings in the cheap seats, as I did, for $20 you can have a plump velvet cushion against the wall, at the very edge of the stage, pretty much in the actor's aisle for entrances and exits. The only way I could have been more immersed in the action, was to actually don the motley and go tread the boards myself. Not that the talent on stage needs any help from me or anyone else, thank you very much. It's an excellent production of the play with an absolutely stellar cast.
THE WINTER'S TALE is a difficult play to do well. King Leontes (a masterful Tom McCamus) the male protagonist is an unsympathetic character, and to a modern audience, incredibly sexist. The tone of the first act is tragic, with a family destroyed by his jealousy and rage: the second act is comic and romantic, as a collapsed marriage gives way to young love among the rustics, reconciliation, and hope.
The action of the show begins with McCamus/Leontes watching his wife Hermione (an elegant and understated Michelle Giroux) and son in a film, a ghostly presence in his house. His late wife's closest ally Paulina (Lucy Peacock, commands the stage as show's heart and its moral compass) hovers. He's tortured by regret and remorse.
McCamus plays Leontes as a man whose narcissistic rage and insecurity drive him to destroy his relationships with all the people he loves. He treats his wife and son like chattel, and drives his brother and his most loyal courtiers away.
The "exit pursued by a bear" at the end of the first half is handled in an extraordinary fashion. Brent Carver morphs from the victim, Antigonius, who is handed the horrifying task of leaving Leontes and Hemione's baby daughter to die in the woods into the beast who consumes him. Carver plays the moment as if his own grief and guilt come out of him to literally, eat him alive. Amazing.
Collectively, the company nails the tonal shift between the two halves, supported by a very simple but evocative design by Steve Lucas and pitch-perfect music by performer and composer George Meanwell. Meanwell also provides a nice cameo in the role of Time at the top of second half of the play.
The second act, with Carver as the singing pick-pocket Artolycus and Mark Crawford and Robert Persichini as two hilariously dim-witted and good-hearted shepherds was an utter delight. As Perdita and Florizel, Sarena Parmar and Charlie Gallant are charming as the young star-crossed lovers, and Patrick Galligan was a suitably outraged Polixenes. The play ends with a real reconciliation between parents and children and then, Leontes and Hermione: tenuous but tender, and hard won.
There are rush seats at the door, but you need to arrive early, as they are coveted and few. I'd be hard pressed to think of a more romantic place for a theatre-lover to spend this Valentine's Day weekend, then as a groundling watching this polished, intelligent and very intimate production of Shakespeare. It's a night at the theatre to cherish.
If your Valentine likes having their funny bone tickled, you might want to head over to the Factory Theatre tonight and catch ONE NIGHT ONLY.- THE GREATEST MUSICAL NEVER WRITTEN this weekend.
An exceptionally good crew of improvisors: Ashley Botting, Carly Heffernan, Ron Pedserson, Jan Caruna, Reid Janisse and Alex Tindal, in tandem with a kick-ass band led by Jordan Armstrong , and backstage Deus-ex-machina director Melody Johnson, create a musical, based on a series of suggestions from the audience on the spot: For real! -and it totally works!
The Factory's stage, which often feels unwieldy is put to excellent use here, with a gorgeous red velvet curtain hung in the proscenium arch centre stage, adding glamour and covering quick changes, entrances, and exits. I'm not always a huge fan of improv, but the cast has great chops and work together like a well-oiled comedy machine. After the show, there was a cabaret performance in the bar and an artist painting scenes from the show. I had a great time from start to finish. It's a very fun night out.
It's the last weekend for one of my favourite plays, THE CHERRY ORCHARD by independent company, The Chekhov Collective. It's about a family of charming upper class spendthrifts who have so squandered their fortune, that their family estate is about to be sold out from under them to pay their debts. A hundred years after its debut, it's still a great play about a paradise of carefree innocence lost to folly and fortune's changing tides. It's also a very challenging tragi-comedy, whose tone is tricky to capture. For the most part, this production gets the blend of humour and sorrow just right.
The largely white set by Dimitrii Khilchenko was very pretty to look at, but a little cluttered, and the scale of the set pieces felt too dainty for the space. The director, Dmitry Zhukovsky made vivid tableaux at the top of each act and did a lot of fine work with most of his actors.
This production has some outstanding performances, particularly Andrew Pogson as Lopakhin, the peasant turned successful entrepreneur, Richard Sheridan Willis as Gaev, one of the owners of the orchard, Llyandra Jones as the put-upon adopted daughter, Varya, Joy Tanner as Charlotte, the eccentric governess, and John Gilbert as Firs, the family's old servant. I also really enjoyed the antics of Nina Gilmour as the affected and silly besotted maid, Dunyasha and Yury Ruzhyev, the pretentious footman and object of her affections. Clayton Gray was charming as the sad-sack Yepihodov, the man who actually loves her, and who she wants nothing to do with. Harrison Thomas and Thalia Kane were a credible pair of young lovers as starving student Trofimov, and soon to be penniless daughter, Anya.
As Ranevskya, the family matriarch, Rena Polley seemed to struggle with her role and neither lighting, direction, or her costume did her any favours.
Most of the wardrobe was perfect for the period production, but Polley looked out of place in a dress that was incongruously contemporary. Worse yet, the lighting and blocking frequently left her delivering speeches in the dark.
In one of the play's most powerful moments, when her brother arrives at a party she's decide to throw on the night their house is auctioned off by the bank, they exchange a look and we see she finally grasps that they have lost their home for good. She delivers a moment of great emotional intensity that was barely allowed to register, as she was positioned onstage so she was visible to only a small portion of the audience.
It's worth checking out for both the play itself, and for the many good performances in the production.
THE WINTER'S TALE by GROUNDLING THEATRE COMPANY and presented by COALMINE THEATRE COMPANY continues at the Coalmine Theatre until February 20th http://www.coalminetheatre.com. ONE NIGHT ONLY continues at THE FACTORY THEATRE http://www.factorytheatre.ca and click "What's On"( top upper l/h side) or call (416)504 9971. The CHEKHOV COLLECTIVE'S production of THE CHERRY ORCHARD continues at the Berkeley Street Theatre upstairs http://www.thechekhovcollective.com for dates, times and tickets.
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