Video of the Week, May 22, 2013

A clip for the intriguing piece from Australia's Back to Back Theatre's Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, playing this week in Calgary at Theatre Junction and then at the FTA in Montreal next week. 

Review Squared, May 21, 2013

My Mission Statement

Valerie Cardinal

@vscardinal

I’m taking a time out from my regular column this week to address comments I received on my last column. I feel the need to do this because these comments questioned the purpose of Review Squared. They also stated a discomfort with the tone of this column. I feel like I need to establish a mission statement of sorts, because it’s possible that Review Squared has gone off the rails a little.

Let me make it very clear that I am not trying to shame anyone. I respect all of my peers greatly, and many of the theatre critics I discuss were writing long before I was. Some of the Montreal-based writers especially are reviewers whose work I read before I started writing about theatre. 

After Dark, May 21, 2013

The Funny Bunch

...and their strange bedfellows

by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

Lordie, what a strange week it has been for reviewers/critics/theatre journos... choose your moniker (or epithet).

F'rinstance the gang that give out the Toronto Theatre Critics Awards met this week. This is some kind of news but what is also noteworthy is that the group includes no women and no one from new media (despite some excellent blogger/reviewers existing in the city). Yes, yes it's pissy of me to note that but the fact remains that many reviewers exist who are considerably more erudite and informed than at least one of the men in the group.

However, one of the guys in the bunch I do like and admire, Kelly Nestruck of the Globe and Mail, also made a kind of weird news this week when he had his second fairly public run-in with playwright Morris Panych. You may remember last year when Panych took umbrage with a Nestruck review of Wanderlust at Stratford and had some fun with the fact Mr. Nestuck wore shorts to the play. It was funny then. Even Nestruck laughed. This time out, however, Mr. Panych was a little less humourous in his comments beneath Nestruck's review of Our Betters, at the Shaw Festival. Here is a link to review and comments but if you find it behind the paywall, let me just quote Panych: "Kelly, it's amazing; you are really a man of your time; certainly not ahead of your time – arriving, breathlessly, for the opening, just at the curtain, fumbling for your seat, making that entrance you like to make so that everybody knows you're a critic, and that you're here, at last, now we can begin, proof once again of your uncanny sense of your own personal 'now'; two o'clock, whatever – the play starts when you arrive, because for you, time revolves like a spinning paddle on the beanie right above your head." Later, he calls Nestruck a dweeb.

Openings We're Tracking This Week, May 20-26

Enemy of the People (photo credit: Arno Declair)

Lane's Week, May 20, 2013

A Week in the Nation's Theatre
by Chris Lane
@chrislanetweets

Congratulations: 
The 16 winners of this year’s Harold Awards have been announced, recognizing outstanding contributions to theatre in Toronto. The Ken McDougall award went to director Mitchell Cushman. According to the website, “to be Harolded is an honour of the highest subversive order.” And congratulations to Toronto theatre critic Kelly Nestruck for being the first Canadian journalist to take part in a U.S.-Germany exchange program for foreign correspondents, the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship.

In memoriam: 
Edmonton’s theatre community is mourning the passing of Jann Smith at age 62. The hard-working theatre administrator has been hailed as an “unsung hero.” (Source)

The Question, May 20, 2013

This Play Compelled...
by Estelle Rosen

Olivia Blocker is a third-year McGill student graduating in May 2013 with a degree in English Literature (major) and Russian Culture (minor). She has worked in seven different theatrical productions this year holding an array of different positions. Her recent credits include: costume designer for Waiting for Godot (Players), Timon of Athens and Based on a True Story (Tuesday Night Cafe); a witch in Macbeth (Players); set builder and sound board operator for The Revenger’s Tragedy (Moyse Hall); and sound designer for Inherit the Wind (Players). She makes her directorial debut with Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden.

CHARPO: Why this  play?

BLOCKER:  Death and the Maiden continues to be a socially and politically relevant play that maintains wider appeal due to its intensely dramatic, yet accessible revenge narrative. The play follows the story of Paulina Salas who finds the doctor who she believes raped and tortured her 10 years previously; she overpowers him and attempts to force him to confess.

Review: (Toronto) The Dumb Waiter

l-r Mark Wilson, David Matheson (photo: Dahlia Katz)

Giving Good Pause
by Jason Booker

The Dumb Waiter. Pinter, eh? 

Pauses.

Great production by Wordsmyth Theatre here, an independent Toronto company. See, sharp direction by Melee Hutton leads David Matheson and Mark Wilson to superb performances. These two, they play Gus and Ben as harsh, hardened, yet vulnerable. Two agitated hit men received a call but now, stuck in the basement, waiting for the word go. Then they begin getting notes from the dumb waiter – you know the device in the wall of old-fashioned hoity-toity estates, delivers dishes of grub and that sort of thing. And good for a café, which is maybe what is upstairs of the basement, so says Ben, when they begin sending up their snacks. But just the sound of that dumb waiter rattling into life, well, it gives you the heebie jeebies.  And that’s without mentioning the ever-present guns these two whip about.

Anyway, Andrea Mittler’s set captures grimness, er, griminess.  Like who has washed the walls in this place in the last decade? Grey and brown: my favourites. Dark, dirty and immersive – no one can tell what part of this space is the set and what part is her design. A set built on contrasts between Ben’s crisply white bed and Gus’ rumpled pong-y sheets.