Director Darko Tresnjak’s set for Titus Andronicus has a boldly white marble effect with occasional highlights of striking blood red, all suggesting both a butcher’s slab and a cruel and bloodthirsty Roman culture. Four statues atop a column each depict tortured agony so the striking set suggests both imperial power and the cruelty of this same power. Itai Irdal’s lighting creates a playing field of aggressive brightness or occasionally a revealing darkness that one’s subconscious fears. It’s a very violent play and the poetry of the language, the obvious ironies, the inevitable understatements, the casualness about pain all featured in this setting will soon send the impact of the play even more over the top.

Tresnjak’s production bursts oratorical in voice from square one and also, almost instantly, turns bloody. Titus will show no mercy to captive Tamora’s son and, as he is speared, blood bursts upward. Not long after we have throat-cutting, biting, more spearing, stabs in the gut, the cutting off of one’s hand. Also, after sexually suggestive playing around by Tamora’s crude sons and some orgy, we have offstage rape of Lavinia, the cutting off of her hands, the removal of her tongue, and more stabbings. And we’re not done yet since there’s an amputated hand left on the floor where a dog has a taste of it and the heads of the two same sons impaled high for all to see. If anyone is hungry, there’s a dinner of two pasties, each made from the bodies of Tamora’s sons, which she unknowingly nibbles with pleasure. Yes, she heaves vomit all over the stage when she finds out.

In all this, it’s a pleasure to hear John Vickery’s resonant and sculpted voice whose musical tone, dips and shadings, mastery of innuendo, and hurled phrases make everything he says a gourmet meal for the ear. I’m glad he this year has a sustained starring role so we can hear more of him. Claire Lautier’s Tamora speaks with a pointed and almost elegant prissiness, with an undercurrent of venom and manipulation. She is chilling when vengeful, enraged, conniving and predatory and she seems to articulate even her spit. Dion Johnston’s Aaron is a tender dad when with his babe, but otherwise he’s a man of slimy gusto who relishes intrigue, all the suffering he inflicts or supports, and killing with indifference to his victims. As Saturninus, Sean Arbuckle is envious, spiteful, somewhat gooey in haughtiness, and nasty when he laughs. His presence suggests a rotting of human values.

One more thing, the usher told me that she has seen the whole of act I only once in eight tries. Why? Each other time she had to help a nauseated and upset member of the audience to the lobby during the performance.

Something encouraging happens after a performance of director Des McAnuff’s Jesus Christ Superstar. People, young and old, and some not too old, enthusiastically discuss both the musical and its production. They do so in the Avon’s lobby, in the street, and in cafes around Stratford. “He is the best Judas I’ve seen and I’ve seen lots,” says a young lady waiting near stage door. Minutes before, at the end of the performance, the audience has erupted into standing applause.

Why? Because it is an overwhelming show that does consume the watcher, a show thoroughly splendid in cast, direction, design, and lighting. The show is rumoured to be Broadway bound after a good stint at La Jolla and that is where it belongs. Meanwhile, people in the audience might as a result be encouraged to see more live theatre, maybe even Chekhov or Sheridan. And as much as I am inevitably annoyed by Lloyd Webber-Rice creations, I am glad I saw this spectacular production.

Des McAnuff orchestrates bodies in space and they explode in electrical currents, all frantic and boldly energetic, as they crisscross the stage, climb bleachers, and scale columns into the stratosphere. He is a master of devices, both human and inanimate, and we in the audience are out of breath keeping up with him. He blows you away and so does his cast when its potent physical enthusiasm is given outlet in bursts of movement and dynamic groupings of bodies.

The impact is irresistible, even as heretics to the church of Lloyd Webber, like yours truly, resist. I did succumb to one singer, I must admit, who among the moneychangers was most adept at etching on the air with her ass. Moreover, Robert Brill’s overwhelming set includes eternally high columns, a running electric marquee that gives day by day headlines like “Six days until Passover,” and an elevated U shaped area nine feet above the main stage for horizontal variety. As for effects, Lloyd Webber likes among other devices to drop things from the ceiling: in Phantom it is a chandelier, here it is Jesus Christ.

The cast with Josh Young as Judas, Chilina Kennedy as Mary Magdalene, Paul Nolan as Jesus and Brent Carver displaying his subtle acting chops as Pontius Pilate are most dynamic and impressive in giving as much human dimension as the Lloyd Webber-Rice idiom allows. Both Judas and Jesus constantly impress with their ease at doing full throttle falsetto and upper register gymnastics. Delightful moments occur throughout, like Bruce Dow’s delicious showstopper that has Herod take on the “King of the Jews”.

Judas and Mary Magdalene effectively negotiate complex inner conflict and all the singers, especially the bass, delight us with surprising variety in textures and tones or ease in vocal high jumps. Jesus, poor Saviour, is given limited choices—either be starched and holy most of the time or angry when challenged – but gradually Paul Nolan is permitted to give Jesus compelling substance. When he is allowed to be more than a statue, this Jesus is disturbingly intense.

Before curtain, Des McAnuff announces the following: “If you are thinking of unwrapping a hard candy or lozenge, feel free to do so, because the score will drown you out.” And that’s my first problem with Jesus Christ Superstar, that it’s a continuum of loudness without much variety and with bass and drum pounding away monotonously in four/four. The singers bellow away in upper registers as a way to signify meaning and intensity, but we see them not as having feeling but yelling about feeling at one another.

