Review: (Ottawa / Theatre) Oil and Water

Alison Woolridge, Ryan Allen, Mike Payette (photo by Peter Bromley)

Warmth on a Cold Rock
by Jim Murchison

(Originally, I wanted to send another writer to review this production. My principal reason was that I have auditioned for the director, so there might be a perception of conflict. An unfortunate medical emergency required me to write at the last minute.)

Playwright Robert Chafe tells the true story of the disaster in Newfoundland where the Truxtun, an American ship carrying 156 passengers went down in 1942. Only 46 survived. The central character in the play Lanier Phillips' life was transformed by that experience having only known bigotry prior to being rescued. Chafe alternates between Boston school riots in 1974 and the Truxtun disaster allowing the real people to do the storytelling. It is an effective device in showing how an act of humanity can change a life.

Review: (Ottawa / Theatre) huff

(photo by Cliff Cardinal)

Dark Theatre to Die For
by Jim Murchison 

The set for huff is stark. There is a chair, a couple of plastic milk crates with beer bottles in them. Long white plastic drapes hang in the centre of the stage and various images can be projected on them. 

I do not want to give the storyline away so I am going to draw from writer/performer Cliff Cardinal's and producer Elizabeth Kantor’s own defining statement. The focus is “on the creation of new transgressive, cathartic works that explore the pain of people living in taboo subcultures”.

What this means for an audience is that unless you are already intimately familiar with the subculture and despite everything you think you may know, you still may find yourself shocked, jolted or even repulsed. Cardinal writes very well and as an actor actively engages the audience to get every reaction he can from them even though his characters may feel that we are nothing more than a hallucination brought on by auto asphyxiation or gas inhalation.

Review: (Ottawa / Theatre) Seeds

Eric Peterson (photo by Maxime Coté)

Food for Thought
by Jim Murchison 

Julie Fox's set strikes you on different levels. There are a number of lab tables filled with scientific instruments, there's a model of a double helix DNA molecule down stage right. Cameras stage left and right and a large screen covering almost the entire width of the upstage area. The stage itself at the start is bathed in bright green looking like a freshly seeded field. The actors are milling about the stage many in lab coats conducting experiments or discussing the results, one would imagine.

This is a Porte Parole (Montreal) production and it commences with a prelude. The audience is informed that it is helpful for the development of this style of documentary theatre for them to come into the audience and get some of our opinions. It seemed more like red carpet interviews at the Academy Awards to me than investigative journalism. People were complimented on how attractive they looked and applauded for their good answers. Perhaps it helps the playwright, Annabel Soutar, but it was pandering, unnecessary filler for me.

Review: (Ottawa / Theatre) Enron

(photo by Andrée Lanthier)

The Shadow of Money
by Jim Murchison 

Lucy Prebble has written a play that examines modern day hucksterism. The financial 911 that hit the world after the attacks in New York and Washington may well have been the more potent terrorist attack. I do not mean to belittle the devastating loss to the victims and families of the twin towers and the flights that went down but the greater threat to society as a whole appears to be corporate greed perpetuated and enabled by governments dedicated to propagandizing and myth making hyperbole.

Director Ron Jenkins has created a fast paced multi media presentation that dazzles and mesmerizes an audience in the same way a magician might with an incredible illusion. The play emulates the subject matter which is flash and smoke and mirrors, but the play has considerably more substance.

With song, dance, puppetry and lights the play maintains an atmosphere of a group of partygoers riding the crest of a wave. There is flash, confetti, money and music everywhere. The pace is kept going largely because of Michel Walton’s set design that has two levels separated by a scrolling marquee so that the action never pauses. We’re kept informed of the historical context as we travel through the Clinton and G W Bush years and into the new millennium by the projections and sound bytes on the upstage upper level.

Review: (Ottawa) Kim's Convenience

Jean Yoon, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Father Knows Best (Korean Style)
by Jim Murchison

The set for Kim's Convenience is a very authentic looking convenience store. Designer Ken MacKenzie has quite meticulously placed all the details there from the aisles and the well stocked shelves, the overhanging fluorescent light boxes, the register and of course the open and closed sign hanging from the window by the door. The remount has been directed by Albert Schulz with original direction by Weyni Mengesha. What has been added or subtracted in  this production is not possible for me to determine, but the balance is good and the play has honesty and truth that captures the essence of family dynamic.

