Review: (Ottawa / Theatre) Hedwig and the Angry Inch

An Angry Inch Short of Perfection
by Sonia Blanchette 

Hedwig and The Angry Inch has received accolades and ultimate cult status. Time Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine and The New York Times among others have heaped their praises on this gender bending rock and roll musical. It is exactly this type of show that should be the answer to growing the new age of theatre patrons, so the buzz and anticipation for this show is palpable.

Not being much of an expert or cult aficionado myself, I wasn't sure what to expect. From the moment that Hedwig, played by Tim Oberholzer, appears on stage, the crowd is sucked in by an overwhelming electricity that immediately manifests itself by tapping feet and bopping heads. Alas, unlike some, I was unable to lip-sync along as I knew not the lyrics. The reality is I have never been much of a concert goer and I now question if I missed out big time. This felt nothing like conventional theatre, it is a powerful musical manifestation! 

News: (Toronto) Dancemakers announces new company structure (press release)

CharPo's Real Theatre! April 4, 2014

A Fly On The Wall, April 4, 2014

Different Tastes
Jim Murchison

I have to give a nod to Valerie Cardinal for my article this week because it is a bit like the feature she wrote Review Squared. I reviewed Seeds at the NAC this week and it appears I am the only one that felt it was not spellbinding. 

On the surface this play had all the things I like; a fine cast, an interesting set, for the most part the use of multimedia was well integrated and at times very effective. Seeds used the space fully both onstage and front of stage. So why didn't it grip me.

Review: (Toronto / Theatre) Conte d'amour (World Stage)

(photo by Robin Junicke)

Story of Hatred
Love yourself – stay away!
by Jason Booker

This is a three-hour, intermission-less film plopped onto a stage – not theatre. Allegedly the play is about Fritzl and his house, where he lives upstairs with a family of life-sized cloth dolls which he feeds by crumbling potato chips into their glossy magazine page faces. It’s a highly amusing, if perverse, opening scene that lasts less than ten minutes. However, that is almost the only live action in the piece (at least as much of the piece as I saw, but I’ll get to that), before Fritzl disappears behind the white drywall of his home through a hole in the cupboard. He descends into the darkness below his living room floor, a constructed box with plywood walls on three sides and a translucent plastic wall facing the audience. Inside this rec-room basement live three people. The program informs me that the man in drag is his daughter, who resembles a badly feminized Daniel Craig and mumbling into his hand-mic songs like Love Will Tear Us Apart – a darkly amusing but overly long English commentary on this German-based show. The daughter takes care of their two sons in this dark playroom, all of whom are played by men in their mid-thirties. Everything that occurs in the basement is filmed and displayed live by two cameras – one hand-held and one mounted in the upper corner near the audience, akin to a security camera – projected onto the drywall.

Why do I need to state that the program tells me? Because it isn’t at all clear from the show. Conte d’amour isn’t meant for audiences to understand or participate in – simply to watch in awe. And for them to walk out.

Review: (Toronto / Theatre) 50 Shades! The Musical!

(photo by Clifford Rhodes)

Where 10 Shades of Gross Meets 40 Shades of ‘Meh’
by Christian Baines

Parody is dead.

No, really. I’m convinced this once noble comic form passed away with the great Leslie Nielsen and I sincerely doubt we’ll see talent on par with the Zucker brothers ever again. What did these guys understand that today’s spoofsters don’t? Perhaps that writing good parody is hard work. Hell, it may even be harder than writing your own material.

Even hit musicals like Spamalot and Evil Dead start to wobble under their own self-awareness in the second act (particularly Evil Dead). Still, both these shows demonstrate enough genuine commitment, inspiration and most importantly, love for their source material to carry them home. They also firmly ground their laughs in what made their subjects so great in the first place. 

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.