With this foundation of faux rock, we don’t experience what feels like real people but people saying the right thing, the trendy thing, to music that is usually unimaginative and functional and hiding out in volume. We don’t really know who these characters are because they are reduced to meaningful glances and obvious ironies. Lines like “It doesn’t help if you’re inconsistent” that would be funny when said tongue in cheek are played straight and light years away from Cole Porter’s wit. The double meaning of Christ in “Christ, you deserve it” is clever, but one wonders if Andrew Rice knew it was.

Yes, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” is effectively simple and melodic and some lines like Mary’s “Let the world turn without you tonight” are inspired, but Jesus according Lloyd-Webber/Rice is made into rigidity, supposedly holy but pointless, and I start to laugh because he simply looks stoned. And unkind phrases fill my mind -Much ado about no one; I Don’t Know Why to Love Him; Jesus Kitsch Superstar- and I begin to imagine that this pair has a photo of Sonny Bono on their wall and that, if they thought of resurrection today, it would be Michael Bolton they would have in mind.

Director Miles Potter sees “Richard’s theatrical ancestors” as “the Vice characters of medieval plays” whose “stated mission” was to “destroy virtue wherever they found it. In order to do so, they would do anything, assume any role, in order to suborn the natural order and attempt the triumph of evil.” In his production at the Patterson, Seana McKenna thoroughly realizes Potter’s conceptual premise in a Richard who is, to be sure, a versatile actor in his society and a consummate schemer too but, more to the point, a spontaneously destructive cancer in human form. This Richard is in body and voice a shriveled thing, an ugly boil upon the blameless, an irritating fly one cannot swat, but also he is inherently malicious and inhuman, almost not of this world. Call him Vice, call him Richard, call him too many a political leader of our time, he shakes the foundations of decency, compassion and good wherever he goes.

Richard is a self-celebrating creature, one who bites into any possibility for destruction, and Seana McKenna’s female registers in voice work to the advantage of Potter’s conception. She does not speak with masculine weightiness but, instead, in piercing and tonally squeezed jabs, in shrill upward ascents, and always with a gossipy urgency, often with an intimate tone. Richard never shuts up but controls others by incessant chatter, as if dominance in speech will make him ruler of the world he regards with shiny, piercing, mischievous and acidic eyes. His voice is otherworldly and insidious and, as a person, he flows like corrosive liquid into any conversation, into any private space. This Richard forces others to react, seems ever present and everywhere, so no one is free of him. He says what he must to take possession of others and destroy whatever control they have that isn’t already his.

The fundamental issue of the Potter/McKenna Richard III and, by implication, of human existence –is the ownership of reality through speech. The famous seduction of Lady Anne, played with ferocious and youthful indignation by Bethany Jillard, is one of many examples of Richard’s method and here the newly widowed Anne is charmed, ultimately into the bed of her husband’s murderer, into bed with evil. She may begin the encounter unleashing her rage, but Richard dances verbally with her every word and takes the lead in their dance of words. He thus claims the intensity of her personal feeling, claims what is hers. He is a usurper in words as much as in the political realm. Evil wants into everything, because it’s there.

The encounter with Queen Margaret, shortly after, becomes in turn a battle of good and evil, a battle of autonomous voices in which Richard will use any means to destroy such autonomy in others. As Margaret, Martha Henry mines the resonating depth of her words, shapes them with dramatic elongations and cadences that seem like castle walls forbidding Richard any entry. She speaks deliberately in pronouncements with foot-stomping emphasis in her voice. She doesn’t submit in reaction, makes little concession in words, and if Richard is a supreme actor, a role-player who adjusts performance to underlying intention, then Margaret denies him from solid ground. If Richard speaks hurried and wiry phrases, hers are solid as rock as she “roles” over him.

It’s a crucial scene because we are given a counterbalance of good’s grand stature denying creeping evil. If Richard’s intent is to undermine, nay, pollute good, Margaret‘s solid voice and manner reaffirm not only virtue but existence of independent will that is free of evil’s infiltration. We note much later that the insistent Duchess of York counsels “Be not tongue-tied” in a scene with numerous references to words. For good to battle evil, in Shakespeare and Potter, it must take uncompromising human form that is strong in speech, unwavering in person, and articulate.

Shakespeare’s brilliantly-employed device of having Richard take the audience into his confidence as implied co-conspirators is a gem of the theatrical canon because these asides put us confidently –and willingly- on the inside track of Richard’s schemes. Richard seems a constant winner, he does not give up, and because any silence means space for another to claim control, he talks and talks and talks –and of course we have to listen. This constant role-player is writing the play we watch as it unfolds and we applaud his theatrical devices which are unending and many. When his words of comfort are shown in an instant after to be mere manipulation, we thus become dirty with him. When his lowly bows seem to rub his deformity in the faces of others, done with beautiful spite by McKenna, we to some degree share his distaste for them.

