Review: (Toronto / Dance) The Four Horsemen Project

Text, Sound, Poetry, Song
by Jasmine Chen,  Senior Contributor

“Language has been so misused by merchants, politicians, evangelists and materialists. Language has become abusive; sullied and souled by ulterior motives. Sound Poetry was an abandonment of language.” – Paul Dutton

This quote rings out with particular clarity in our contemporary society, when a single miscalculated comment can send the media into a frenzy or the twitterverse into a firestorm. When language can be manipulated towards different agendas, it is refreshing to step back from what we know as language. What the Four Horsemen and Volcano Theatre with Crooked Figure Dances and Global Mechanic are able to do is strip language of meaning so that we begin to listen to pure sound. When we begin to listen to sounds produced by the voice and human body, we stop relying on language to convey meaning. The result is a fully embodied form of expression that is exposed and surprising.

Review: (Toronto / Theatre) The Road to Mecca

(photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Together Apart
by Zoe Erwin-Longstaff

The beginning of The Road to Mecca, now playing at Soulpepper’s Michael Young theatre, is jarring. A young schoolteacher, Elsa (Shannon Taylor) bursts on stage and crankily snaps at her unsuspecting hostess, Miss Helen (Diana Leblanc). An elderly widow, Miss Helen lives in the Afrikaans small village in South Africa and Elsa has travelled 12 hours from Capetown for this visit – why? We’re not sure. On the highway she ran into a poor African woman carrying her newborn baby in the stifling heat. It is this kind of injustice that incenses Elsa, and she has a vituperative way of taking it out on Miss Helen.  But what is slowly revealed through the first act is a foundation of fondness between the two women. Furthermore their exchanges do aptly demonstrate different kinds of rebellions. For all her tongue-lashings, Elsa deeply respects Helen, with her quiet but powerful bucking of the status quo, her steadfast commitment to her art at all costs. 

Review: (Toronto / Theatre) Of Human Bondage

Jeff Lillico, Gregory Prest (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

From Page to Stage (and Screen?)
by Greg Bunker

It is a curious thing that the classic British novel, Of Human Bondage, written by W. Somerset Maugham in 1915, has not been adapted to stage until now. Maugham was a playwright as well; his novel is considered one of the best ever written; and there are three film adaptations of it – the first of these launched Bette Davis’s career in the 1930s. Adapted by award-winning playwright Vern Thiessen, and brought to life by director Albert Shultz and an impeccable Soulpepper cast at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, this world premiere offers up some big artistic risks that for the most part are exquisite and rewarding. The story, though, is a tad belaboured in the beginning, and come intermission, I was nervous about where it was all going.

Review: (Toronto / Theatre) The Gigli Concert

Diego Matamoros, Stuart Hughes (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

A Songful Premise 
by Keely Kwok

I arrived 15 minutes early to last night’s performance of Soulpepper’s The Gigli Concert and took a few of those minutes to admire the artistry of Ken MacKenzie’s set. With dirty windows, rustic walls, an unmade sofa bed, and absolute chaotic clutter everywhere, MacKenzie shows you exactly who lives here. The lights dim, music plays, and as the lights come back up, out stumbles JPW King (Diego Matamoros) in a morning-after stupor. King wrestles to pull a sweater over yesterday’s shirt and scrounges in an almost empty jam jar for some substance before washing it down with a swig of liquor. MacKenzie hit the nail on the head. 

On the acting front, The Gigli Concert has a very talented cast consisting of Diego Matamoros as JPW King, Stuart Hughes as the Irish Man and Irene Poole as Mona. Admittedly, it took until the second act for me to realize just how talented this trio is, but I think that has more to do with the writing and my lack of interest in the story than anything else. The Gigli Concert is about a troubled Irish Man who seeks assistance from self-proclaimed dynamatologist, King (a doctor of an invented science), because the Irish Man desperately desires to sing like the famous Italian opera singer, Beniamino Gigli. Sorry, but not my cup of tea. 

Review: (Toronto) Idiot's Delight

Raquel Duffy, Dan Chameroy (photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Shearing Time and Place
by Ramya Jegatheesan

At first glance, Soulpepper’s staging of Idiot’s Delight has all the makings of a first-rate comedic romp. 

We are in a resort in the Italian Alps. The company is intriguing, kooky, and worldly. A French revolutionary, a Russian con artist with her munitions tycoon lover, and an American vaudeville entertainer with his bevy of blonde showgirls all make an appearance. 

The world is on the brink of war. The borders are closing. No one can get out. 

What more could you ask for? 

