Review: (Toronto) Once On This Island

Photo by Joanna Akyol

Why They Tell the Story
Ten years on, Acting Up Stage shows it’s here to stay
by Stuart Munro
@StuartMunroTO

Now in its tenth season presenting musicals to Toronto audiences, Acting Up Stage has become a leading player in the city’s cultural fabric, delivering shows that provoke and challenge assumptions and expectations. This holds true for its newest production, Ahrens and Flaherty’s 1990 piece Once On This Island, co-presented with Obsidian Theatre Company, Toronto’s leading Black Theatre company. Now almost 25 years old, the music of this sung-through one-act musical holds up incredibly well, and its message is as relevant today as it was when first produced. Despite a few bumps along the way, this new production is a powerful look at love, race and loss.

Review: (Toronto) The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble

                                                                                                      (photo by Joanna Akyol)
The Worth of a Life
by Winna Tse
@tsewinna

What is a life worth living if you can’t even remember who you are? The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, brought to us by the Factory Theatre and Obsidian Theatre tackles this tough question with poise and emotional maturity that leaves the audience in tears, myself included. 

Written and directed by Beth Graham and Philip Akin respectively, Bernice Trimble is a play about a woman and a family struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. Bernice (Karen Robinson) is exuberant, sophisticated and powerful as the mother of three. Robinson's performance is heartbreaking and realistically captures the despair of a person besieged with such a disease.  Facing this tough disease with her, are her two daughters and son who also struggle to cope. Iris (Alexis Gordon) is calm, collected and composed just as she believes her family needs her to be. The eldest daughter Sara (Lucinda Davis) is highly emotional and paranoid. Peter (Peyson Rock) is aloof but involved in his own peculiar way. At times they choose to ignore or deny the ever looming future that awaits their mother. Other times they are forced to face the truth and accept it. The decisions they make through such a difficult time in their mother’s life are not easy and understandably so. Not surprisingly, their actions affect the family dynamic which like many families, is complicated.

Review: (Toronto) dirty butterfly

Kaleb Alexander, Lauren Brotman, Beryl Bain (photo by Joe Bucci)

Catch Up Then Slow Down
by Keely Kwok

Debbie Tucker Green’s dirty butterfly has three characters, two sets and two themes. It’s almost two different plays compressed into 65 minutes. 

Part One hits the ground running. Amelia (Beryl Bain) is a hard ass. And brilliantly so. From the moment she utters her first word she distances herself from Jo, played by the remarkably childlike Lauren Brotman. Finally there’s the stuttering snivelling sweetheart (but is he?) Jason (Kaleb Alexander). All three seamlessly intertwine with one another. There’s a poetic fluidity to the language of the play and the actors perform it beautifully. Constantly overlapping, repeating what someone has said only to give it new meaning for themselves, yelling a word that clearly has a greater meaning. You spend the first half hour breathlessly trying to catch up, to grasp what they are actually talking about. You follow each one as they take the spotlight to tell their part of the story. Hats off to director Jack Grinhaus for the blocking. They speak about the things that happen in their lives with just enough detail to paint an abstract image of what they experienced. 

And yet there are moments of extreme specificity and exactitude too.

In a Word... Lauren Brotman and Jack Grinhaus on Dirty Butterfly (Obsidian/Bound To Create, Toronto)

Maintaining the Edge
Juggling the match and the dynamite
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

B2C Theatre engages audiences with familiar and relevant themes presented in unfamiliar ways. They strive to create cutting-edge theatre that aggressively reaches its audiences by exploring dark themes, rich texts, heightened physicality and tension, and bold visual imagery through a fusion of artistic forms. Their aim is to ‘provoke and charge the soul’ by creating intense and visceral productions that have a modern, social, and artistic relevance to the world today. Lauren Brotman and Jack Grinhaus share artistic directorship...and more.

CHARPO: Before we dive into the show, a little birdie told me you've just had a child. You share theatre and life projects. How does that dynamic play out?