Richard attacks and retreats in speech as required and each victory fuels his contempt for others. His only acknowledgement of others is to undermine them, destroy them ultimately, shout “Off with his head!” and reduce them to nothing. Richard’s dismissal of Buckingham is as arbitrary as his other deeds –to win, evil must be arbitrary and catch good off guard- and because Richard ignores him, Buckingham no longer exists. He and his words served Richard, after all, and now neither do so. We don’t think of Marlowe’s “winning words” of a conqueror in witnessing Richard at work, but a creeping presence and quickly propelled words that bring disease to body and soul. Such evil can see itself only in the ruin it does, understand others only as far as their virtue can be mastered. Such evil is hungry for more evil and never full.

Miles Potter has created an unobtrusively energetic production and made sure that each character embodies a distinct identity. His cast serves his concept well with honed performances too many to detail here and, as a result, we experience a realm of distinctly individual spirits in peril and sometimes in defiance of evil. It’s a production that moves briskly from one situation to the next, driven by the motivating presence of Richard. Throughout, speech is echo to characterization, reinforcing one’s evolving realization that to speak effectively is to exist. Still, if Potter’s ethereal choreography of the final battle scene and Richard’s death is reassuring, it is not so for long.

Richard is dead, but his repertoire of destructive devices remains open to use in the world outside the theatre. Shakespeare is indeed our insightful and relevant “contemporary,” according to Jan Kott, as he explores Richard’s and our obsessive control of people and situations. The need to undermine, demean, dismiss, humiliate, hurt and finally eradicate are not simply potent and disturbing characteristics of a playwright’s creation, but everyday qualities we find in average folks as they neuter others into speechless inarticulation. If others make no sense while speaking words imposed upon them and not their own, if they can’t speak their own process of making sense but must constantly respond instead to attack of some kind until they exist only as response, then individual reason itself is being undermined and evil can thus do as it pleases.

Potter’s production is a gripping exploration of how evil becomes a reality in every human experience. The sex of the lead actor is simply not an issue because, even as he seems a pitiable and mundane man of no distinction, McKenna’s Richard is at the same time a disturbingly inhuman force that works with masterly ease to destroy anyone at will and without remorse. He is capable of rallying his soldiers with a rousing and defiant “If not to heaven then hand in hand to hell” and seem infused with cosmic proportion. Minutes later, however, he can enter the stage with a faint and almost inconsequential “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse” and make his need sound simply pragmatic. There are many such instances throughout the production where one is given a fresh take or a challenge to rethink and reconsider Shakespeare’s lines and meaning and ourselves.

A compelling feature of Potter’s splendid large cast is how, in limited time, each one becomes an individual of some human value in our eyes and does so in concise theatrical detail. We believe these characters –the young woman’s confusion and needs in Bethany Jillard’s Lady Anne, the precocious and guileless confidence of the princes, the maternal and vulnerable concern of Yanna McIntosh’s Queen Elizabeth, the efficient but naïve sycophancy of Wayne Best’s Buckingham, the naïve congeniality of Nigel Bennett’s Hastings, and all the others. It’s a cast of unwavering substance that creates a genuinely human world around Richard and I could be here for days if I counted all the ways. Because I still feel the unyielding impact of, especially, Richard, Lady Anne, Queen Margaret and Buckingham, in my mind, I’m sure this production in reflection will continue to have much more to say.

Geraint Wyn Davies as King Arthur in Camelot

This is Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot on Stratford’s 2011 stage. The tree vines and balconies are all gold. A “bird of prey” about which we’ve been warned by a sign in the lobby soars down for a twenty second appearance and is carried off. We meet King Arthur, aka Geraint Wyn Davies aka Falstaff on Merry Wives nights, here quite full of anxiety as he sits all boyishly innocent up a tree. Merlyn aka Brent Carver looks on with an aged twinkle posing as an eye and we learn that Arthur is “scared” in anticipation of wedlock. We feel instantly protective of this seemingly guileless lad.

It turns out that bride-to-be Guenevere is equally anxious about same wedding, even as she bursts with girlhood and girlishness dreams. Both are finding their way, for he is “not very accomplished at thinking” and she is a blend of eagerness, prematurely assertive attitude, charm, and romantic notions. Arthur’s body is awkward and he does not quite know what to do with his limbs, while Guenevere is both womanly sexual and tomboyish. We are immediately on their side as they maneuver through their first meeting, for their innocence together is very dear. We want to preserve them safe from life’s inevitable complications but, of course, it won’t be so in this two-boxes-of-tissue classic musical.

We also want to preserve the wondrous place that sprouts from Wyn Davies voice each time, as Arthur, he opens his mouth. His nuanced manner of speaking creates a world made of the human heart, at once awkward among others and still true to its purity. He is a constantly accommodating fellow, one who can’t reach the potential in his world because his brain is not acute and Merlyn who guided him before is now, when he is king, gone. He does have a loving and loyal Guenevere as his queen, romantic as before and now ambitious too, but Kaylee Harwood keeps her not much changed in adulthood from the girl she was and we sense unrealized dreams in the air, hers and his. 

Meanwhile Arthur’s idealistic dreams are beyond the scope of Guenevere’s inner realm and part of the emotional clout of this production is that Wyn Davies makes them human and necessary, although a potential that he and we can never reach. The catalyst for change in the status quo enters all brightly shining and metallic in knightly attire and he too will see his ideals mangled by the facts of life in a triangle of love. Like King and Queen, he too has inevitable inadequacies, although he too means well, loves truly, and tries his best.