The patriarch proprietor Appa Kim is played with stoic assurance by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. The comic interplay because of broken English and the steadfast determination to be right at all times is deftly played. It is clear that the audience relates to the father figure that believes any manner of doubt is weakness and tough love means aikido.

Review: (Ottawa) The Sound of Music

                                   (photo by Andrée Lanthier)
The Hills are Alive and Well  
by Jim Murchison

The Sound of Music is a story and a film that most people know although not as many are familiar with the play. This is what I was thinking would be interesting to see as I made my way to the theatre and when I opened my programme, I saw director Joey Tremblay making exactly the same point. This was a play first and there are strengths and emotional moments that hit more deeply in live performance.

Having said this, the songs are part of our culture, at least for people within 20 years of my age range. People under 30 might not know them as well. A great many people have already decided to see the play, and many others will just want to know if it's good. Well yes it is very good.

Review: (Ottawa) Hamlet (solo)

The Lonely Melancholy Dane
by Jim Murchison

There is no set. There are no costumes. There is just one supremely talented actor in a well-directed Hamlet that wrings all manner of subtleties from the Bard’s words.

Raoul Bhaneja plays everyone in Hamlet. Just getting to the kernel of the title character could take a lifetime so imagine how many layers you can uncover playing every single character. How do you get to this level of performance and make it look almost effortless. You start workshopping it in 2002 and perform it frequently as a full scale performance since 2006. You also need a director that you trust implicitly and Robert Ross Parker fills that role. 

Review: (Ottawa) Tartuffe

Petrina Bromley, Andry Jones (photo by Andrée Lanthier)

Molière Lands on the Rock
by Jim Murchison

What would have happened if Molière had time travelled and crash landed into Newfoundland in 1939. He would have not been out of place. In fact the blend of Molière's biting social satire and the Codco affinity to salty, salacious self deprecation is so symbiotic that it is hard to say where Molière leaves off and Andy Jones's adaptation takes over in this wonderfully performed and meticulously directed skewering of religious hypocrisy.

The Question... Sarah Garton Stanley, Associate AD, NAC English Theatre

by Estelle Rosen

Montreal born and raised, Sarah Garton Stanley now lives between Ottawa and Kingston. She founded The Baby Grand, in Kingston, in 1985, then co-created Women Making Scenes in Montreal, and Die in Debt Theatre in Toronto, (a ground-breaking company dedicated large canvas site-specific work.) Sarah Garton Stanley is a former Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, she co-helmed the Directing Program at the National Theatre School and is adjunct at Concordia University. Sarah creates work with Michael Rubenfeld including The Failure Show, Mothermothermother, and upcoming Oopsala and The Book of Judith. She is currently directing Beatrice and Virgil, (Lindsay Cochrane’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel) at the Factory. Her latest adventure is launching The Collaborations in her role as Associate Artistic Director of English Theatre at Canada's National Arts Centre.

CHARPO: You've been involved in various aspects of theatre for many years. Would you say previous theatre involvement was the precursor to your current position as Associate Artistic Director of English Theatre at National Arts Centre? 

STANLEY: There is a strong line that runs through all of my work: I am in love with theatre. (I am 50 now, and to declare such love seems unseemly at best, and positively Harlequinesque at worst.) Replete with this ardour are all the various attributes that present in a more conventional, person-to-person kind of love.

Review: (Ottawa) Big Mama!

Jackie Richardson (photo by Tim Matheson)

Some people have the right to sing the blues
The blues heal the soul, like snake venom heals a snake bite.
by Nanette Cormier

[Please note: This review is based on a preview performance]

Willie Mae Thornton left Montgomery, Alabama, when she was 15, about a year after her mother died, to join Sammy Green's Georgia-based Hot Harlem Revue.  It was 1941. She had a chaperone who travelled with her from city to city in the south. None of the men in the revue drank or took drugs.  And of course, none of them were interested in a 15 year old girl.

Oh, all right, it was all true up to the word chaperoned. Willie Mae became a woman while a member of the review which toured from 1941 to 1948. She also earned valuable stage experience.

Nothing good in Willie Mae's life was made to last. In between gigs, she shined shoes, was a drummer/bouncer in an Oakland bar in the 50s, she slept in all night restaurants and bars, in barns, and she picked cotton in Mississippi for awhile; the work was insanely hard.

