SOULPEPPER THEATER: DEATH OF A SALESMAN

Posted on November 3, 2010 by strecker

Albert Schultz’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is so exquisitely unforced, so subtly true to human desperation, so consistently acted with unfailing integrity by an exemplary cast, that its beauty hurts without relief. As Willy Loman first enters his home in darkness, the sound of a flute permeates the air and gives his presence a lingering ghostly quality on the verge of dissolution. It seems a life drifting by. We witness the relationship of Willy and his supportive wife, Linda, and note the introverted quality of two lives losing their bearings. As an audience, we are not watching, we are intruding. Their two adult sons, simultaneously before us, share a bedroom as they did when they were lads. Happy, we learn, has screwed the girlfriends of three executives with whom he is getting even. Biff, his qualitative opposite, is one to seek the purpose of his life, one to live inwardly. As lads, they revered and heeded their dad who advised, “Be liked” and thus they would thrive. As adults, however, watching their lives and their dad’s fall into ruin of no purpose, they now know better.

Nancy Palk’s Linda is loyal, quietly accommodating, a contained greyish presence that is both support and outlet for Willy in his ongoing frustration. It is a poignant interpretation as she tries, beyond her ability, to smooth each rough edge in the family’s tense life and to nurse her husband’s sinking self-esteem. She fits into the lives of others as needed and, because playwright Miller is acutely sensitive to all places where human dignity can be wounded, she is constantly needed. Palk’s Linda is a woman whose identity is founded on the support she gives to others and because she does all she can, she cannot understand why her efforts are not enough. The familial ship sinks no matter what she does. It takes subtle understanding of character to find complexity in Linda’s lack of comprehension, and Palk has it.

Joseph Ziegler’s Willy is indeed “a little boat looking for a harbor,” a man whose constant urge to succeed through likability denotes a frustratingly small life without a centre. The system he worked to create no longer needs him and Ziegler’s take on a now discarded Willy’s humiliation is detailed with nuance and painfully memorable. He does indeed seem tired at the core and unable to maintain even his shallow standards of dignity. He does indeed seem a man of lifelong loneliness in constant need of approval. In Willy’s decidedly ordinary existence, his recourse is to pipe dreams, to quiet irritation, to attempts at being known -we know this man. Ziegler gives Willy an epic dimension because we detect no attempt to do so on his part, no actor’s reach for meaning. It hurts to watch Ziegler’s (and Miller’s) Willy because we see the hopeless parts of ourselves we’d prefer unspoken.

In two words “ Yah, Pop” Ari Cohen as Biff is eager, obedient and self-destructive at one go, a lad whose total submission to his father’s superficial ideals leads to total disillusionment when he finds his dad with a woman other than his idealized mom. And his ironically freeing realization is that “We have been living a lie for fifteen years”. Biff has always been judged by his dad and now, as he is forced to judge his dad, his old self is destroyed. One tragedy here is that Willy can’t or can’t dare to understand Biff’s father-damning realization that “I am nothing, Pop.” But it is a declaration of existential freedom in the face of Willy who has never been free of the dream that takes him nowhere. The enthusiastic and shallow Happy, played with insightful precision by Tim Campbell, reveals an unsettling emptiness of values. Something of a stud, he is unsatisfied in everything he does and Campbell nails Happy’s inability to think beyond his condition to cause and solution. He is a Willy-in-waiting and, because we know his end, deeply disturbing. We want him to wake up to truth, to see some potential in his life, but he can’t. As with Bif, we feel that Happy lives filial pain.

Lorenzo Savoini’s set is certainly cramped, so overlapping movement at times seems awkward and confusing. On the other hand, the set does act as a psychological mirror of the collective and cluttered emotional mind of the Loman family. One example of Albert Schultz’s acute feeling for Miller’s masterwork is that people touch one another, embrace one another, as we in the audience come to realize that no embrace is strong enough when the other is consumed by the American lie posing as a dream. At Willy’s grave Linda asks “Why didn’t anyone come?” but, in the end, the point is that attention has not been paid and the inhuman capitalistic machine that shaped Willy’s dream and his tragically logical demise has made another killing.

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OPERA HAMILTON: THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO

Posted on October 29, 2010 by strecker

Opera Hamilton’s subtly realized and thoroughly entertaining production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro satisfies in so many ways. Right at the outset, the overture is conducted by the much-travelled Gordon Gerrard for a lightness of energy and buoyancy of momentum, rather than the punctuation of grand musical lines with big chords of which, in Mozart, there are many. Such assertive understatement, in turn, welcomes many nuances in singing at which this vocally-notable cast excels. Director Brent Krysa, in the initial plot setting banter between Figaro and Susanna, immediately shows a knack, as he will throughout, for implying relationships of covert complexity. We have playful power trips, established habits of communication, Figaro with a slightly mocking stance, and Susanna with latent fire waiting for ignition. They are appealingly casual with their intimate connection.

Above all, this is a domestic situation and each character is defined not by anticipated stereotyping but by situation. Figaro, sung with unforced magnetism by Stephen Hegedus, thus isn’t one to automatically lay on the charm and manipulative smarts without actual need, but instead proves indeed to be an ever-ready serving man who must come to terms with each crisis as it arises. There is an everyday feeling to the man, he is an appealing regular guy, and, in turn, his warm baritone is unshowy and conversational. Nathalie Paulin’s Susanna is a sharply defined beauty who conveys a latent sexual savvy as her tonal variety echoes many shades of personality. She is feisty and, as well as being heartfelt, is also the most felt-up Susanna ever, I would suspect – there isn’t a hand in this bunch that doesn’t settle upon her breast.

Katherine Whyte’s Countess, slightly more velvet-coated vocally than Ms. Paulin, is delicately heartbreaking in “Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro” but, with an interesting turn, she seems less inwardly fragile than much attuned to the delicacy of the human heart. She is also a woman of instinctively flirtatious eyes and smile, a woman of warm and somewhat fleshy radiance. Brent Polegato’s handsome Count, a disconcerting double for Gerry Lee Lewis in his early days, is decidedly masculine yet lyrical of voice, with shades of a dark and dangerous and volatile center on one hand and a charmingly human vulnerability on the other. He seems to live on the edge and is ready to take anyone about him over that same edge. When I checked, it was no surprise at all that Don Giovanni sits in his extensive repertoire.

This is a very sexy cast who take the implicit sexuality of this production in stride, surrounded as they are by walls covered with nude gals in a style that resembles Boucher going on Watteau going on Cezanne. In this spirit, Ariana Chris’s Cherubino, a young writhing fellow of uncontrolled and self-indulgent horniness and very nervous energy, is hilarious as he strokes the bare bottoms on the wall. Song by a mezzo, the part is played to the hilt for sexual ambiguity and Ms. Chris is slightly over the top and delicious. The asexual presence of Daniel Lichti’s Bartolo, Lynn Mc Murtry’s Macellina, and Gerald Isaac’s Bassilio/ Don Curzio, all appealing of voice and distinct in characterization, are thus doubly amusing in contrast.

As said, the setting is a household, albeit one of nobility, and, as far as one hears in this production, the cast have little need to present stadium voices in showpiece arias. Instead, they offer voices of tonal charm and agile nuance that, whenever dramatically required, shape vocal lines with potency and resonance that actually evolve from each characterization. Mozart’s famous music and Da Ponte’s famous libretto are consistently shown to serve each other and every aria thus seems a natural part of the narrative. Thanks to all involved, this is theatre as opera should be; we are without fail taken in by a collective and cohesive effort that creates a new world, not as a classic from the past but as experience in present tense.