Jonathan Winsby’s Lancelot is street corner handsome, has a charming toothy smile, and his vocally ringing entrance with “C’est moi” seems ready to conquer the world. But that too doesn’t happen in life, does it? Even when driven by a young man’s enthusiasm, intentions and the roles one chooses to play get foiled, even if a clueless and Christ-like Lancelot who adheres to virtue can do miracles. Again it is Arthur, achingly played direct and complex by Wyn Davies at the end, who shows the wounding and confusing impact of life.

Other key roles include Brent Carver as King Pellinore who is delightfully worn and rough-edged, a man like Arthur of nuance but also –and this is a Carver trademark-with eyes that drill forth in almost predatory glances. Lucy Peacock does a juicy star turn as Morgan le Fey with grand gestures, meaty delivery, and many a phrase made into a conversational weapon. As Mordred, the very evil counterweight to Lancelot’s goodness, Mike Nadajewski  offers a potent creation who is smarmy, conniving, self-indulgently cynical on the seven deadly virtues, and, as he should be, hateful, hateful, hateful. 

So this production of the classic Camelot is special because it has, among other things, a human centre, one which director Gary Griffin keeps genuine. He subtly stresses the ineptitude of people in impossible situations and we keep hanging in emotionally because we live lives too. We know, perhaps admit, that adults are still kids even in duds that grownups wear, that people don’t change all that much from what they were. Wyn Davies brilliantly and constantly shows the tension of struggle between was and is, and if sometimes we don’t get the same sense of inner bruises created by life in Guenevere or Lancelot, one point of the tragedy is thus made even more deeply. Not everyone hurts the same.

My Fair Lady opens with an aggressively active Covent Garden setting, one that feels alive and abrasive with survival in Molly Smith’s broadly realized production. Entertainers and regular folk do acrobatics and vigorously dance in this drab and dirty late night place. The tarts look unwashed and the grimy crowd visually suggest a dense human smell, which is a notable accomplishment by designers Ken Macdonald, Judith Bowden, and Jock Munro, in set, costume, and lighting, respectively.

 Note that Eliza does indeed resemble “a squashed cabbage leaf”. Later after her transformation from cockney “good girl” into the socially desirable Miss Doolittle, she will declare with dignified vulnerability, “I’m not dirt under your feet,” but we know throughout that she began as society’s discard.

The appeal of Eliza at the outset of this production is not a given. She is crude, blunt, spunky in a growly voice when angered, and she does make ugly sounds. We don’t automatically deem her nice; we don’t automatically think Audrey Hepburn. Still, although she looks worn but not worn out from surviving, we are touched by her yearning for a dream to come true in “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” and saddened by the reality that this dream has no chance at all in her class-divided world.

Nevertheless, Eliza’s an unselfconsciously feisty gal with cockney fire in her DNA, energetically committed to what she is or what she wants to become. If Higgins condescendingly thinks her “deliciously low,” he merely confirms that his is a protected world. On the other hand, she has been given the strap by her own dad all her life. When, in a softer voice, she reveals an innocence of spirit and a private delicacy of the heart, we are on her side. We feel she deserves her dreams, especially since Deborah Hay as Eliza provides eye-opening human substance throughout. This Eliza has lived a life.

Henry Higgins, deftly inhabited by Benedict Campbell, is crude in his own way, a boorish bully of a man. He is instinctively dismissive of human dignity and emotionally remote and unreachable as he plows ahead brilliantly in his field of study. Intellectually advanced, but otherwise pathetically a child, he dwells safely protected within a box both social and emotional, at least until he’s “grown accustomed to her face.” Campbell’s Higgins is solidly conceived and thoroughly intriguing as a creation who implies a contained wild centre.

As Pickering, Patrick Galligan offers a man of  impassioned decency and strength of character who acts as foil to Campbell’s Higgins who has neither. It is a lively pairing with each man decidedly forward in manner as they disagree endlessly. Eliza’s dad, Alfred Doolittle, played by Neil Barclay, has initially a grimy lousiness about him. He is a man both unprincipled and unwashed who is happily secure in being too poor to have morals as he ekes out both existence and drink. Pragmatic and principled in his own way, he is an appealing S.O.B. Sharry Flett as Mrs. Higgins is a poised, compassionate, and wisely assertive mom to her embarrassing son, while Mark Uhre does Freddy with an endearingly sincere lack of depth and a pleasant resonance of voice.

There are many delights in this production, including Eliza’s short fuse that anticipates effrontery. Campbell’s resonant singing voice, as it breaks the Rex Harrison mold with actual melody, demonstrates the beauty of sound in the English language of which Higgins constantly speaks. The way we are compelled to struggle along with Eliza with marbles in her mouth and one swallowed puts us decidedly in her court.  Her faux pas are funny because we feel her struggle to do what she has newly learned, although her crude roots keep popping out as in “move your blooming ass.”

This is not a comfortably era-reproducing show that takes upper class rituals and status quo as the way of the world. It is rather a declaration of the inherent, albeit sometimes crudely shown, worth of lower classes who have their own harsh realities to live. Thus Eliza shows herself to be a woman of confidence even when she is vulnerable and not a marionette playing to the rules of society.

Macdonald’s set of birdcage motif is a visually busy yet appealing creation of many verticals that counterbalance the horizontal expanse of the stage. The projected silhouettes of birds in flight, however, seem an extraneous touch, perhaps pointless. The costumes at the Ascot races are rather out of tune with the production and garish- why??- and ugh as in ughly.