Plenty, it turns out. 

Review: (Toronto) Parfumerie

Patricia Fagan and Oliver Dennis (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Christmas Comedy of the Best Kind
by Spencer Malthouse

OK, Cupid, what if you fell in love with someone you’d never met or seen but with whom you corresponded regularly? Now what if it turns out that not only do you know that person but that you actually despise her? A lot of dramatic irony and some great opportunities for slapstick would certainly occur and there would definitely be the potential for a Hollywood spin-off. Soulpepper’s adaptation of Miklos Laszlo’s Parfumerie imbues the situational comedy with quick and adorable theatricality. 

Set in a high-end shop in Budapest in 1937, six store workers and their boss prepare for Christmas. The central romance of the piece is a love story between two of the co-workers who adore one another as anonymous correspondents but loathe each other in person. Meanwhile, there is deceit and concern amongst the staff s as it becomes apparent that one of the employees has been shtooping the boss’s wife. The play flies along with superb pacing although a few pauses in the second act were longer than necessary. The first act contained a little too much exposition and could have been cut slightly. That said, the plot flows simply and is filled with comic moments and the play is a joy to watch. 

Review: (Toronto) Farther West

Matthew MacFadzean, Tara Nicodemo (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Of Love/Obsession
by Beat Rice

Going farther west is the dream and solution to all of May Buchanan’s life. A prostitute since the age of 14, May travels across Canada and finds herself in Calgary, as a leader in a house with three other prostitutes.

John Murrell's Father West's story is one of passion, obsession, self-preservation. It bubbles up and explodes in the trio of May Buchanan (Tara Nicodemo), the Constable Seward (Dan Lett), and Thomas Shepard (Matthew MacFadzean).  Both men relentlessly yearn for her to the point of obsession.  Seward starts off as an officer of the law who pursues her in order to arrest her for immoral behaviour, but he is also trying to fight his desire for her. It is as though his conflict with her morality is battling with his inability to accept his desire for a whore, and it comes out as an obsessive ‘investigation’.

Review: (Toronto) Round and Round the Garden (The Norman Conquests)

Albert Schultz (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

In The Garden, Dark and Deep
by Ramya Jegatheesan

Welcome to the garden, where a weekend of depraved seduction takes a twisted turn outside, and Norman, our jubilant anti-hero, muses on his lovely pyjamas, irresistible animal magnetism and the raw pleasure of touching earthy things. 

Round and Round the Garden is the rousing and brilliant climax to The Norman Conquests, Alan Ayckbourn’s trio of plays about a librarian who fancies himself a gigolo and unleashes his amorous yearnings upon a dysfunctional family. 

This third instalment is a fitting end to Table Manners and Living Together (its predecessors), but even as Round and Round the Garden erupts with hilarity, it carries dark undercurrents of angst, loneliness and pain.  Norman is an overgrown, overeager shaggy dog who will mount anyone who rewards him with an encouraging glance. Yet his affable exterior disguises a deep well of insecurity as well as a libertine and cavalier attitude towards life and women.  It is a testament to the playwright’s genius that he can take pain and insight and infuse it with so much humour.  Ayckbourn takes characters who, at first glance, you might dismiss as hoary clichés, and elevates them to breathtakingly vulnerable and human individuals. The whole trilogy is a fascinating commentary on family and relationship dynamics, and with Soulpepper and director Ted Dykstra at the helm, it is a theatrical experience you will not want to miss.  

Review: (Toronto) Living Together (The Norman Conquests)

Laura Condlln, Albert Schultz, Fiona Reid (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

The Spoiled of War
by Ramya Jegatheesan

Norman’s sordid romantic adventures continue in Living Together, the second of Alan Ayckbourn’s triptych of comedic plays, The Norman Conquests, where a libidinous librarian’s sexual cravings are unleashed upon a squabbling family in a run-down English country home. Norman tells us he is a three-women-a-day man, and he is out to prove it. 

Here, we glimpse the cast of six as they move from dining room to living room, offering us another window into the once secret dirty weekend gone awry. 

Watching Soulpepper’s Living Together is like piecing together pieces of a larger mystery: even while the initial intrigue begins to wear off, the family’s dysfunction becomes ever more clear. Annie (Laura Condlln) is feistier and angrier; Tom (Oliver Dennis) more dim-witted; and Norman (Albert Schultz, Soulpepper’s artistic director), well, Norman is more of a scoundrel than you might ever imagine. And oh, the bearskin rug! Far too much happens on that rug. 