This production is directed and conducted for undercurrents of personality and situation. There is less emphasis on types as on everyday individuals who must find resources to survive. Types, as we have often seen, are already defined, but these folks come into being before our eyes in this thoroughly integrated show. It is a mark of this production’s subtly dramatic qualities that the audience pays attention to each word sung and responds accordingly. One feels that even in cinematic close up each character would seem unforced and natural. Without flaunting its dramatic or musical theatricality, this production entertains through and through.

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THREE PLAYS FOR STRATFORD IN AUTUMN

Posted on October 11, 2010 by strecker

AS YOU LIKE IT (to October 31)

Things hang loose in Des McAnuff’s magically conceived Arden where absolutely anything goes. The combo of five swings as they would in a jazz boite, folks pop in and out of song, implied realities linger to make themselves almost known, and each iconic element of Debra Hanson’s joyfully eclectic stage design (thanks, Magritte) insists upon a fascinated admiration.

The young here are charming yet directed right-on as they prove clumsy when they want finesse and test out others as they simultaneously test themselves. This is a beautifully touching realization of youth as alien in an adult world. They are unsettled by their love, surprised by it and speak with voices one might hear in the streets outside in day to day Stratford. The harmony of colloquial manner of speech and elevated poetic writing feels very fresh and alive.

Andrea Runge’s Rosalind is something of an “every teen” in essence, an admirable blend of untried audacity and innocence, vulnerability and passion, and she suggests a fetching inner life of open dreams. Cara Ricketts’ Celia implies largesse and elegance in her precociously poised manner and her high heels in a forest trek make a revealing class distinction, as do the five suitcases that Touchstone must carry. Together they are irresistibly endearing in their bubbling girlish sincerity, their energy of girlish conspiracy, their girlish everything. Paul Nolan’s Orlando, in turn, is full of youthful energy and appealing vigor that blend naturally with a young man’s vulnerability in the presence pursuing ladies.

Lucy Peacock’s wide-eyed and thick of brain Audrey, for whom any thought at all is as difficult as quantum theory, is delightfully ready to live anytime, anywhere. Ben Carlson is a robust and acidic Touchstone who intriguingly seems to set his own terms with the very difficult world around him. But it is Brent Carver’s Jaques, as he slinks about spouting a cynicism no doubt made of wounds, who acts as a magical tuning fork for this production. He is everpresent and cool with style, wears a bowler and topcoat like an upper class Vladimir (in fact his head emerges from the floor at one point a la Beckett), and he plays the threads of potential meaning around him as if his voice is the string of a lute. He is unforgettable.

McAnuff’s risk-taking production floats like a cloud yet makes incisive use of many of life’s cruel edges. This is a military state after all and the brutality and torture, stylized or implied as they respectively are, hit home with understated force. There are many sexual undercurrents here and also much suggestion of penile activity. McAnuff’s show doesn’t feel like theatrical depiction as much as every day life exaggerated as it might be at a party after a few drinks. One knows these people and keeps finding out more. I attended a student matinee and it was a joy to hear a young audience so in tune with every word of the play.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS (to October 30)

Under Ethan McSweeny’s direction of Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons, this production opens with an imposing chandelier sitting at midstage as its candles are lit by attendants in powdered wigs. It rises to reveal some light on an eighteenth century world of hypocritical façade, one played to the hilt with intrigues and gossip, with sex as a weapon and seedy savoir faire in bed and everywhere else. Making others betray their ideals is a game in this world where the good are too naïve and gullible and inept among cynics who would use them.

As Valmont, Tom McCamus is a smooth and verbally agile seducer who savors each double entendre and irony. He gives his character substantial fibre that informs his words. His dynamic presence draws the distant seats of this immense theatre into the realm of his persona. His ally, and sometimes queen to his pawn, is Seana McKenna as the more inwardly-played Marquise, a woman who leans as much to indifference as to relish in her evildoings. After all, in her book, “When it comes to marriage, one man is as good as the next” and “Shame is like pain, you only feel it once.”

Sara Topham is melodramatic with her virtue, petal delicate in her innocence and a walking whisper of a woman as La Présidente de Tourvel. Martha Hanry brings a worldly and experienced meatiness to her Mme de Rosemonde and Bethany Jillard is adorably inexperienced as Cécile who, once turned on, won’t be turned down.

The play is cleverly theatrical with its show-stopping bon mots and this production, incisively spoken as it is, makes sure that we get hold of each voicing of cynicism before we move on to the next. I do sense a more casual air here than I did at the play’s London opening many years ago: I feel perhaps too comfortable watching here, whereas back then I felt quietly dirty. Perhaps in so large, too large, a theatre, the nuance of malice can get lost.

KISS ME KATE (to November 6)

For the set of Kiss Me Kate, David Farley’s uses strongly defined verticals and high horizontals around the stage that make the large Festival Theatre seem an extension, a smaller and more  intimate space. After all, this is a classic and stylish Cole Porter score. These confines are tentative, however, in director John Doyle’s exuberant and freewheeling show that, for the sake of a will to entertain, won’t be confined by boundaries.  

The explosive costumes on this showbiz bunch are strong hued and, appropriately, every opportunity to overact in parody of classical style or to do an eardrum-blasting squeal (thanks, Lois) is taken joyfully and robustly. It’s the kind of show that starts over the top and then goes further over the top. Still, albeit the physical gags and the energy bursting everywhere, this show doesn’t lose a human centre. Like a delicious song of Cole Porter, it’s there when the production needs it.

Of course, the staging of Shrew is rife with missed cues and magnificently amateurish. The two thugs with their nasal accents are not at all suited for Shakespeare, so laughs are many. And the parallel relationships of Fred and Lilli and Bill and Lois, the duality of backstage and onstage goings on that overlap, the scatterings of sarcastic wit, these are all set up a priori to entertain. All the leads, and in fact all the cast, are strong presences who match the inherent energy of the production with their own brand of gusto. I had both legs tapping at Too Darn Hot.

 Chilina Kennedy’s scene-stealing Lois is lovably air-brained and inept; her best features are obviously below the neck and we are given much opportunity to enjoy them. Her upstaging of Monique Lund’s Kate is hilarious. Lund, on the other hand, conveys a sense of poise, unforced confidence and inherent dignity that nicely balance the otherwise Lois. Both ladies, as they contort, look great in underwear.  Juan Chioran’s Fred is a long, lean, classical ham of grand gestures, intensely melodramatic eyes, and the mannerisms in delivery one might find in an old recording old Henry Irving. He is often an anchor when things get too hot.

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SOULPEPPER THEATRE IN TORONTO 2010

Posted on September 7, 2010 by strecker

DOC

Doc, with Diana Leblanc directing Sharon Pollock’s Canadian classic of 1984, opens like a frenzied Altman film of simultaneous or overlapping words inside a tormented skull. Is this the playwright’s mind to which we are witness? Her characters can’t escape their memories as they inhabit the memories of others and we immediately find ourselves in the emotional crossfire of R. H. Thomson’s Ev and Carmen Grant’s Catherine. We try to comprehend the distance and hostility between them, the extent of the damage each one feels, the conscious or subconscious motives of each one. “You were never home,” the daughter accuses her father. “You go through men like boxes of Kleenex,” he fires back at the daughter who, now moved away, does not keep in touch with him.