In sum, there is much life in all the curbside dirt of this My Fair Lady. The choreography bursts with a vibrant street energy that is somewhat mirrored in Higgins’ animated and almost athletic stage presence. In this extraverted production, Henry is always pacing, always briskly walking the expanse of the stage. Like the poor, he is made of energy and so, as a result, this is an energetic production.  And as we always hope, we do love Eliza in the end- if not much sooner. Both she and Higgins are obviously not equipped for the emotions that ensue after their first encounter, and their awkwardness in sensitivity gives this production an unforced heart.

Christopher Newton’s gradually unsettling production of Heartbreak House begins with strains of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, one of music’s most potent statements of primitive energy and chaos. It ends with the sound of not too distant explosions as the Shotover household and their visitors stare upwards, transfixed by the airship carriers of death overhead. Destruction, one of the most fundamental needs of the human race, fascinates these folk, even if the impending destruction is their own.

This brief moment is all the more disturbing because we have repeatedly verified the absence of self-respect in the household. We have heard the native land referred to as “this soul’s prison called England”. We have heard “nothing ever does happen” and then “nothing will happen”.  Of course, World War I is waiting in the wings to destroy a generation and, bored or not, this self destroying human species is about to do itself in. No wonder that the Captain asks “Do you suppose at my age that I make distinction between one character and another?” Regarding people, he has seen it all before and anticipates nothing new.

The Shotover home of eccentricity is also one of lazy ennui, one too weary to be cynical as in this exchange: “How can you love a liar?” “You can, unfortunately; otherwise there wouldn’t be much love in the world”.  Ergo we later hear, “If we women were particular about men’s characters, we would never get married at all”.  As usual men, women, and humankind all get poked by GBS’s sharply perceptive pen and he has Hector -aced delightfully vain, roguish and practical by Blair Williams- assess our species as “useless, futile creatures…… there is no point to us”. Of course, these are people of diversion who thrive on games to redirect their pointlessness and Hesione declares, “It matters little who governs the country as long as we govern you”.

The set by Leslie Frankish is made of bold visual elements and the country house doubles as the hull of a ship. It soon seems more like a Sartrean hell than a hull. The ship’s sails hang heavily over library shelves and later, symbol of humanity’s doom, the masts of this vessel in a storm collapse. There are some spirited back and forth battles in this setting—Hesione and Ellie, Hesione and Boss Mangan– but mostly the undercurrent is humanity doing its decline through individual lives. These folks rant, they compete, they chat away but make no mark of substance. They are lightly amused by one another, but nothing they do really matters, and they seem to know it. Their futility is in the air.

Michael Ball as Shotover is gruff, individualistic, self-perpetuating and weathered like a solid seashore rock. His puttering manner and voice possess a seen-it-all wisdom for he has known enough of humanity’s ways to know what comes next. Because of Ball’s shaping of Shotover as hopelessness with a heart, we warm to Shotover and like his company. Ellie is played subdued with quiet longing and an implicit and fetching reticence about life by Robin Evan Willis. This Ellie is a heart looking for mooring, yet she is also assured and precocious in womanly manipulation of Mangan. She wants Hector, who is married to Hesione and learns in short order that almost all is false in the world. This floating take on Ellie compels us to make sense of her and come to terms with what we discover.

Laurie Paton’s snobbish Ariadne has a chirpy, sometimes automatic, musicality of voice that reveals her to be stuck in one of life’s roles. Deborah Hay, in a dark wig, is a Hesione who has both world- punished qualities in her person but also an inherent gusto with a sexy bite to it. She seems tuned in to the outer world. The nerdish-looking Mazzini Dunn of Patrick McManus, who looks like Franz Shubert after an electrical shock, and Patrick Galligan’s self-directed Randall add distinct flavours to this human brew, as do Patricia Hamilton and William Vickers. Benedict Campbell does moneyed confidence with a deep resonant syrup of a voice. His Mangan is adept at crass manipulation of lives and one of his notches is that he ruined Ellie’s father. He will stay up all night “thinking how to save six pence” and a nasty fellow is he, all anxious and centred with darkness.

Newton’s production is one of compelling scenes held together thematically by a thread of ongoing futility. All the cards of meaning in life have been played, only petty ritual remains, and these characters ache almost by rote because they have little to offer. They are hollow and without purpose no matter their rants and schemes. They float without development because they sense inwardly that there is nothing of true interest in life or themselves and no place in life to go.

This is hard stuff to show in a production because ennui on stage can beget ennui in the audience.  Newton, however, has shaped an atmosphere that pointedly reflects and creates on stage a pointless and worn out society just existing, just getting by in futility by means of diversion. We in the audience know that war and their demise are coming, since the creation of Heartbreak House coincided with World War I, and nothing can be done.  As a group these characters embody such futility.