Review: (Ottawa) Innocence Lost

Jenny Young, Pippa Leslie and Joan Wiecha (photo credit: lucetg.com)

Scales of Injustice
by Jim Murchison

The first thing I noticed about James Lavoie's set design when I stepped into the theatre were the long horizontal strips upstage that created a feeling that this little community in Clinton, Ontario was behind a closed venetian blind connected from the sky and pulled tightly to the horizon shielding it from the rest of the world. On a slightly raised platform downstage right, is a large tapered pole that could be a telephone pole at the boundary of a road, stylized just enough to be a symbol of the cross in a small Christian community. Stage left is an upstage platform with windows rising high on an upstage wall. A door takes you into a courtroom gallery, church or the Truscott home as the action dictates.

Patrick Andrew Boivin and George Allister's video design starts with home movies, with the cast gathered around watching the innocent fun of picnics, swims and bicycle rides, often using the actors themselves in the footage. Luc Prairie's lighting design, and original music and sound by Keith Thomas complete the technical artistic vision that is so rarely this symbiotic in support of the action.

Review: (Ottawa) Metamorphoses

Rosemary Dunsmore, Andy Massingham, Ryan Allen, 

Rachelle Casseus (photo credit: Andrée Lanthier)

Metamorphoses
Ovid's Pool Party
by Jim Murchison 
twitter@JimMurchison

I have been going to theatre for many years and this is the first time I have ever seen a play set around and in two large swimming pools. Bretta Gerecke has designed a set with a large wading pool downstage at floor level. A walk up the steeply pitched chrome staircases at either side of the stage takes you upstage to the deep end. The second pool looks to be about seven feet wide and deep and a great deal of the action of the play takes place in and around this level and can be seen murkily through the picture window front of the pool. Counters on each side of the chrome handrails have wine glasses and spritzer nozzles suggesting a country club fit for the gods. Behind a diaphanous curtain of water at least 10 feet high that remarkably does not make enough noise to be distracting are musical instruments largely in shadow called aquarions, along with crystal glass rims and bass drum.

Review: (Ottawa) Pride and Prejudice

Tyrell Crews and Shannon Taylor (photo credit: Trudie Lee)

Ever-Faithful

by Jim Murchison 

@JimMurchison

By Canadian theatre standards NAC’s mainstage theatre is a relatively large house and while it works quite well for more intimate shows, it is fun to see it rev up to its potential of a performance space of more grandeur. Certainly, the large cast and Jane Austen’s epic story of class, courting and ritual in 19th century England would give the theatre the chance to strut its stuff.

The first hint you get that you are in for an evening of more traditional theatre is that the curtain is actually drawn. When it does open your eye is immediately drawn to the oversized hangings of pastel coloured sheets of writing paper and the large rosettes. Patrick Clark’s set is romantic and representational which allows for pieces to fly in and out, to create the different locations and let the actors have full use of the breadth of the space. Clark’s costumes are gorgeous. So the mood and the stage are set. 

Review: (Ottawa) Thirsty

Jackie Richardson and Andrew Moodie (photo credit: Andrée Lanthier)

Thirsting for more
by Jim Murchison 
@JimMurchison

The NAC presented the world premiere of Thirsty by acclaimed writer Dionne Brand. The play is set in Toronto and explores the life of a small family of newly immigrated Jamaicans; husband, wife, daughter and paternal mother. Gillian Gallow's lovely set has an upstage staircase descending steeply from stage right to left onto a large circular stage where we find a chrome legged table with a microscope on it, stage right, set in front of a mosaic made up of hundreds of microscope slides. There is a bicycle upstage centre and a sewing area with tons of material piled up stage left. 

The audience basks in the sound of waves gently washing against the shore until the play opens when a much more ominous drip takes over as the women stare out into the audience intently reliving the senseless tragic killing of Alan at the top of the staircase. It is powerful and intense. The final scene is even more powerful and intense. In between, where we follow the family's fragmented immigration to Toronto and learn of their relationships though, it is incredibly intense.  There is so much to admire about this play, I really wish I had liked it.

Review: (Ottawa) The Glace Bay Miners' Museum

Francine Deschepper and Gil Garratt (photo: André Lanthier via NAC website)

A Maritime Story

by Jim Murchison

@JimMurchison

When you first walk into the theatre and see the beautifully rustic set design by Sue Lepage, it instantly informs you that you will be in for an evening of intimate story telling and human struggle. The central component is a cramped kitchen and the staircase that spirals around the stage right side does not have a single step that is exactly the same size or shape hinting to the audience that this is a community that has to make do with whatever is available. Paul Cram's sound design further sets the mood as the tin flute plays over the sound of the surf and Leigh Ann Vardy's light scape splashes across the sky.