Another pairing is the guy relationship of Ev and Oscar and they share memories of hockey, whores and med school. Although Ev as Doc is passionately altruistic in the world, he is absent to wife and kids at home, absent when his wife, Bob, gives birth, absent when she descends into alcoholism. Ev is a man frozen in the conditions of his existence, unable for many years to open the suicide note his mother wrote, and as he saves the world his family dies. He’s a man who does harm as he does good.

Ev’s wife Bob, given a sensitively shaped and thoroughly stunning performance by Jane Spidell, sinks into a personal hell before our eyes. It is painful to watch this concisely depicted human suffering as it becomes an overwhelming reality of human futility that can end only in death. Indeed, the five characters are five pulsations of tormented existence, especially in a setting of visual metaphors that hit home the eternal barriers between people. Astrid Janson’s intensely confining and poetic set, with its reflecting surfaces and transparent walls that only partially conceal, intensifies the experience of memories that come forward on stage and then ebb. Kevin Lamotte’s brilliantly isolating and haunting lighting makes both characters and audience deal with persons from the past who now, partially concealed, inhabit shadows in the mind.

We have here a superbly made theatrical unity of an acutely effective play, with acting of implication as much as statement and evocative design, a production that achieves nothing less than the poetry of music. This is a deliberately paced and visually articulated account of what people are and what has made them so. The device of Catherine at two ages, both in tormented bond with her parents, is subtly devastating in this play about people who live in relationships that destroy, even as people crave them in order to survive.

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW

Geraldine applies for a secretarial job, ends up naked behind a curtain as the seducer-psychiatrist’s wife walks into the office with a pageboy in tow, one with whom she has had a go, and the shrink declares to wife, “You were born with your legs apart, they’ll send you to your grave in a Y-shaped coffin.” That’s the beginning of director Jim Warren’s very entertaining production of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, a play, which, at its premiere in London of 1969, so offended and appalled the audience that they shouted at the actors and ripped up their programs. Only in a 1975 Royal Court production directed by Lindsay Anderson did Orton’s anarchistic shots at the establishment get their due respect. Perhaps by then more people could admit that the system was crazy.

Orton repeatedly takes the pretense of the status quo to its logical but absurd conclusions and reveals a system that is based upon power and nothing else, especially reason. Doctors spout legally-sanctioned nonsense like “She may mean yes when she says no” or “I’m not interested in your explanation, I can provide one of my own” because every protestation of sanity is treated by psychiatrists as a symptom of mental imbalance. They call the shots and they jump to conclusions with logic that runs askew, always protecting themselves

Brenda Robins, as Mrs. Prentice, is nicely ambiguous, a walking icicle at times who, according to hubby the shrink, “is harder to get into than the reading room of the British Museum” but, as he has also noted, sexually ever-ready. Nicole Underhay’s Geraldine was, at one time, standard stuff in London’s West End, an unclothed bird tightly packed into her undergarments, all wide-eyed and clueless and built. Graham Harley aces the fanatical, resolute, melodramatic and self-serving efficiency of Rance, the official who understands little and pronounces much. Brandon McGibbon and Oliver Dennis delight with finely-tuned physical comedy in their cross-dressing frenzy while Blair Williams, as Dr. Prentice, is multi-layered in human vulnerability as he pays for all this fuss he began.

Yes, we have several doors for all the frantic coming and going, one liners fired all about, say at royalty or the police or the civil service, the running gag-line, “Undress and lie down on that couch,” straight-jackets too, lots of sex of many blends, and a very far-fetched resolution, involving, in part, Churchill’s missing part. The pace gradually picks up to an easy-going frenzy and it’s fun to observe the audience respond in mind-splitting glee to a play that could, mishandled, be simply a relic of another time. As it is, Orton does make unsettling points that all is not well in our world of officialdom and civility and one laughs, even long afterwards, at this farce that the audience forty years ago didn’t want to understand.

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STRATFORD SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL 2010

Posted on September 7, 2010 by strecker

DO NOT GO GENTLE

Back in the 70s, I spent several days in Laugharne in Wales, the setting for Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. In those days, the poet’s boathouse and writing shed were not open to visitors and peeking through the windows gave one the only available access. Folks in town did remember habitués of the pub buying Thomas a pint when he couldn’t afford one and they told of his wife Caitlin who, drunk at his burial, was held aloft by mourners on either side. Then, as now, Thomas exuded a mystique to which many were susceptible, especially on hearing his booming and plaintive voice in delivery of poems that sounded like grand echoes made of eloquent language.

It’s not a boom of public pronouncement one hears in Geraint Wyn Davies’ voice in a one man show titled Do Not Go Gentle, but foggier tones of inner dialogue and intimate conversation. We sense that this is Dylan thinking through each word and cadence, engaging and not overwhelming his listener, living the creation of his words and thoughts. This is not so much proof that “a writer plans his casual appearance” but a candid view of a writer and human being in reflection, before, in public, he will then make every observation a public pronouncement. In this intimate space, he confides, “I was very good at being a child” and indeed he here seems as much a child as a grown man. He also reveals his private but enthusiastic relationship with his creations, and we feel that words are his heartbeat.

In part, Geraint Wyn Davies gives us the poet’s innocence, tells us what he notices in his life and what gives him pause. He reveals an element I’ve long sensed in Thomas, not a bombastic poet over a pint, but a small town fellow, a boy out of his depth in the world, gossiping over a cup of tea. As Thomas, Davies confides throughout, as with, “The ladies think I’m thinking all the time” and lets loose with “God damn you academics, you’re just as dead as I am but at least I have my art.” We hear the voice of admiration and inadequacy when of Shakespeare he states, “That son of a bitch, he wrote it all.”

The reading of poems has greater value, then, because we feel we’ve come to them through the poet’s inner life that he has shared with us. “Do Not Go Gentle” is read with a realization of each word’s import, with almost an approving caress of each phrase, with a rush of cadence one feels, while writing, in discovery. Davies reads the poems as if he is listening to himself, hearing himself, discovering himself.

This is an immensely engaging show, pleasantly raunchy and blunt with sexual exploits savoured and an Act I closer of “I don’t know about you, but I could use a piss.” It is also loosely structured, but when is the human heart, like the one it depicts, ever tidy? And when his ever-emptying bottle finally gives Dylan the shakes or when he asks a fundamental question of human existence –“Is anybody ever really listening?”- we feel we are present beside tragedy. It’s tragedy that creeps in under the simplified myth that simple minds want of poets, myth that makes life, now less complex, easier to handle.

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SHAW FESTIVAL 2010

Posted on September 7, 2010 by strecker

SERIOUS MONEY

Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money depicts a frenzied and pummeling world of buy and sell, “takeover mania,” and insider deals -with champagne, coke, sex, silk shirts from Jermyn Street, and all else that money can buy as a bonus. It’s a world of beneficial connections (“You say Henry where I say Kissinger”), willful amorality (“Promise what you have to, promise your ass”) and corruption (“Wheeling dealing is stealing”) at every level, where money is borrowed to pay colossal interest and shady dealings are given a cleaner name.

It’s a crazy world of greed, of competition gone mad with itself (“They may say I’m a bastard but they’ll never say I’ve lost.”) It’s a world of, well, sex, drugs, and capital, and Act One ends with these words, “Fuck yourself instead.” It is certainly as timely and relevant a play in 2010 as it was in 1987.