That sense of nothing can be done and that twin sense of nothing much to do are hard to achieve and Newton succeeds with accumulating effect upon us. He gives us subtly engaging characterization and entertaining theatrical encounters, he gives us shades of poignancy, to be sure. But most of all, he gives us cause for profound sadness because, in these people, we so often see ourselves. Their self-indulgence is not purpose, their shallowness is not is not salvation, and thus we observe that our pointless species will not, cannot, change

Lucy Peacock as Mistress Ford and Laura Condlin as Mistress Page

As a theatrical presence, Geraint Wyn Davies’ Falstaff  is playfully physical yet burdened with both bodily weight and the weight of age. He is stiff and sprite at the same time and, as he waddles from scheme to scheme, his paunch claims the man and leads the way. He is also a fellow of impish sensuality. Ever ready with a pelvic thrust, via Wyn Davies he is a creation of subtle versatility who slowly suggests qualities of serene foolishness and of personal dignity.

Of course, Falstaff isn’t the sexually desirable package he assumes he is. Of course, his pursuit of the Merry Wives proves him an ass along the way. But we also sense a man of inadequate powers who is touchingly out of his depth in the world, a world where he struggles to survive but where he also thrives on a manageable adventure and an audience.  He takes small bites out of life and in his mind makes them into large chunks. Falstaff is harmless, somewhat ordinary, beautiful in foolishness, and a man of magnificence in his mundane deeds. In other words, Wyn Davies’ Falstaff moves our hearts.

The more dominant thrust (no pun intended) in the play is Tom Rooney’s Master Ford, a cranky and sour fellow who is easily displeased and obsessively jealous of his faithful wife’s suspected wanderings. “A man may be too confident” about his wife’s fidelity he maintains and Ford is quite the opposite, absurdly suspicious at every turn. He is a man decidedly ready to push the Othello button and without his jealousy to drive him on, it seems he would not exist. He is absurd and out of control. Rooney’s insightful take on Ford’s obsessions and frustrations make for a comic gem, especially when we sense him to be potentially nasty at his core and a man foolishly or helplessly consumed by doubt as he thrives on jealousy.

Lucy Peacock as Mistress Ford, is wide-eyed and breathless, delighted to have Mistress Page as cohort in a counter scheme against Falstaff. She is an inherently funny dynamo of a woman. Laura Condlin’s Mistress Page is a woman who almost implies a country twang, a woman of some poise who seizes the chance to go over the top with some mischief and intrigue which she savours. Christopher  Prentice as the bumbling and hopelessly clueless Master Slender  gives us genuine delight with his repertoire of facial  contortions that punctuate each word he speaks. James Blendick as his exasperated uncle is hilarious each time he reveals a crack in his staid composure.

Frank Galati’s production feels secure and comfortable with its low key and not too bawdy dynamism and its sensitivity to textual potential. At times these people look too sophisticated for “townsfolk” and designer Robert Perdziola’s decidedly upper class attire  is such that one might see on Austin’s Mr. Darcy instead of Page and Ford et al. What Galati and Perdziola achieve is a leisurely country feeling in which events are often relished simply as a diversion. Even Ford’s lunatic jealousy seems taken as a matter of course, although director and actor do suggest here a truly disturbing undercurrent in human behaviour. As much as we are moved to fondness for Falstaff, we are scared by the unsaid in Ford.

The whole production is delivered in a usually articulate, measured and musically spoken fashion that supports the director’s leisurely pace. The setting is functional yet atmospheric, makes for flowing movement and strategic stage placement of characters, and is imaginatively suggestive of more detail than it actually contains.  On occasion, a character may not emerge far enough off the page (another pun unintended) or a voice of fuzzy tonality might not ring to the festival theatre’s ceiling but remain somewhat muffled below, but on the whole this production entertains solidly without a glitch.

As a play, The Merry Wives of Windsor offers characters of some complexity, stock creations, and, best of all, characters with a foot in each camp. In this production some are easily fleshed out into entertaining and individualized characterizations and some entertain us well as far as they can. There are running gags at the expense of say the French and some redundancy in Falstaff’s comeuppance. If Falstaff hiding in the laundry basket is a classic situation (see Verdi), the beating by Ford doesn’t really offer much that is new or interesting. For the most part, however, there is much comic potential delightfully realized in Galati’s production, say in Falstaff’s attempted come on to Mistress Ford.

Where both play and production shine comically is in pairings: Falstaff and the disguised Master Ford discussing Ford’s wife, Falstaff with Mistress Ford choking back her laughter,  Mistress Ford and Mistress Page eagerly conspiring to get back at the two timing seducer Falstaff, and Shallow’s exercise in futility as he helps the very challenged Slender to woo are some. Falstaff by himself and Ford by himself are each thoroughly engaging, each one bountiful with human failing, to be sure, but  very human and theatrically splendid. For this production, we sit back and laugh often and well.

A bride to be and five girlfriends gather to celebrate on the eve of her wedding ceremony. They wear knee length skirts of wine and black hues that flare out in puffs and folds over pattered or boldly reddish tights. They wear squeezed uppers, bodices that accentuate their breasts and  assert their womanhood. Their striking and surprising costumes, by designer Michael Gianfrancesco, seem to urge them revel in their sexuality.

So these ladies are hanging loose. They are playful, impish, assertively celebratory, and much fun to be with for the Opera’s fifty minute duration. In life off the stage, they are mezzos Andrea Ludwig and Krisztina Szabo and sopranos Laura Albino, Carla Huhtanen, Shannon Mercer, and Jacqueline Woodley, a gathering of vocal riches, to be sure.

