Review: (Montreal / Theatre) 2 Pianos 4 Hands

(photo by lucetg)

Round of applause for 2 Pianos 4 Hands
Dykstra-Greenblatt classic is still delightful and appealing nearly 20 years later
Sarah Deshaies

Who knew piano lessons could impart such a universal message? 

As a former, rather weak music student, I never thought that I would look back on those hours of practicing and agonizing conservatory exams with fond memories. Last weekend, I found myself waxing nostalgic about those years after a performance of 2 Pianos 4 Hands, a simple show about the challenges that come with having a dream, whether it’s to play an instrument or a sport or have a hobby.

I’m a newbie to the play, which was first performed nearly 20 years ago in Toronto. Since then, the show has been a certifiable Canadian theatre hit, touring round the world to 2 million people in more than 200 cities, including Montreal in ‘97 and ‘99.

Review: (Montreal / Theatre) 4000 Miles

photo by Lucetg.com

Growing up and getting old
Herzog’s 4000 Miles gets loving treatment at Centaur
Sarah Deshaies

Leo shows up in the middle of the night, schlepping his dirty bike and worldly possessions. Ringing the bell at his grandmother’s Greenwich Village home, the 21-year-old is seeking physical and mental refuge. Awoken by the buzzer, Vera opens the door in her nightgown. “Are you high?” she demands. Leo almost leaves right then and there. But he doesn’t.

A self-described hippie, Leo is running from obligations, family and a summertime tragedy that he is reluctant to confront. Vera is lonely but stubborn, ensconced in a home with memories of her long-dead husband and their radical socialist past. Though they are both progressive lefties of different ages, the gulf between these two now de-facto roommates is decades-long and miles apart. He is trying to find his way, and she is losing her way of life. 

Review: (Montreal / Theatre) Motherhouse

Holly Gauthier-Frankel  (photo: lucetg.com)

War is Not Enough
by Caitlin Murphy

Setting one's sights on grand subjects like WWI, an artist is always wise to zoom right in – find the specific in the epic, and tell an ostensibly humble tale as a microcosm of the grander narrative. In this regard, David Fennario's play Motherhouse is promising. Inspired by a photograph of women workers at a British Munitions Factory, the legendary playwright focuses his attention on one woman in particular; moved by the defiance in her eyes, he imagines her as Lillabit, a feisty Protestant Anglophone, living and working in Verdun during the first world war.  From this beginning though, more flounders than flourishes in the Centaur's production of Motherhouse.

Plagued by clarity and structural issues, as well as a distinct lack of dynamics, the meandering tale fails to provide a clear hook for the audience to grab onto.  Though we sat in house lights the entire performance, meant to make us feel more involved in the narrative, we wound up feeling oddly left out.

Review: (Montreal) V-Cards (WildSide)

Fake it till you make it or Like a Virgin?
by Aleksandra Koplik

Any show that starts with a Leonard Cohen-esque cover of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” can have and keep my attention. This clever and extremely funny play is written by Step Taylor and Jesse Stong, directed by Dean Patrick Fleming. [ED: Jesse Stong is a contributor to The Charlebois Post.] It opens and closes with 14 chairs placed on stage, forming the letter V. Each chair holds a Roman mask of emotion that helps give life to over 20 characters (aged 13-70) on stage. They are played by four talented and energetic actors:  Marcel Jeanin , Amanda Kellock, Mike Payette and Anana Rydvald , that have absolutely no trouble transitioning from one story to the next. Actually, they glide through it. The audience quickly realizes from the very beginning that this is in fact an exposé of different people’s stories of their sexuality, self-awareness and, of course, losing their virginity. The names of the characters and their age is projected onto a chalkboard at the beginning of each segment and transitions to the next with song that ranges from the vocal stylings of the Spice Girls, to Sting, to Bruno Mars – keeping an upbeat vibe in the room.

Review: (Montreal) Big Shot (WildSide)

Here’s your Big Shot: a cinematic snapshot of a tragedy
Jon Lachlan Stewart is an elegant whirligig of energy 
by Sarah Deshaies
@sarahdeshaies

A shot rings out in a cabin of the SkyTrain.

Over the course of just over an hour, the bullet’s story will be revealed by those touched by it: who shot it, who provoked it, who witnessed it, who it struck.

Big Shot, which has toured in several festivals, including the Toronto and Winnipeg Fringes, is an intricate story woven by performer, playwright and Edmonton native Jon Lachlan Stewart. 