Eda Holmes’ energetic and rightly frantic production features breathtaking pacing, upbeat though occasionally muffled delivery of lines, briskly efficient scene changes that actually involve a repositioning of stage boxes, clever chorography as in the hunting scene, and a crazy atmosphere that, appropriately, sometimes drives one crazy to watch. Churchill’s rhymes sneak up subtly or come forth with waving arms (“Pull yourself together Daddy, What does it matter if Jake was a baddie?”) but always delight. I especially love the pairings of “creditor” with “predator” and “shitty” with “city.”

There are many dynamic yet concisely realized characterizations here that include Graeme Somerville, Ali Momen, Marla McLean, Steven Sutcliffe, and Helen Taylor. An added pleasure is to hear the classically-trained and precisely articulated resonance of Lorne’s Kennedy’s rich tones projected without seeming effort to every corner of the intimate Studio Theatre.

AGE OF AROUSAL

Set in Victorian London, Linda Griffiths’ Age of Arousal, with its easy-flowing but densely theatrical text, bursts with an enthusiastically female energy under Jackie Maxwell’s precise and alert direction. It is a time of female identity in crisis and self-image in transition and “women must come to terms with two things, loneliness and money.” Why? Because women are still married into “legal prostitution and still “put the shackles back upon their wrists.” Maxwell keeps the tension between sex and sexual politics admirably real throughout.

Contained, restrained and socially acceptable dialogue alternates with unspoken, lust-driven, sexually uninhibited thoughts, and to hilarious effect. It’s a device that seems spontaneous and unforced throughout. Several scenes are obviously tailor-made to entertain and the competition in which each woman displays her fainting technique is delightful, as is the ritual of reaction to Impressionist paintings.

Each characterization is full-blooded yet stylized, a tease of clues to implied human depths that leave us guessing. Kelli Fox and Sharry Flett do an uncliched maladroitness with expertise and both actresses follow Griffith’s lead in negotiating poignant subtleties as Virginia and Alice. It’s a treat to have Fox in a rich and evolving role that has rough-edged gentleness to it and a treat to have Flett pull out the physical stops yet remain centred as a woman bound but not yet rigid in restraints. They are funny and make us care about them.

As Mary, Donna Belleville displays a meaty air of authority while remaining vulnerable and resolved in her longings; her strength aches. As Monica, Zarrin Darnell-Martin is sexually ripe and ready, unstoppable and defiantly so, a well-done turn-on. The inherently regal Jenny Young is a tall and slender in her gliding elegance, but also funny in facial expressions that make well-defined, desperately polite pronouncements in close encounters of a sexual kind. This production does understated awkwardness brilliantly.

As the only male character Everard (get it?), Gray Powell maintains some enticing ambiguity about his character, although Griffiths argues convincingly that men in this age are “beings who need to be woken up.” For the most part, as you might guess, we are made aware that men’s intellectual processes are penis-rooted and that they constantly have “balls aching,” no matter what they say in the presence of the ladies.

This production is top notch entertainment, a celebration in the key of woman, which doesn’t back down in exploration of how women are trapped with the “very nature of our bodies.” It’s an especial joy to experience this collective female energy as distinctly individual lives, both human and theatrical, under the director’s dexterous hand. And who on the planet will disagree that “it’s a shame that sex matters are so untidy.”

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Shaw Festival 2010 Reviews

Posted on August 22, 2010 by strecker

SHAW FESTIVAL 2010

THE CHERRY ORCHARD

Under Jason Byrne’s keenly-attuned direction, the lighting of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is not merely a supportive atmospheric element, but a something of a metaphysical echo to the characters, a narrator of their inner lives, a subtle water colour paint whose hues are human hearts. Light is not given but earned at the Ranyevskaya estate where people squint at printed pages by candlelight, converse with facial detail concealed in the dark, and live through endless cycles of day and night. But in darkness that ends and begins they find their moments of hope, they speak in misconnections and unheard mutterings, they whine because they must say something in this cycle, and they find minute consequence that is uniquely their own. Manservant Firs says, “My mistress has returned. I’ve lived to see it. Now I can die.” Life is lived concisely in the dark.

This The Cherry Orchard is challenging because its characters are not allowed to be tragic as some directors would have it, against Chekhov’s intentions. These characters are distinctly ordinary, people one would not notice if they were not put before us and we are made to pay attention. They exist because they open their mouths and, heard or not, they speak, although there is little to distinguish one sound from another. But silence is too quiet a place and no wonder Leonid blurts out, “I talk and I talk.” But words and thoughts drift off, the governess says, “Why I am I do not know” and there’s an almost Zen-like austerity in the sets. This production opens many doors for our introspection and gives us no easy truths. And it gives brief but potent clues to this society’s imminent collapse; it gives social cruelties a human face we can see.

There are fine creations here. Benedict Campbell as Lopakhin is solidly mundane in his own world view; Mark Uhre’s arrogant and ungiving Yasha is scary in determination; Laurie Paton’s Ranyevskaya shows glamour that lingers, as it fades, with vulnerable assurance; Severn Thompson’s Varya is a subtly detailed account of human emotions draining body and spirit; Gord Rand’s student Trofimov conveys both intellectual astuteness and youthful integrity with strong but delicate reserve; and, as Gayev, Jim Mezon embodies with sensitivity the pain of spiritual demise.

In fact, all the notable actors of this cast, underplayed and richly-conceived, give Chekhov’s characters an uncomfortable immediacy as mirrors to the pointlessness that we, in the audience, ourselves live. I’ve heard some say that they were bored with this beautifully honest production, so, for that reason, if you value truth about yourself, don’t miss it.  

JOHN BULL’S OTHER ISLAND

This top-notch production, paced with meticulous ease and shaped as a multi-dimensional poem as it is, might be perhaps the most challenging interpretation of Shaw I have seen; it has not only a discerning mind but also a truly passionate poetic spirit coexisting beside it, both rendered masterfully together as a musically veined whole. In this John Bull’s Other Island, director Christopher Newton creates deeply etched characterizations, solid interactions that humanize the tennis match of ideas, lives that actually speak their experience, and atmosphere that beats like a heart. We live with and through the words we hear.

Benedict Campbell’s symphonic variety in voice suggests not only human character but also theatrical character, a man made of projected presence as his essence. His Tom Broadbent is a man of clichés and blundering romantic advances, but out in the world he is the conquering English with capital in his pocket. He sees nothing beyond himself as he divides people into the efficient and the inefficient. As the new financial breed that wantonly destroys tradition and the earth, Campbell nails human limitation.

His comedic goods are rooted in his presentation of dynamic reserve and cluelessness, in his solidly British smugness, while his human dimension emerges in his boyish enthusiasm that breaks through his artificial poise. He is awkward in love and doesn’t look around himself to acknowledge reality. He is unaware of the social stratification of provincial mentality, for one, but his love, Nora, an Irish beauty, is not. Severn Thompson has matured into an actress of a stately and earth-moist core, and when she says she won’t “lower myself to the level of common people” we feel years of Nora’s heels pressed into the earth with prejudice and snobbery.

Graeme Somerville’s Doyle is a man who seems to have come to distasteful realizations about the world and the people in it. Given poetic words and rhythms to speak, by Shaw, Doyle is skeptical, youthful, and fixed in what he thinks -as only a young person with youthful sadness can be. Ric Reid is a dynamic Haffigan, the natural con who drinks full glasses of whiskey like water from the earth. Guy Bannerman is gruff and delightfully leprechaunish, while Mary Haney, with her well-sculpted repertoire of facial expressions and vocal shadings, is richness itself.