The ladies sing texts of Serbian poetry that sometimes shows a desperate sense of existence in everyday life, as in the lyric: “Mother is giving me to Jovan the drunk”. The singer, however, wants Ilija the hero, and not Jovan. Such is a girl’s complaint that inhabits folk songs of every culture. Or, further “two roosters were fighting on the priest’s hearth”, a lyric which echoes a rural existence where all kinds of animal activity and consciousness prevails. In the country, people and animals both domestic and wild traditionally live as one coexistence, and humans sometimes take animal sounds, like those here on display, as their own. They make up stories played out by animals, ergo folklore and its buddy imagination. Thus, the surtitles overhead are a welcome good read.  

In the composer’s and her first culture’s tonally compressed vocal sounds, we hear piercing and elongated Balkan harmonies that carry a sense of inherent echo, of mystery. We have ebb and flow cadences and staccato sounds punched out on the breath. We hear squeezed and flattened or ripe and juicy tones, group conversation like collective barnyard clucking, voices of implicit defiance whatever the subject. We also hear gut-wrenching cries from the bride and dizzied, breathless laughter and affectionate teasing tones from her friends.

The sung dialogue might be “vuh……huh huh”  repeated over and over, meaningless sounds that, with pointed characterization, seem to speak whole texts. Or it might be confidential girl chatter bursting with urgent advice or premarital sexual innuendo or a wistful sharing of dreams. In terms of sound alone, even without director Michael Cavanagh’s inventive and very human sensitivity and his keenly theatrical smarts, this opera would be maddeningly delicious with its always surprising variety of sounds.

In the realm of body, since physicality is indeed a driving force of Sokolovic’s creation, we have playfully robotic or marionettish movements, or sauntering, swaggering and suggestive walks, or a sensual bride writhing in the light and stroking her hair. We have foot stomping in staccato rhythms, or mime with everyday gesture magnified, or physical movements that echo or accompany the words these voices sing. These bodies are often so rich and varied with movement and sound that they seem collectively as complex as an orchestra, yet always spontaneous , spur of the moment, easily silly. The voices make sound and such sound is worked over into meaning, a meaning that is not abstracted but rooted instead in physical existence that constantly encounters the world. Sound is a spirit here, one that permeates all, makes everything presented here exist again and again in a new dimension.

As well, a celebratory lust for existence drives the atmosphere created here by these assertively breasted women who play both their sexual and life-nurturing cards at one time.  They are crucial to life’s process, and this is what we sense.  The production becomes even more potently female with the bride-to-be’s undressing, removing her stockings, and the sense of isolation seeping into her being as the voices around her, though close as before, sound more distant. She sinks into her senses, it seems, and then into poetry as she is told that “the sky is full of stars” and then to “wash your hair in the stars”. Her friends circle about with yards and yards of silver fabric and over a simple frame create an ambiguous formation. Is it a bath, a bed, an ocean symbolic of her awaking sensuality, her primordial purpose? She is told to “wash your breasts in the stars” and we thus know that something very true of the human heart is going on.

In Svadba we experience women in groups where, through play and bonding, they have their own feminine existential search, their own feminine world, their own dimensions of reality. A continuum of sound develops as, for instance, each upends a hollow tube, one not quite three feet in length and filled with granular material, and creates the sound of water flowing. Or is in time that flows in their hands, like grains of sand?

The bride to be is being awakened to her part in the fundamental flow of propagation, one in which a species must participate in order to endure. Her friends slumber almost protectively around her and a flute sound is heard and we are told “the nightingale is starting to sing….. it must be dawn… wake up, Milica… the groom is arriving.” The bride to be, naked and wrapped in silver disappears for a moment and returns in a gown. She sings the opera’s only solo “Come to me, my beloved.”  A new lifetime is beginning and from it other lifetimes.

In the production’s program notes, Svadba is described as a newly commissioned opera by Serbian born, Montreal resident Ana Sokolovic. As you can tell, it is much, much more. Rooted, as it is, in traditional folklore, and composed and produced with a knack from all participants for subtle profundity, it carries the unforced resonance of a collectively shared ritual. It weaves multidimensional realities into a theatrical fibre that entertains and moves one deeply, it alters and embellishes everyday life and draws forth its archetypal underpinnings. Svadba is a creation that celebrates the immediacy of friendship, sensuality, fantasy, physical existence in the world, the sounds we make and amplify into meaning. It celebrates being.

With six instinctively dedicated and versatile singers, a minimum of multipurpose props, six lights that seem like small suns to roll on stands and be refocused at will, and tonal resources so broad and daring that they reconfigure what one defines as experience, Svadba succeeds in reaching beneath concept into a more fundamental experience of existence. It certainly offers many surprises, much delight, many nudges into ineffable understanding that we come to feel in our bones. Ultimately, it simply gives undeniable cause to celebrate being in the world. For this production of Svadba is most seductive as it demonstrates and indeed seems made of the very same life energy that it would have us, the ones who watch, also know and, yes, celebrate. I’ve waited a long time for theatre to do something like this.

My following reviews were published in an alternative paper over the past few years and I can’t help but recommend each splendid CD again. So here we go -unedited, from the originals, so please excuse the occasional bit of information that is no longer relevant. JS.