Review: (Montreal) Little Orange Man (WildSide)

(photo by Al Smith)

Remembering When...
by Aleksandra Koplik

Remember when you were a kid? How sense of coordination and controlling your walking speed never really came to mind? How every little question or curious thought was processed through your imagination, and came out in what at the time seemed like the perfectly logical conclusion? What glorious and forgotten days: when any uneaten vegetable or food could be used as a prop for play time and every toy could tell a story. Kathleen Greenfield and Ingrid Hansen 's Little Orange Man is an escape to childhood through the eyes of Kitt (played by Hansen), a little Danish girl who is directing a dream experiment with the help of volunteers from Craigslist (the audience). As a child diagnosed with ADD, this smart handful is having trouble making friends and she really misses her grandfather, who recently fell into a coma. This story is about Kitt trying to communicate with him through her dreams.

Review: (Montreal) Talk, Mackerel (WildSide)

The Most Bizarre Children's Birthday
by Chad Dembski

Talk, Mackerel playing at the Centaur Theatre’s WildSide festival is a completely unique, bizarre and absurd piece created by Sarah Segal-Lazar.  From the first awkward moments entering Centaur’s Studio space an instant decision is needed to be made; to sit at the table on the stage or sit in the centre part of the audience.  I chose to sit close but in the audience due to a recent bout of stomach flu but many audience members joined the table before the start. The invitation on the cover of the program is to Leslie Moira Duncanaine’s birthday party and the design of it all prepared me for something in the genre of childrens theatre possibly.

Review: (Montreal) A Quiet Sip of Coffee (WildSide)

Photo by Lily Jamali

When the water is coffee and the prank is the Play
by Chad Dembski

“Hi everybody, remember this is a play”.  This is one the first sentences from the start of AnimalParts creation A Quiet Sip of Coffee. The two writer/performers present themselves to the audience, introduce the premise of the piece but most of all want to remind everyone of what is real and what is not.

  

The story revolves around a letter written in the summer of 2004 to a fundamentalist 'ex-gay' organization they saw advertised in a weekly newspaper.  As a self-proclaimed 'gay-straight' duo they decided to prank the organization and ask for funds to produce a play.  The letter was answered, a meeting was set up and before they knew it they were not only there to work on their play but also agreed to participate in their camp.  This was a two week intensive Gay conversion therapy camp with boys and men from all over BC, Alberta and Washington State. 

Sunday Feature: Carmen Aguirre on Theatre in the Time of Danger (Blue Box, WildSide)

“Come if you dare”
by Carmen Aguirre

Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist who has written and co-written 20 plays including Chile Con Carne, The Trigger, Blue Box, and The Refugee Hotel. Her plays have been nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award (Toronto), four Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards (Vancouver), and The Siminovitch Prize (national). Her first book, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter won CBC Canada Reads 2012 and is a national bestseller. Carmen has over 60 film, television and stage acting credits. She is the recipient of the 2002 New Play Centre's Best New Play Award, the 2011 Union of B.C. Performers' Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award, and Langara College's 2012 Outstanding Alumni Award. Ms Aguirre presented the keynote address below on the theme "Speaking Of Change" for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Annual Conference on June 27, 2013 at Simon Fraser University.

When I was 18 years old I had the most searing theatrical experience of my life. It happened in Lima, Peru, during the civil war there. It was May, 1986, and I had just joined the Chilean resistance that was fighting Pinochet's right-wing dictatorship. 

Now if you joined the underground outside of Chile, like I did, you did so in Lima, where you would get your orders. But first you had to take the oath. 

The oath said that I would give my life to the resistance, that I agreed to be executed by the resistance if I broke under torture and gave my comrades away, and that I would always follow orders no matter what. Security was of the utmost importance; people fell all the time: Pinochet's dictatorship was considered one of the most “secure” in the world (in other words, the secret police were everywhere), and the Peruvian secret police worked with Pinochet as well. So one must never ever do anything stupid. 

The Question... Ingrid Hansen on Little Orange Man (WildSide)

The High-Octane Danish Girl

by Estelle Rosen

Raised by Danish immigrants in Kelowna, BC and fuelled by a love for talking with strangers, Ingrid Hansen is fascinated with ways of creating temporary communities out of groups of strangers. She has toured Little Orange Man across Canada, designed for the Dora-Award Winning musical Ride the Cyclone, and was a lead puppeteer for the children’s television series Tiga Talk! on APTN. Ms Hansen also does ongoing work with the inmate-run prison theatre company William Head on Stage in Victoria, BC. She loves to teach students of all backgrounds, especially beginners, and has taught theatre workshops for children, adults, actors, dancers, puppeteers, and prison inmates.

CHARPO: The last time we were in touch was about SNAFU Dance Theatre production of Fractured Fables, a play written and performed by prison inmates. At first glance, Little Orange Man (LOM) seems a departure. Yet perhaps not. LOM involves an outcast fighting dark battles, both incorporate fables and puppets. Are there any connections or is this coincidence?