BROTMAN:  In rehearsal we have an amazing caregiver on site with us.  That way we're not separated from our 2.5 month old for the 9 hour day, but we can still work rigorously on the piece. Breaks are all about feeding Ethan and spending time with him which keeps us all connected. At home we spend a few hours a night producing, one of us with our son, and the other working on the check list, switching after every task.  We also make sure we have an hour or so before bed where it's just the three of us. While it's a hugely challenging time, I couldn't feel more lucky that everything that is important to me is so incredibly intertwined right now.

GRINHAUS:  He's a true theatre baby. A trooper that has a dirty butterfly onesie and is a producer on sight, being in charge of breaks and all. But our lives as artists have always coincided with our personal lives. Lauren and I have lived and worked together since the inception of B2C, so Ethan joining us was just the next logical step.

Review: (Toronto) The Whipping Man

Thomas Olajide, Sterling Jarvis and Brett Donahue (photo credit: Keith Barker)

Spinning Slavery

HGJT and Obsidian tackle little known history

by Gregory Bunker

Written by Matthew Lopez and first produced in 2006, The Whipping Man is an excellent production that puts a deeply ironic spin on slavery in America. The play is co-produced by the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company and Obsidian Theatre, and draws special attention to the paradox of Jewish slave-owning in America. It explores the notion that a religion with the history and pride of escaping slavery could be kosher with imposing such chains on others. And it is the gobsmacking awkwardness of reconciling this irony in the newly emancipated South that makes for great theatre at the Toronto Centre for the Arts. 

Review: (Toronto) Shakespeare's Nigga

Sascha Cole and Andre Sills (photo credit: Keith Barker)

MORE THAN A NIGHT AT THE META-THEATRE
joel fishbane

At once mesmerizing and frustrating, Shakespeare’s Nigga, the new play by Joseph Jomo Pierre, succeeds best as a showcase for the talents of two men: director Philip Akin and playwright / actor Pierre himself. Neither man has held anything back in bringing this difficult play to the stage and the result is a challenging work that will astound some, bewilder others and give everyone something to talk about on the ride home.

Set as a fantasy that takes place in the head of William Shakespeare (John Jarvis), the Bard imagines himself as a cruel slave owner living with two of his characters: Othello (Andre Sills) and Aaron, the moor from Titus Andronicus (played by Pierre). Othello has ingratiated himself with his master but Aaron is in chains for trying to escape. The plot eventually thickens when Shakespeare’s daughter (Sascha Cole) begins visiting Aaron in the dead of night.

Sunday Feature: Sascha Cole, actor, on Shakespeare's Nigga

Acting in a Dream World

Sascha Cole performs in a work where even the title is hot button

[This article was created with the assistance of Obsidian Theatre]

You’ve been a part of this project from very early on. What was this journey like throughout the various incarnations, (table reads, workshops etc.) to a fully realized stage production? 

I was brought in for a workshop in December 2011. Since then the play has been living inside my heart and head, marinating so to speak. It started to permeate my dreams actually. 

It is a gift to have so much time to let the complexities of the language and the story reveal themselves to you over time. I would be watching a movie or reading a book or seeing a play and suddenly I would think “oh, maybe Judith is a little bit like that” or ''maybe THAT is what Philip was talking about”. And then once rehearsal starts you have the opportunity to explore those small realizations. Even now, as we begin our tech week at  Passe Muraille and gear up to have an audience, I am still connecting the dots and searching to understand Judith.

Review: Caroline, or Change

Michael Levinson, Arlene Duncan
(Photographer: Joanna Akyol)

Caroline's washing

A blend of fact and fantasy makes Caroline, or Change a winner

by Mary Lea

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Caroline, or Change, is not your typical musical. It is a piece that has the potential to move and inspire. Acting UP Stage Company and Obsidian Theatre Company are two powerhouses. It was a fantastic pairing.  I loved Tony Kushner's writing, Jeanine Tesori's music and the direction that Robert Mcqueen envisioned for this piece. I can’t possibly leave this man out: Reza Jacobs' musical direction was absolutely on point.