The gathering of provincial minds is hilarious and when Shaw introduces concern for pigs and country folk, we feel humanity’s cruelty and its vulnerability at once. Such is Newton’s skill that we feel ourselves not watching but overhearing these folk in their daily lives. Perhaps this is also designer William Schmuck’s doing, since his set defines the whole auditorium and we are thus attached to what transpires on stage.

The poetic soul of the production is the worn and wise Keegan , of Jim Mezon, in whom we have Shaw at his most surprisingly eloquent. Bearded and long-haired Keegan, with a cane and folksy elegance and insight into blarney as a way of life, knows too well the human love of cruelty. Keegen’s juicy cynicism, one that still remains attuned to the mysteries of this world, runs counterpoint to Campbell’s Broadbent “who’ll never know they are laughing at him. He observes that “My way of joking is to tell the truth and that is the funniest joke of all” for Keegan has seen and well understood the world of deceivers and self-deceivers. He is a haunting creation. After curtain, his memory lingers like a ghost.

HALF AN HOUR

Half An Hour is a compact gem by J. M. Barrie that is further polished here into an engaging theatrical experience by a sharply focused cast who suggest much human depth within the play’s textual brevity. Peter Kranz is the frazzled financier who can’t afford scandal but whose wife Lilian married for bucks and is now engaged lustily outside their union. The power struggle within their intimacy -she with an elusive blend of shallowness and meaty passion and dignity and he driven to be more of what he is- is made of sharp edges. Diana Donnelly’s grandly expressive facial expressions add spice to her Ibsen’s Nora-like games of false existence. This is splendid theatrical nugget of human variety and reality, a compressed and efficiently constructed play. Michael Ball dips in as Withers the butler and as a representative of time, while Jennifer Dzialoszynski, as Susie, is a new delightful energy at the festival.

HARVEY

Six of the cast of Harvey, directed by Joseph Ziegler, have in total 144 years on the stages of the Shaw Festival and their finely-honed subtleties in acting give happy pulse to this heart-fuelling production. Mary Haney as horny Veta, with her jerky spasms, turns and drops, waves and bends, growls and trills, is a consistently surprising comedic joy, especially when indignant at being treated as “a woman of the streets.” The open-spirited, wide-eyed and grinning Peter Kranz, as a reality-elsewhere Elwood, gradually makes a solid and undeniable case for a man who is happy with his tall rabbit friend, especially when happiness is hard to find. His tranquil charm is undeniable and who cannot like a man who says, on the phone, “You’ve got the wrong number but hello anyway.”

The prancing Chumney of Norman Browning is paternally and naively confident without foundation, especially (irony) since he’s “the biggest man in his field” and desperate for “one last fling.” Guy Bannerman is an aged-like-wine Judge Gaffney, while Peter Millard and Jennifer Phipps, with 72 Shaw years between them, ace their cameos in concisely evocative performances. Each of the cast is noteworthy, including the slightly charged Donna Belleville, veteran of only 12 Shaw seasons, who blends societal propriety and not-too-suppressed sexuality, the efficient and slightly frenzied Gray Powell as Dr. Sanderson, and Diana Donnelly with headlight eyes as the delicious-babe nurse Kelly.

The fun is in miscommunication and misunderstanding and innuendo, in the ongoing deflation of clueless but arrogant psychiatrists. The fun is that others come to acknowledge Harvey while most also begin to look strange in their own “normal” behavior. The fun is that Veta comes to ask, as we have all along, “And what’s wrong with Harvey?” The message comes, as we wait in suspense as to whether Elwood will be injected and become thus normal, when Millard as the taxi driver notes, “After this he’ll be a perfectly normal human being and you know what bastards they are.” No wonder we cheer for fantasy.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND

Judith Bowden’s set for An Ideal Husband is angularly elegant and cage-like, appropriate for society folks imprisoned in the rules of a game called society. Kevin Lamotte’s dim lighting adds a sense of worldly gloom to Jackie Maxwell’s precisely realized and stimulating production of Wilde’s play where love can still emerge from an indifferent and dark place and wit reflects life experience as much as quickness of mind. The characters develop in complexity as the play progresses and they are certainly a diverse and compelling lot.

Catherine McGregor’s Lady Gertrude is a woman of oppressive innocence who needs to “worship” the man she loves. But the man she worships has made his fortune and highly principled political career with wealth he initially earned by betraying cabinet secrets. Gertrude’s protected black and white ethical world is thus made of principles she hasn’t earned that, ironically, are founded upon corruption. She doesn’t allow her husband to be human and she is annoyingly precious in principles, but McGregor keeps her genuine and not unsympathetic.  

Her husband, Sir Robert, played with vulnerability and some bite by Patrick Galligan, loves his wife desperately and feels he cannot tarnish her idealization of him. His background is humiliating poverty and, because money buys power, he once took the money and now he pays the price. Why? Because the venomous Lady Cheveley, played ably as a social predator edged in acid, by Moya O’Connell, needs a favour . She is uncompromising in destruction, a woman of villainy, sexually versatile as a temptress –and she wants him to compromise his principles if he wants to keep his secret safe.

Wendy Thatcher as Lady Markby gives amusing relief from all the tension as she chats on with little awareness and few concerns in her head. Lady Cheveley says of Markby that she “talks more and says less than anyone I have ever met.” Lorne Kennedy plays the determinedly duty-bound Lord Caversham who is paternally pissed off with his flippant son. Given to silent screen melodramatics, delightfully gruff and testy, he, like Thatcher, put secondary roles front and centre because we realize that each portrayal is a work of deeply rooted conception. 

The heartwarming delight of this production is the relationship of Goring and Mabel, one that is made of loving tolerance and unlike the confining union of the Chilterns. They enjoy each other and enjoy themselves because of the other and we enjoy them both. Steven Sutcliffe makes Goring a dandy whose shallowness conceals as much human substance as privileged birth allows. He endures the mundane world of society with a self-aggrandizing oratorical flippancy and perhaps an undercurrent of fatalism. Marla McLean gives Mabel a perky serenity, an implicit feistiness, an ease and maturity of insight, warmth, and a kindness in nature, all of which, since she is so cute as well, make Goring a very lucky guy.

THE WOMEN

The Women, by Clare Boothe Luce, depicts a world of cattiness, wit, deception, gossip, malignant friendship, insincerity and go-for-the-throat repartee. As directed by Alisa Palmer, it sometimes opts for broad and balcony-visible strokes of characterization by stereotype over fine shadings of human, yet still comic, complexity. While the comic antics certainly entertain, they sacrifice, some human detail whose absence puts no rein on stereotypes taking over.

Certainly I have known women whose blunt and brutal excesses exceed anything on Palmer’s stage. However, I would prefer some of these caricatured ladies to inspire more reflection, more understanding on my part, and not simply distanced guffaws that require no introspection. Still, the audience at both performances I saw was very delighted and very entertained. I don’t know how challenged they were, but there wasn’t a safe romantic notion in the house at final curtain.