I have to admit that I have a bias for maritime stories as I myself grew up listening to family tales, games, music and jokes in cramped seaside kitchens. I also had the profound and frightening experience of being at the face of a working coal mine in Sydney Mines and met the men that worked there. The beautiful thing about well crafted theatre is that it can transport you to that common part of the heart that informs all humanity regardless of personal experience, so I believe this production will touch everyone with its caustic wit, pain and warmth.

Review: (Ottawa) Communion

Stephanie MacDonald and Jenny Munday. Photo by Janet MacLellan.

The Beauty of Simplicity
MacIvor conquers at NAC
By Jim Murchison

The play starts in a therapist’s office while it rains. The rain effect is evoked by Ingrid Risk and Leigh Ann Vardy's lighting playing on the backdrop of Victoria Marston's wonderfully minimalist set. The way the light splashes on the frosted backdrop looks a little bit like the aurora borealis. This opening image is a fitting parallel of the way I feel about this Daniel MacIvor play. It is at once simple and direct, yet layered with subtle nuance and profoundly beautiful.

Even the costuming by Janet MacLellan represents two stages of a person's journey. The first time we meet each one of three women they are wearing their appropriate costume: cancer patient for one woman, therapist for another and  religious zealot for the third. The next time we meet them they are basically in their civvies and freer to love, doubt or cry as the case need be.

Review: (Ottawa) Creation

Christian Murray, Joey Tremblay (Photo credit: Andrée Lanthier)

Around Creation

Peter Hinton's last season at NAC continues but ho-hum

by Jim Murchison

I was excited to be going to the NAC again. We had to enter the theatre differently first of all, so I knew that something different had been done with the set up. Sure enough we walked by a thin backstage area and I saw drums and props behind a black curtain. It was theatre in the round which offers special challenges and treats for staging.

Review: (Ottawa) 2 Pianos, 4 Hands

Consummate Performers Weather a Storm

Greenblatt and Dykstra show why their work lives on

by Jim Murchison

Last night 800 or 900 people braved the stormy weather and shunned Friday the 13th superstition to add themselves to the estimated two million people that have been swept away by the theatrical, musical marvel known as 2 Pianos 4 Hands. In addition to the NAC's mandate to create original productions with it's resident ensemble, it is equally committed to showcasing the greatest plays that Canada has produced. Peter Hinton expressed this as more than mere commitment but something that the NAC embraces, and added his personal feeling of pride that Ottawa and specifically the NAC would be included in this, their final tour.  

Review: (Ottawa) Oliver!

Oliver! (photo: Andrée Lanthier)

Ottawa Oom-Pa-Pa

Oliver! gets full marks

by Jim Murchison

Lionel Bart’s classic musical Oliver! opened On Friday at the NAC Theatre. Due to Christmas commitments I was afforded the opportunity to take in the Saturday matinee instead of opening night. This is one of those, it is what it is, plays. Most people already know the tale and indeed have seen it before. The play was already sold out before opening night.

Review: (Ottawa) And Slowly Beauty...

Celine Stubel, Caroline Gillis, Mary-Colin Chisholm, Dennis Fitzgerald

(photo credit: David Cooper)

And slowly perfect...

Belfry/NAC co-pro stuns

by Jim Murchison

Last night, with the translator and the writer in attendance, the National Arts Centre launched their Studio season with And Slowly Beauty, fresh from a heralded run at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria. The praise is well founded.

Maureen Labonté’s translation of Michel Nadeau’s beautiful piece breathes with vital characters. It weaves the lives of real people with the characters in Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters skillfully. It is respectful to Chekhov without stooping to idol worshipping. This play grabs you equally by your heart and your funny bone and pulls you in for a deep, satisfying kiss. If it’s your first play it is probably the beginning of a long love affair. If you are a regular patron of the theatre, you will welcome the embrace of a long time love. It is a brave undertaking to perform a play that is about how beautiful and transformative theatre can be. If the play works it’s a poignant example of art, imitating art, imitating life. If the play doesn’t work it can be embarrassing and pretentious; as well as tedious and uncomfortable for the audience and the cast.