Review: (Toronto) Table Manners (The Norman Conquests)

Albert Schultz, Oliver Dennis (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

The Party of the Year
by Ramya Jegatheesan

Meet Norman (Albert Schultz), a bearish Lothario, who sets out to seduce the ladies of the house beginning with his lonely sister-in-law Annie. 

Stranded in Annie’s (Laura Condlln) country home when a dirty weekend away is foiled by nosy relatives and a put-upon wife, Norman re-jigs his plans for romantic conquest and throws the whole house into chaos. No one is safe. 

Reg (Derek Boyes) says the women hate Norman, but the truth is a much murkier creature than that. Norman may not look it, but he is an incorrigible charmer and every man’s id unleashed. He knows just the right words to whisper to soften even the most severe and nervous of women. This makes him unpredictable. It makes him dangerous. 

Review: (Toronto) Angels in America Part I and II

Raquel Duffy and Damien Atkins

The Gay Fantasia takes flight at Soulpepper

Epic theatre that delivers on its promises

by Christian Baines

(photos by Cylla von Tiedemann)

It’s 1985, and Prior, a young gay man afflicted with AIDS has just begun to show visible symptoms. His lover Louis must decide if that ordeal is more than he’s prepared to face. Meanwhile, up-and-coming Mormon legal clerk Joe is caught between his deeply unhappy pill-popping wife Harper, his sociopathic conservative attorney mentor Roy Cohn, his distraught, yet no-nonsense mother Hannah, and the lure of other men’s beds. All while Prior is receiving strange visitations from an angel, calling upon him to stop humanity’s perpetual and seeming destructive march towards progress and change.

All told over two plays, running a total of just over six hours, and it changed the way theatregoers and theatre makers thought about gay stories, AIDS stories and depictions of America forever. What kind of a mind produces such a work? Tony Kushner, who subtitled his phenomenal play “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”. Applied to any other work, it might seem pretentious. Here, it seems an only fair description.

Review: (Toronto) Entertaining Mr. Sloane

David Beazeley and Fiona Reid (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Entertainment in Excess
Soulpepper’s Sloane a dark and campy treat
by Christian Baines

There’s a fine line in Joe Orton’s plays, somewhere between British farce and the blackest of black comedies. Productions that find it are rare, but golden, and Brendan Healy’s take on Entertaining Mr Sloane is among them. Gleefully embracing camp excess, but always with one eye on Orton’s darker observations and the morally ambiguous nature of its characters, this Sloane is brisk, acerbic and very, very funny.

Review: (Toronto) Great Expectations

Kate Trotter (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Expect the best from Soulpepper
A summer must-see
by Dave Ross

As the house lights dimmed and a single figure stepped onto the stage at Soulpepper last night, I was hurriedly composing myself, having arrived just minutes before. An unrelated family emergency had delayed me, parking had been difficult to find, expensive when I did find it, and I arrived at the theatre with just enough time to rapidly skim the program and get the cast of characters in my mind. I sat there in the gathering darkness, took a deep breath, and turned on the “critic” portion of my brain… “here we go” I thought.

Sunday Feature: Orton, Sloane, Sex, and Violence

Orton: Entertaining Sex, Violence and Counter Culture

by Christian Baines

There was something about the British youth culture that fascinated and terrified the mainstream in the 1960s. Whether it was the fear of dystopian moral decay by way of the Rolling Stones, or some misguided fear that the frightfully un-British hippy movement would fuse with that anger to create a countercultural monster, or the near obsession with graphic sex and gore-soaked violence that defined the horror films of Hammer and other studios... the message of overarching paranoia was clear.

Britain was doomed. The kids would destroy us all.

Many of Britain’s writers clearly and memorably shaped these fears into characters –often sexually active and engaging young men – such as Alexander DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange, or on stage, Joe Orton’s Mr Sloane, who returns to stalk Soulpepper Theatre under the redoubtable directing hand of Brendan Healy from July 5. 

Review: (Toronto) La Ronde

Brandon McGibbon, Grace Lynn Kung and Mike Ross (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Socio-Sexual Edgeplay
Soulpepper runs Schnitzler's genital relay

by Gregory Bunker

Soulpepper’s La Ronde is a not-quite-convincing cobbling together of Torontonians’ sex lives. The original Arthur Schnitzler play was scandalous in its day for its display of sexual relationships across the rigid class lines of late 19th century Germany. Jason Sherman’s modern-day adaptation is downright wholesome in comparison. Set downtown, we are in a different place and time—especially for conversations of a sexual nature—and a uniquely Torontonian update should not only show us how times have changed but also expose us to how times are changing. It was, after all, the cultural context of the original play that made it so deliciously dirty at the time. Here, Schnitzler’s template of crossing class structure with socio-sexual edgeplay seems difficult to transpose onto the cultural milieu of sexual Toronto.