The author’s alert and unrelenting social commentary continues to offer many clever surprises over seventy years after the play’s premiere. Meanwhile, Palmer’s production is big but mobile with William Schmuck’s gliding design, disco bright with Kevin Lamotte’s lighting, and propelled with the big city thump of Lesley Barber’s score. The fashions are sometimes too bizarre and loud for even 1930s extremities of style and Deborah Hay’s ridiculous and easily mock-worthy attire is exaggerated and surreal. Some of these women are self-indulgent cat-fighters and, whatever their social aspirations and pretense, there is not much finesse here.  

This company of women offers many enjoyable performances. Jenny L. Wright as Edith with morning sickness, declares “I have to unswallow” and while nursing her fourth baby remarks that she hates “that milky smell” as she drops a cigarette ash on the infant’s face. Deborah Hay, whose broad physical comedy is a hilarious reincarnation of Lucille Ball, is an aggressively meddling, and conspicuously insincere Sylvia. Moya O’Connell as the other woman, Crystal, is assertively glamorous, cool, and nasty when she needs to be. Wendy Thatcher condenses the foibles of the shallow Countess into a nutshell, but her acting smarts in nuance are reined in for some reason.

Kelly Fox a la Dorothy Parker handles pungent asides like “I’m a virgin, a frozen asset.”  She as writer is the author of “All the Dead Ladies” and provides a bemused Greek chorus of sorts as commentary. Beryl Bain is quietly charming and instinctively classy as Peggy. Sharry Flett’s Mrs. Moorhead provides insightful wisdom and noble practicality that seem indeed the result of life in the trenches of marriage. The many minor roles are concisely etched by Helen Taylor who is bluntly unsettling in her description of childbirth in wretched poverty, Patty Jamieson as a country gal who talks off-handedly of wife-beating, Jacqueline Thair who is snooty-snippy as Miss Watts, and the rest of a very flexible cast.

As Mary Haines, whose hubby has wandered, Jenny Young speaks with a sophisticated nasal resonance in her voice as she floats, quite believably aching, through the emotional hell of betrayal. She has coasted in false security and “love” has now come to mean “fond of” and she is surprised. Her Mary is poised, dignified, beautiful and hurt, violated as much by gossip as a deceiving husband, and still veneered with dignity. Though she often wins our hearts, she remains remote and ambiguously classy and enigmatic.

In the end, we wonder how much a woman can do, how much she must do, how much she can afford to do, to keep a man. But once too often in this production, this very smart and very relevant play goes silly and some ironies have too heavy a feel. The characterizations are meaty enough to carry the incisive lines as blunt ladies, unobserved, would speak them, but the simplification of human nature through obvious laughs is a problem that at times undermines this show. As we laugh some might feel that the audience, the cast and the director are not going for all the challenges available here.

THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA

Early in The Doctor’s Dilemma we have medical types in energetic and competitive speculation about their respective takes on science and its efficacy. They reveal much arrogance, irresponsibility, narrow-mindedness, and smug self-reverence that, in turn, inspires little faith in doctors. Each has a tunnel-visioned and theoretical schtick, such as blood-poisoning, and is buoyed by accidental success on occasion, ergo arrogance. The issue soon at hand is whom to save when on one side stands an irresponsible artist who only takes and on the other an altruistic and self-denying doctor who only gives.

The artist has a wife who will “give anything to save him” and Patrick Galligan’s Sir Colenso Ridgeon, newly knighted, is turned on by her as are his medical cohorts. Several, except Michael Ball’s older and wiser Sir Patrick, go bumbling and dotty over Krista Colosimo’s voluptuous Jennifer. The artist is a fascinating hustler who borrows as if by instinct and feels no responsibility to repay. He thus confounds the doctors in their “inartistic profession” and they are forced to question what morality is, how much it can bend, and how one can be moral. The much-desired Jennifer justifies hubby’s every deed and tolerates no criticism of him. She idealizes him and will later pen a book about him titled “The Story of a King of Men.”

Director Morris Panych here offers a thought-provoking production of non-stop entertainment that begins with the Rolling Stones’ Under My Thumb played pizzicato. Each performance that follows is notable for the restraint upon the inherent lunacy within these people and therefore is a comic joy. The humour creeps up and some in the audience gradually crack with laughter and Thom Marriot as the dense and eloquent Sir Ralph is especially to blame. Catherine McGregor does Emmy with a Scottish edge in her voice and manner that snips at everyone. Patrick Gallagan’s Colenso seems confused and vulnerable as, at the age of forty, he subtly loses his common sense over Jennifer’s charms because, partly, he is ready to fall. Each actor in fact is a richly individualized contribution to a splendid ensemble performance.

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Stratford Shakespeare Festival 2010

Posted on August 22, 2010 by strecker

STRATFORD SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL 2010

EVITA
For some, kitsch is the preferred artistic pinnacle of our time and, never fear, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Evita presents only token cause to fear humanity’s darker side. This creation is made to distract and safely entertain with a combination of predictable ingredients that really don’t add up to much, other than theatrical, consequence. It does overwhelm, nonetheless, and doesn’t let go, even with Rice’s distancing device of inner commentary which doesn’t allow characters to exist spontaneously with flesh on their bones and be known.

Evita is given a dazzling Stratford production and, even in the compact Avon Theatre, there is much remarkable showbiz energy here. Although volume and dazzle do not tell a story as much as avoid one, this production doesn’t pause to inhale a breath and ladles on its musical goods without restraint. We too forget to breathe. Throughout we have rear projection like Evita’s funeral and close-ups of poker hands that help to overwhelm the eye. My fave line from Tim Rice’s lyrics that often make me cringe, is, “They seem to adore me, so Christian Dior me.”

Josh Young’s Che is no mythical hero, but an a compact, meaty and entertaining hustler of a man with wry attitude and insinuating, nudge-nudge eyes. He is young with young assurance, an interesting character with a contemporary feel. He is a strong yet unforced presence on stage, a richly conceived creation that people talk and read about at the interval. He is undeniably likable with just enough a dash of bastard appeal to deny too much comfort on one’s part.

Chilina Kennedy’s Evita is starry-eyed, spunky, self-willed, tenacious, and, whatever the show’s book may tell us, virgin to the grunge of life. She gets her way through energy, not manipulation. She doesn’t cynically scheme but bubbles instead with enthusiastic will, partly because Weber gives her few musical cues that suggest cynicism. This Evita is warm but independent, underplayed as a myth, but made of a subtle, unreachable remoteness that makes her an intriguing woman. Evita’s cool expression at Peron’s victory suggests an inner secretive force working through her. We never quite understand her. She is radiant.

Kennedy is a rich and resonant listen too, especially in lower register, and she negotiates Weber’s more demanding higher passages with grace and aplomb. She is especially a performer of maximum commitment and sometimes thrilling in her vulnerable passion, even in Weber’s commercially-savvy milieu. One feels a genuine human heart beating in her performance, pumping blood through Weber’s inorganic artifice.

In all, I felt more dazzled than moved after this performance, just as I did the opening week of Evita many years ago in London. Weber and Rice don’t expect subtlety of mind from their audience, they don’t reach beyond theatricality into the real world, they rarely provide music that isn’t made for effect, and they often set awkward clichés to music. But they do create theatrical hybrids that go loud and bright into that good audience of open arms and hook-loving ears.

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS
Stafford Arima’s’s direction of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris creates a subdued and immediately seductive atmosphere with its sparse but hearty chamber ensemble, dim lighting of eerie footlights, restrained and almost lurking singing, and choreography whose steps collaborate with each phrase of the lyrics. With one significant miscue in casting, it continues throughout as very engaging theatre. This is appropriately so since Jacques Brel himself was consummately theatrical in lyric, music, and performance. Brel lived his art as he performed.

