Review: (Toronto / Theatre) Vitals

Now this, This is Vital Theatre
by Christopher Douglas

Outside the March has done it again. Site-specific, realistic and environmental, Vitals is a theatrical piece that has to be experienced to be understood. And it does need to be experienced by everyone.

Directed by Mitchell Cushman, Vitals takes place in a home in Toronto’s West End, where the audience tours the four floors of the home, sometimes led by a performer and sometimes left with clumps of other patrons to explore the detailed setting that has been created. The various rooms designed by Anahita Dehbonehie are occasionally literal crime scenes and often are wonderfully metaphorical representations. Be on the lookout for the little bonuses to search for throughout the spaces – open drawers, peek inside, read any papers, look at the maps – because the attention to detail in this production astounds, if the excessive costume choices can be forgiven.

Review: (Toronto) Weather the Weather

Photo by Jacqui Jensen-Roy

The Snow Glow Queen or How I Learned to Just Enjoy the Show
Weather the Weather to see Weather the Weather
by Christopher Douglas

Haley McGee crafts a wintery tale about a brother and sister after the hail.
A storm’s thrown the pair into a mess:  one that requires warm winter dress.

See, the play takes place outside in the snow;
For an hour, audiences are told where to go.

The story? You know it, it’s The Snow Queen with light, taking place in a magical Toronto park night.
Brother’s struck by lighting but Sister sticks with her map. She yearns to get home and won’t take a nap.

They fight while Brother sparks and glows (neat effect and it shows)
Before being seen by the Troll of the Sky, a Canadian Glow Queen.

Review: (Toronto) The Girl in the Picture Tries to Hang Up the Phone

Honest Picture of a Parent
or Where Theatre and Therapy Meet
by Christopher Douglas

In his elaborately titled play, The Girl in the Picture Tries to Hang Up the Phone, Hume Baugh tackles the minefield of a parent-child relationship – his relationship – with a dying, alcoholic mother.  And that is the key to this piece of theatre: it is Hume we watch onstage telling his own story.

As an audience, we sit in this small storefront theatre to watch Hume talk about himself and his mum as if he has had us over for tea or a beer: no fourth wall, no pretensions – pure honesty. Something which makes it admirable for him as a writer and lucky for him as a performer that Hume is as commanding and intriguing as he is, though odd for us watching. There is no pretence of an actor or a character stepping into the light; there is very little stage magic. As he states at the top of the show, there is only one sound cue and one projection. These two technical elements are the keys to the title however: one a recording of the phone trying to be hung up and the other a photograph from eighty years ago. These two artefacts symbolically bookend the life of Hume’s mother and his show about her.

Sunday Feature: Larry Westlake on Thrill Me

Boys will be Boys

Director Larry Westlake reflects on Leopold and Loeb and Thrill Me

by Christopher
Douglas

The award-winning musical Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story by Stephen Dolginoff,  creator of the show’s book, music and lyrics, has been staged in New York, Australia, Vancouver and dozens of regional theatres throughout the United States. Internationally, the show has been staged in translations ranging from Korean and Greek to Japanese and German. For three weeks in July, Capricorn 9 Productions presents the Toronto premiere directed by Larry Westlake.

CHARPO: First, tell us about the show.

WESTLAKE: Thrill Me is the story of two twisted teenagers who murder little Bobby Franks in Chicago. It is an infamous true story from 1924 about a pair of young men who are remembered as the thrill killers. Believing they embodied Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman and were above society, the about-to-be law students lure a boy to his death simply to prove they can get away with it. They would be defended by no less than Clarence Darrow, who convinced them to plead guilty in order to avoid the death penalty.

Multi-Media, May 10, 2013

The Essentials, Part I

[We pestered our contributors to offer one essential theatre book and explain why it is essential. Here are the first two essays.]

Angels in America by Tony Kushner
...more than its accolades
by Christopher Douglas, senior contributor, Toronto

So, difficult as it is to claim that one play script is more essential than any other, Angels in America by Tony Kushner is a play on my shelf (fine, I’m cheating a bit: a pair of plays) that definitely stands out. Since the first productions just over 20 years ago, Angels won almost every American award for playwriting, has been produced numerous times in numerous cities despite its thematic and budgetary challenges, was adapted into one of the most successful mini-series of a generation and has been anointed a canonical work taught in many universities within record time for a modern classic. 

But, for me, Angels is more than its accolades.  This Kushner guy – he’s a damn fine writer.  Sure, he’s insanely academic and ridiculously political but that is what gives the work something to revisit; the play always has another layer of depth that can be peeled away: a new message, an image that hadn’t hit the audience before or a possibility to be played.  These are characters with foibles, multi-faceted damaged people with backgrounds and beliefs that symbolize their era.  They are positive characters (in more ways than one) that present an image of real-life to their audience: not merely stereotypes representing sexuality or religion. With appropriately varied levels of good and evil and wisdom, the epic scope and imagination of this sprawling work still astounds me after multiple visits to its pages – and I don’t re-read scripts often.  I hold this script up as one of those examples of what theatre-work should be.