Review: (Toronto) True West

Stuart Hughes (photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

True West is Strangely Directionless
by Christian Baines

Sam Shepard’s furious tale of brotherly feuding isn’t the easiest play to pull off. But something has gone seriously askew when the production’s comedy elicits only a few polite chuckles, and its darker elements summon only that faint shrug of ‘meh’.

Lee is a drifting petty criminal. His brother Austin is a highly successful screenwriter. But do the two men secretly yearn for a taste of what the other has? True West has become something of a modern American classic and when done right, brings the brothers’ conflict to an explosive head that teeters dangerously between the hilarious and the downright terrifying.

Review: (Toronto) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Ted Dykstra and Jordan Pettle (photo credit: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Same As It Ever Was
by Shannon Christy

Soulpepper's production pf Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is as quirky, witty, and sharp as the original production by Tom Stoppard which makes me wonder why I didn’t just watch the movie the playwright directed on Netflix instead. 

The good qualities consist of Dana Osborne’s stage design and the soundscape by Mike Ross. There is no fourth wall: the audience surrounds the performers. This allows the spectators to feel as if they are literally stumbling across two confused men questioning everything around them, while allowing the actors to interact naturally with the audience. (At one point, Guildenstern discusses the relevance of their conversation, as he steps down from the stage and used me as a live example of audience boredom to Rosencrantz. What a great tongue in cheek joke; using the actual text he was given to challenge a live audience member at the same time… I couldn’t stop laughing at the idea - especially knowing that all the while, he was probably trampling that poor shopping bag a careless spectator had left in the alley.) In addition, Mike Ross’s soundscape with its clever use of effects, and great transitions is effective in giving the piece direction and grabbing audience attention. Unfortunately this and the set are among the only provoking concepts in this production.  

Review: (Toronto) The Crucible

William Webster, John Jarvis, Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster & Hannah Miller (photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

No one can know God’s will
Sixty years on, The Crucible proves it still has much to say
by Stuart Munro

When Arthur Miller’s The Crucible opened in 1953, the reviews weren’t kind. It was felt that the production had been too stylized and cold, even though the power of the text was clear to everyone. Nonetheless, the play went on to win the Tony for best new play, and a new (better received) production the following year cemented its status as a cornerstone of the American Theatre. Last night, Soulpepper Theatre opened a new production of this landmark play, which walks that fine line between cold remoteness and powerful text.

The Crucible is a fictionalized account of the Salem Witch Trials of the late seventeenth century. Using historical figures, Miller shows us not the courtroom, but the lead up to and behind-the-scenes actions of the famous trials. An allegory for the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the play constantly pits ideology against reason, forcing its audience to ask how educated and intelligent people could possibly believe their own rhetoric.

Review: (Toronto) The Royal Comedians

Sarah Koehn & Diego Matamoros (photo by: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Singing the Under-sung

Soulpepper delivers a little-known gem

by Christian Baines

Mikhail Bulgakov’s black satire The Royal Comedians arrives at Soulpepper Theatre Company, reminding audiences of a time when playwrights were answerable to both state and church for the content of their plays. Bulgakov experienced such censorship first hand. Earning the ire of Soviet authorities by supposedly making a joke of the regime, it was only the intervention of an unlikely fan, Stalin himself, that kept the writer from prison.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that he should find solidarity with Molière, his subject and protagonist in The Royal Comedians. Like Bulgakov, the Molière of this story enjoys the favour of his nation’s leader, much to the dismay of the resident doctrinal gatekeepers (in Molière’s case, the church). 

Review: (Toronto) High Life

Mike Ross, Michael Hanrahan, Oliver Dennis & Diego Matamoros

(photo: Michael Cooper)

A Brotherhood of Men

Testosterone fills the iconic High Life

by Beat Rice

Something strange about us humans is that we like watching people get up to no good. The Canadian work, High Life, directed by Stuart Hughes, is a testosterone fueled play with an all male cast of four who plan to execute a bank heist. The core group of Dick, Bug, and Donnie, played by Diego Matamoros, Michael Hanrahan, and Oliver Dennis, are old friends with a history of petty crimes, heavy drug use and jail time. Newcomer Billy, played by Mike Ross, is also an addict and claims to have a criminal history but has never done time. The need for Billy for the heist creates conflict within the group.