Of the four singers here, Brent Carver is consistently breathtaking with his instinctive sense of style, his compassionate interpretive way with human complexity, and his incisive insight into human essences. He is also graceful, fluid and potent as a performer and distinctive as an embodiment of Brel’s wide-ranging songs. As far as I can remember, he is certainly the most deeply human of any interpreters of Brel I have heard in English, and that includes many in French as well, since I first saw this show in Toronto in the late 60s. He too seems to live his art as he performs and is discreetly energetic in articulating Brel’s existential statements. His rendition of the famous Amsterdam is a thoughtful and concise study of a man sinking deeper into the mire of his rotted soul.

Mike Nadajewski has the physical elegance of a flamenco dancer, an almost threatening smirk, a tonally-rounded, versatile and very listenable voice that shifts with ease from tragedy to humour, and a pleasing ability to nail the theatrical potential of a word or a song. He performs Au Suivant/Next like an emotional breakdown and we pay attention. Robin Hutton, subbing for Nathalie Nadon, is a satisfying blend of crystalline purity, quietly enthusiastic involvement, reassuring poise, vulnerability, and a tonal sweetness that always feels genuine. Both give solid presence to all they do and are very enjoyable.

From what I’ve seen of Brel on the DVD box set of his complete filmed performances, titled Comme Quand On Etait Beau and highly rcommended, he was an assertive, risk-taking, emotionally-open performer who used his body as an uninhibited dramatic or comic tool. With his voice and approach firmly declarative, while poignantly sensitive as well, he was decidedly male if you will. I’ve long preferred listening to Brel –and who wouldn’t?- even with his inevitable crescendo in the finale, to interpreters who dazzle with Broadway gusto that signifies nothing or, much worse, the female whiners who sing flat to sound meaningful.

In this show, Jewelle Blackman sings with a gutsy sense of familiarity and solid urgency in the lower registers, but leans toward a mannered and uncomfortably airy blare up high and makes arbitrary sounds that fight lyrics whose reality tolerate no mannerism. I found Blackman idiomatically inappropriate and distracting because we were too aware of her bag of vocal tricks. But then, too many singers nowadays telegraph feelings without seeming to feel deeply them as Brel did. Such singers don’t penetrate the façade of bourgeois behavior but, instead, simply and ironically decorate the middle class mask that Brel despised.

KING OF THIEVES
King of Thieves, carrying on the tradition John Gay et al., begins in high gear with a banker trio’s song to –what else?- banking and then moves into a saloon in New York in the late 1920s. The stylish Evan Buliung as Mac, a thief, with fedora on head and switchblade in hand, is buying off a Pinkerton cop who asks, “What kind of thief ever used words like ‘overview’ and ‘economy?’” Buliung/Mac breaks into song, of course, because that’s what folks do in George Walker’s delightful show with songs and music of equal delight by John Roby.

Yes, we have cops and crooks and a singer called Jenny who has an animated bum, says “gorl,” and “will take a man for anything I can.” A surprising delight is Nora McLellan, once of more sedate expression at the Shaw Festival, now all twangy, wiggling, scratching her backside, showing some leg, and wielding a rifle. Sean Cullen is Vinnie the owner of the speakeasy and a human largesse of fun as he weaves all elements of the tale together. Meanwhile, the bankers nail the greed of their, and our, time as they talk of pushing the “system beyond any sustainable point” and observe that “taking can look like giving.”

Pork, ably played by Oliver Becker, gets the “Thief of the Year” award and we also have compromising photos for blackmail and an unfortunate victim of bankers’ thievery carrying a sign that reads “No work, no home, no hope.” In these times, who doesn’t feel ice in the stomach at that one? And don’t forget Feds who also play rough, and the paranoia about Bolsheviks and Reds, while so many in this perfectly cast bunch get bumped off and hauled away in a hilarious running gag. And who doesn’t love the extremely capable Polly, Mac’s wife, given a versatile spin by Laura Condlin? To be sure, this King of Thieves is more an engaging entertainment than biting social commentary, but it does offer enjoyment on all fronts.

THE TEMPEST
The Tempest opens with a loud primordial chaos of a storm while overwhelmed and powerless human voices strain for their lives. The sound that calms this tempest is the voice of Christopher Plummer as Prospero whose thoughts and speech and deeds are one. His centered resonance, his perfect sculpted sound, shapes clarity and perhaps meaning in this cosmic discord. The beginning is indeed the word in Des McAnuff’s production
and it is also the magic of Ariel who, at the outset, descend from the Festival Theatre’s sky high ceiling. This production remains magical with all manner of otherworldly doings, say, swords that float in the air. McAnuff also achieves a palpable tension between body and spirit in this world and we therefore remain both engaged and enchanted as we watch.

“You taught me language and I learned how to curse” says Caliban accusing Prospero who does not curse back but shapes a world of resonance in his words. Even the silences of Plummer’s Prospero speak the eloquence of words and his performance proves memorable as an experience of a passing theatrical style rarely found in theatres nowa- days. He ends phrases with implication of further meaning, changes mood in a syllable, orates in a whisper, modulates at will as he creates a Prospero of knowing beneficence. He commands the stage and commands our imagination with his presence. Who will forget this performance?

The relationship of Prospero and Miranda is gently buoyant with shared jokes, shared laughter and palpable mutual love. We feel the cycles of love and death in their loving repartee. Miranda is innocent but substantially present in body, earthy, and explosion of unrefined enthusiasm. She is open to discovery, she lusts for a brave new world with her feisty innocence, and she is naively predatory. She is indeed a wild child, blunt and arbitrary, sexy and awkward in social graces she does not know. She is impish and confident and has an inherent crazy wildness in her eye. Trish Lindstrom’s Miranda is another memorable performance.

Yet another special player in this special production is the Ariel of Julyana Soelistyo. She is a genuinely otherworldly creature, but one with a conscience and a heart. She delights in chatting up her deeds, she gives her all, and she is devoted to Prospero though she leans to tantrums when crossed. She is reachable in her human qualities, but out of reach as a spirit. She can be caught but not contained in essence. And that is part of the magic of this unique take on Prospero’s spirit friend. I have never seen an Ariel like this -a petite, self-contained, completely independent will with a humane essence- a spirit who could be a pal, a dream or a CEO.

Caliban is reptilian and slithery, rock hard muscular but cowering, hungry to do malice until caught. The other male characters are also theatrically rich creations, each one dense with detailed characteristics. Peter Hutt offers a clueless, hapless, perhaps dim-witted as Alonso. The magnificently world-weary clown Trinculo is performed by Bruce Dow with pin-point comic timing and loads of comic charm. Stephano, played by Geraint Wyn Davies, is an endearing but clueless drunk who seems to reason out each moment he lives. He points each word he speaks in judgment and certainly spices up the place.

At the end, Caliban stands erect and then Prospero and he bow to one another, now man to man, we assume. It’s a moment that is both touching and unsettling because we want magical powers to save us. One feels, moreover, a genuine sadness at Ariel’s freedom to leave us as we learn, once again, that such merciful and magical creation can disappear into thin air.