HANSEN: I suppose the main similarity between the two projects is that when we started, we really had no idea what the end result would be. When working on Little Orange Man, at times we threw out huge chunks of material -- entire show’s worth of material -- or evolved the story into something completely different. It’s now the story of Kitt, a high-octane Danish girl whose greatest delight comes from re-enacting her grandfather’s grisly folk tales to young neighbourhood children. Kitt fires up homemade technology to extract and re-enact the audience’s dreams. Through the weird songs, fast-paced humour and shadow puppetry we have the story of an outcast child who entrusts a group of strangers to help fight her darkest battle. 

Review: (Montreal) Seeds

(photo via website)

Percy Schmeiser: heroic David or crooked farmer?
Food for thought at the latest incarnation of Seeds
by Sarah Deshaies

Who is Percy Schmeiser?

The septuagenarian canola farmer based in Bruno, Saskatchewan was sued in 1988 by biotech giant Monsanto for illegally growing their patented seeds; his fame (and infamy) grew as he fought back against the company over several years, resulting in a landmark 2004 Supreme Court Decision.

But is Percy Schmeiser a good guy?

The Question... Danielle Desormeaux, chorus director for If We Were Birds

I was terrified and so I had no other option but to say: “yes, I'll do it”
by Estelle Rosen

Born and raised in Northern Ontario, Danielle Desormeaux studied Music at Queen's University and graduated in 1984. She began her acting career in 1991 in Ottawa.  Film and television credits include: How the Gimquat Found Her Song (2007 Award of Excellence - Accolade Television Awards, 2008 Best Children's Program - Banff World Television Festival), the Oscar-winning Affliction (dir. Paul Schrader), Stardom (dir. Denis Arcand), The War of 1812, Big Sugar (dir. Brian McKenna).   Some of her favourite stage projects include: The Comedy of Errors (dir. Peter Hinton - NAC/Centaur), Umloüt, MöcShplat (dir. Alain Goulem - Clowns Gone Bad),  National Capital/e Nationale (dir. Robert Lepage – NAC), as well as her own bilingual adaptation of The Anger In Ernest and Ernestine (dir. Alain Goulem - Hudson Village Theatre).  Danielle has been a member of Platypus Theatre's touring company since 1998, performing theatre for young audiences with symphony orchestras across Canada, the U.S. and South-East Asia. 

CHARPO:  I understand If We Were Birds is an adaptation of Book 6 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, featuring a chorus of women, each a survivor of a 20th Century conflict. What's the most important aspect in general of being a chorus director, specifically in this play featuring only women in the chorus?

DESORMEAUX: When director Micheline Chevrier asked me in the Spring to work with the chorus,  I had to think long and hard about it.  This was new territory for me.  Could I actually do this?  Of course, I have always been musical.  Singing and playing instruments had always somehow found its way into my acting work in the past.  But this was a bit of a departure from the silly songs I'd written for the likes of Madame et Matante or learning to play the accordion and arranging songs for Umloüt or making kooky soundscapes with ukulele, xylophone and cardboard box.  This play is enormous in its theme and yet so deeply personal.  It describes the collective as well as the individual.  I was terrified and so I had no other option but to say: “yes, I'll do it”.

Review: (Montreal) St. Léonard Chronicles

No mambo through St. Léonard
by Sarah Deshaies

It doesn’t add up.

“Who builds curved, wooden staircases, outside, in a place where it snows?” questions the old woman seated at the centre of a Sunday family dinner.

That is what immigrant Dora faced when arriving in a wet and idiosyncratic Montreal in April 1955: nonsensical stairs in a cold land. She’s recounting the hardships of arriving in a new country, so different from her native Italy, with one child tucked under her arm and another trailing behind her. “Stupid WOPs, maudits Italiens,” the neighbours hissed at the time. Despite not knowing a lick of English or French, Dora knew exactly what they were saying.

The Abominable Showman, September 30, 2013

l-r Vittorio Rossi, Steve Galluccio, Bugs (photo by Eloi Savoie)

The Italian Stallions
CharPo sits down for a revealing tête-à-tête with Montreal  playwrights Steve Galluccio and Vittorio Rossi – who also co-stars in Galluccio’s new play The St. Leonard Chronicles – and the boys dismiss all talk about their rumoured professional rivalry …

By Richard Burnett (all photos by Richard Burnett except when noted)

@bugsburnett

There’s one thing that Vittorio Rossi and Steve Galluccio do extremely well, and that’s cuss like sailors.

As we all settle on the terrasse outside the Centaur Theatre’s rehearsal studio on Young Street in Griffintown – the same building that used to house the police station where Susan Kennedy was charged with the beheading murder of Mary Gallagher in 1879 – I tell the boys that if things get a little rough or touchy during the interview, “Just tell me to fuck off and move on.”