PETER PAN
An evil voice with an evil laugh warns the audience to shut off their cell phones and unwrap their candies now, and so Peter Pan begins. We are already full of glee and soon we become more child, if we are young, and child again if we dare think we have lost our instinct for wondrous fantasy that this wonderful production delivers.

To begin J. M. Barrie is the narrator who on occasion addresses the audience. Nana the huge but agile dog, with a tick-tocking tail, is adorable to the max, a quaint Victorian world of loving propriety and articulate assertive children is the setting, and anticipation fills the atmosphere. Wendy’s wide-eyed urgency and enthusiasm are a catalyst for magic to happen and magic indeed arrives in the form of Peter Pan whom we find is a lad of rough social edges, deep psychological wounds, a gymnast’s agility, and a desperate need to escape into fantasy.

Add a jealous and subversive but self-sacrificing Tinkerbell, a monstrous crocodile whose wide jaws might swallow the whole stage, an elegant, slightly peevish, problem-prone Hook, a paunchy and physically inept Smee, “a lovely darling house” that gets built in a minute, some Amazons, an altruistic bird who come to the rescue of Peter, a maternally efficient Wendy on the verge of sexuality, a very splendid pirate ship, and magic abounds. After all, we the audience save Tinkerbell by believing in fairies and clapping our hands, don’t we?

It is heartwarming to hear so much delight, including one’s own, in an audience. This Peter Pan is ably directed for wonder by Tim Carroll and the perfect cast includes Michael Therriault as Peter, Sara Topham as Wendy, and Tom McCamus as Hook.

A WINTER’S TALE
Is there a dry eye in the Patterson Theatre at the long-delayed reunion of Leontes and Hermione, in Marti Maraden’s carefully paced and carefully composed production of A Winter’s Tale, when forgiveness is finally all? It’s an unforced and satisfying interpretation that, with its air of life wisdom unfolding, befits late Shakespeare and I found myself sitting forward and savoring every undercurrent, every subtly musical word. In this intelligently-directed production, Maraden keeps all dramatic threads tight with unwavering but subtle dramatic tension and finds engaging rich sense and energy throughout the text. As well, this is a cast with acute instincts for pinpointing and uniting their human, theatrical and conceptual roles in the narrative context.

Ben Carlson immediately suggests a seething propensity for jealousy and seems diseased with suspicion. His physical presence is a mirror of his agitated mind as he thrusts in all directions with irrational rage and seems no less than a walking sneer in manner. After all, he doesn’t heed even the Oracle. Carlson raises the production’s emotional bar and keeps it high. Yanna McIntosh’s Hermione is a stylishly-centred and pleasantly earthy queen whose low-key response to Leontes’ outburst suggests she has long experienced his mercurial swings of mood. She is elegant in understatement, noble without apparent effort.
Seanna McKenna’s seasoned stage voice is both folksy and oratorical. It’s a voice that seems to sing at will as it choreographs the atmosphere around her. She plays Paulina with bold but defined strokes and is indeed an “audacious lady.” Her venom is a blunt and bashing experience. With extraverted vulnerability, Sean Arbuckle as Camillo, is a meticulously thinking man; Randy Hughson creates a moving Antigonus of deep human substance; Brian Tree aces the rustic old Shepherd as one always out of his depth. Claudio Vena’s middle-eastern musical strains weave through the show and engage both hips and spirit. This is a fine production for both mind and heart.

TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
The audience for Dean Gabourie’s production of Two Gentlemen of Verona reacts throughout with spontaneous laughter at all the confiding asides, the precise physicality of the comedy, and the choreographed energy of the sprite company on the Studio stage. Shakespeare’s early work doesn’t allow these characters to speak without innuendo, without a clever pirouette of meaning, or without a quick and sharper retort in any repartee, so the director mines the potential of word, voice and body for a conspicuous theatrical style that has kin in the Commedia dell’Arte and vaudeville and silent film comedy.

A youthful joy in performance is palpable here, as if one creates fun by having fun. One does notice at times that some actors speak with a rich and centred resonance that is based in years of classical theatre, while others at times seem to follow direction well, but obviously so. Nevertheless, this is an very digestible unsubtle play of wit for the pit and a very uncomplicated and very happy entertainment indeed. It is theatre of types and not psychology, theatre of overt purpose and not subconscious nudges, theatre of wink-wink meanings that incorporate the audience at every step throughout. Both playwright and director intend to entertain and they certainly do. One cannot help but join in the spirit of this production, and isn’t that what theatre should be?

There are many fine nugget performances here. As Lucetta, Trish Lindstrom underplays her jam-thick and testy attitude just enough to keep us constantly on our toes to determine her true meanings. Claire Lauter’s Silvia, with the longest self-pitying wail on record, flows in every direction with playfully self-referential glamour. Each monologue from Bruce Dow as Speed, with occasional dips into Jackie Gleason, is a dictionary of comedic devices used to best effect. Robert Persichini is a compelling, weighty and life-tested Launce, but one who can chuckle at his own jokes. A special pleasure is John Vickery as the Duke of Milan, a man who is melodramatic, monocled, and measured in elegance as he speaks with inherent authority. Crab, Launce’s dog, a master of deadpan, is played by Otto and understudied by Keppy.

FOR THE PLEASURE OF SEEING HER AGAIN
Lucy Peacock as Nana, in Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, celebrates the playwright’s mother and also all mothers as an essential sustenance of every human existence. She is dynamically maternal, desirable in her bold femininity, given to sentimental passion that feeds itself, overwhelming in everything she does, lovable through and through, and unable to tolerate contradiction. She takes to heart the melodramatic historical novels she devours, takes issue with every word her son attempts, fights to win every verbal exchange, needs to be right however wrong she may be, and is poignantly limited to a self-protected scope of reality. Nana punches out her declarations in unselfconscious French-Canadian rhythms but, thankfully, foregoes an accent. She has an almost lusty, clipped manner of speaking that is echoed in jerky gestures that punctuate her opinionated outbursts. She talks like a tidal wave that swallows up everything before it.

Lucy Peacock is breathtaking, plain and simple, as she embodies Nana. We don’t see Peacock’s performance, of course, because, for one, Nana is herself a woman of constant performance. More to the point, Peacock seems an inconspicuous tool of every word and gesture and feeling of the woman she portrays. One suspects an especial collaboration here of actor, director, translator, and playwright, a collective effort that makes Nana an overwhelming and lovable mom and also an unyielding force of nature as she waddles about, stooped, in slippers. This is one of the most consummately realized and memorable performances I’ve seen, over many decades, on a Stratford stage.

As Narrator/Son, Tom Rooney grows up before our eyes in an evolution that progresses through gradual awareness and understanding into manhood. His performance is made of endless subtleties that ring true each time he speaks in voice or with eyes nuanced by change of purpose or mood. He begins as a boy learning his way, embodies childhood that balances loyalty to mother and personal will, and develops through truths only he, as a teen, can know for himself. Rooney’s performance is potent with gentleness.

The conversations of mother and son feel spontaneous and genuine. The undercurrent of maternal and filial love comes early and remains to the end. The shared understanding, one of the other, gives painful weight to the impending death of Nana, for this is often understanding beyond words. But the writing/translation is eloquent throughout and, for one example, Nana says, “I feel like I am living pregnant with my own death.” The writing in translation is as colloquially poetic and true as the lives it depicts. Translated by Linda Gaboriau, directed by Chris Abraham, and take note of the portable record player and LPs of French and Quebecois singers from the fifties.

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