“No fucking problem!” says Steve, smiling.

“Fuck do you guys swear a lot!” Vittorio pipes up.

And so begins a no-holds-barred conversation with the two finest Italian playwrights in Montreal.

“In Canada,” they both correct me, with gleams in their eyes.

Review: (Montreal) The Number 14

Sarah Rodgers and Stefano Giulianetti (photo by David Cooper)

Making funny
by Caitlin Murphy

Humour’s a funny thing.  

What elicits your laugh-out-loud delight might meet my stone-faced confusion, and vice versa.  So, a few quick comedy taste markers:  The Simpsons over Family Guy; British The Office over American; Larry David over Ron James.  Any day. Descriptors like ‘zany’ and ‘off-the-wall’ make me nervous; I associate them with making funny, not being funny. And perhaps all of this explains why The Number 14’s particular brand of grinding out guffaws was lost on me. But, personal biases acknowledged, the show’s got some splainin’ to do too.

As far as Canadian theatre goes, Axis Theatre’s The Number 14 is an astounding success story; it has toured intermittently for the past 20 years, including a run on Broadway, and garnered numerous awards.  Currently directed by Wayne Specht, the piece was originally created in 1992 by a theatre collective in Vancouver, and directed by Roy Surette, the Centaur’s Artistic Director, which explains the symbolic significance of the show’s final tour stop here in Montreal.

Review: (Montreal) Dance Me to the End On/Off Love

When Even "Hallelujah" Feels Revitalized
by Caitlin Murphy

On the heels of its triumph, Trad, the Centaur Theatre is offering another enigmatic and enchanting ‘import,’ this one from further afield.  Dance Me to the End On / Off Love, a Granhøj Dans Production from Denmark, presents a surreal landscape of theatre, movement, and performance art, through the lens of some very familiar melodies and beloved lyrics – those of  Montreal’s own, Leonard Cohen.

A bold programming choice for the Centaur, Dance Me is clearly interested in challenging and teasing its audience, playing with our desires to see clearly, understand what we’re looking at, and be able to read well.  At various times, we are sung to through a megaphone or nylon stocking, shown Cohen’s lyrics re-written on overhead projector, temporarily stunned with a blinding light, or made to decipher what’s being written in body paint on a dancer’s back.   

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: (Montreal) Trad

Graham Cuthbertson and Patrick Costello (photo credit: lucetg.com)

The Emerald City
by Caitlin Murphy

In a spirit of Samuel Beckett meets Father Ted, SideMart Theatrical Grocery’s production of Trad, by Irish playwright Mark Doherty, is riveting – beautifully staged and superbly performed; deliciously absurd, but deeply moving too.  Originally produced in 2007 at the Segal Centre’s Studio space, this dark comedy is currently on tap at the Centaur Theatre – and Montreal audiences should feel very very lucky that it is.

As its title suggests, Trad is a play about tradition, but also about how much can be truncated, lopped off or lost – from a word, a body, an identity, a nation – before what remains is no longer recognizable.  100-year-old Thomas has only one arm, and his Da has only one leg.  But in a sort of upside down Godot, the aged male duo sets off on a search for Thomas’ previously undisclosed son, whose name or whereabouts are unknown.  Stuck for so long in the past, the men’s quest becomes a symbolic last stab at the future.  As Thomas and Da, Graham Cuthbertson and Patrick Costello – with bald pates, furry ears and pleading eyes – deliver brilliant performances replete with vulnerability, wit and soul. 

Review: (Montreal) Innocence Lost

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

Cause Célèbre
Canada's awful justice
by Caitlin Murphy

In the tradition of The Laramie Project, Beverly Cooper’s Innocence Lost reminds us that there are certain crimes that don’t so much happen in towns, as to them.  The story of Steven Truscott – a 14 year-old boy falsely convicted of the rape and murder of 12 year-old, Lynne Harper – was certainly such a case, not only for the town of Clinton, but ultimately for the entire country.   Though Innocence Lost compassionately and adeptly chronicles the Truscott tragedy, I think it could have unearthed a little more beyond the facts to move us along the way.

Review: (Montreal) Poutine Masala (Wildside)

Bollywood, Qc

by Rebecca Ugolini

If the grey winter landscape has you yearning for a little heat, the Bollywood-inspired dance numbers and light romantic comedy in Poutine Masala might be just the spice you need.

Choreographed by Deepali Lindblom, founder of the Deepali Indian dance company, Poutine Masala uses all the drama and comedy of Bollywood dance to tell the story of the cross-cultural love story between a free-thinking young Québecois man and a flirty but reluctant young dancer whose flight from an arranged marriage in India brought her to Montreal.