1)    In a year and change, Rodney Crowell will be sixty, and on his new CD, Sex & Gasoline, as before with Fate’s Right Hand of 2003 and The Outsider of 2005, the lyrically versatile and discerningly poetic songwriter again proves himself gutsy, and almost unrelenting in self-revelation, as he explores his worth. Here again he puts his will to truth in the witness box to give testimony against the destructive and wounding BS that sustains too many guys in our patriarchal culture. A male to female confession – “….We momma’s boys have got it in for you/Our faults are many, our virtues nil/We never loved you and we never will”- pulls no punches at showing romantic love as a façade and con job of both the other and oneself. Yet, ironically, what follows is the unforced and delicate shading of regret in Moving Work of Art. In Truth Decay, relationships, even with self-awareness, are tough-going in what seems the quicksand once described by R. D. Laing: “I can’t love you like I want to/If it comes down to what I don’t do….” Girls are taught to “bow your head, lift your skirt…” and, in time, men who think they care or maybe do care can only declare, almost like a character out of Beckett, that “there’s nothing I can do/I’ve done everything I can” and realize a futility in the way “they say true love conquers all/ but they don’t tell you who to call.”

 The desperation in Crowell’s wishing “for an hour…to be a woman and feel that phantom power” and in his need to find out “if I’m a decent man/Or if I’m just a joke” is deeply touching. One always senses that Crowell has humanity’s number, be it male or even female, but no matter how deeply he regrets his failings –and no matter how much he hopes a woman might handle and not cause pollution, the Iraqi war, the world’s hungry- the inner world of women remains unreachable, unknowable. So I’m relieved that Crowell doesn’t take an easy route, like some songwriters, and assume that human decency is contingent upon the absence of a penis. But in a world where too many puerile men pass stupidity for masculinity and destroy life and planet in the process, one can only hope there is a solution to be found to our madly competitive and shamefully destructive nature. One can be glad then that Crowell has spoken, as a male “out of touch with my gender,” from his need for truth.

 I admire Rodney Crowell on many levels. His instinctively poetic lyrics feel fresh and   evocative without his trying to make them so, his music in both melody and style shows variety and an insightful vitality, his production is sonically rich and nuanced even when it rocks, but also the man has a deep need to find out, through his art and his honesty, what the ingredients of his being a man and being a human being might and can turn out to be. At his self-critical best, which shows itself often, he doesn’t pass self-flagellation for honesty, nor does he take the facile way out by removing himself from responsibility in either personal relationships or a rotten social fabric, of which he is part, and simply point at the crimes of others. He tells us what we do, in our lunacy as males, and with courageous integrity reaches for answers one assumes he knows don’t exist. He doesn’t escape into his often consummate art but, instead, faces the blunt fact that, being alive, there is no escape from anything on the planet, especially “the man in the mirror” he described in Fate’s Right Hand who is in some way, in truth, each of us.

2)   My favorite CD this month is Shelby Lynne’s Just a Little Lovin’ which on first hearing I found rather low key and now I find addictive. Why? Lynne is one of the best up close singers around, one whose naturally intimate voice suggests that singer and listener are sharing one layer of skin between them. Her emotional shadings, sometimes ethereal and sometimes out and out aching, feel deeply rooted in the fibre of living through relationships, personal need, private joys, and wounds that won’t heal. Lynne’s nuanced voice feels so personal at times that one feels an intruder, but also emotionally bound within the singer’s voice to remain and hear more. For Shelby Lynne, a Grammy-winning singer adept at several genres of music, style ultimately emerges from her private truth and so we believe her.

3)  The best CD of the month, by a country (and western) mile, is Say Uncle from the Toronto-based C&W string quintet Lickin’ Good Fried. It’s a collection of top-notch music-making on all counts, especially the intuitive interplay in the band itself, the solidly creative musical chops in the backup, and the loving and witty vocals, of always inspired and clever lyrics, up front. The quintet consists of singer-guitarist (Colonel) Tom Parker, fiddler John Showman, Andrew Collins on mandolin, Sam Petite on bass, and singer-mandolinist Alex Pangman. Pangman, when backed by her very hot Alleycats, happens to be Canada’s premiere chanteuse of traditional jazz vocals.

 You’ll find yourself doing repeated listens of Say Uncle’s fifteen cuts. Colonel Tom’s enjoyably distinct lead voice seems a long-brewed hybrid blend of teen crooners like Tommy Sands and Hank Williams, while harmonies or duets with Alex feel true to any musical groove they pick, no pun intended. The musically-compelling and very catchy tunes lock easily into one’s brain and the lyrics cover a range of contemporary and traditional issues without forgoing the latter’s musical roots.

 For starters, try the relationship politics of Soap Opera: “You ought to be in the soap opera, each night you switch your act up, rewrite the plot and come up with some new and crazy drama, that’s guaranteed to keep us watching each and every minute of the soap opera.” Who hasn’t known or done that one? But equal pleasures and recognition await in “Your Side of the Bed,” or “Don’t Paint Me with the Same Brush,” or “Leave This Song” with its surreal suggestion, “Do me right and leave this song.” Don’t be surprised if you find this disc sharing listening time with Rose Maddox and her 1940s cohorts and Randy Newman and his witty and ironic post ‘60s singer-writers. Available from www.lickingoodfried.com and soon on itunes.

4)  Guitarist Margaret Stowe’s new CD, Mello Jello, is now released and it is a subtly enchanting gem of masterly technique infused with a complex and profoundly gentle humanity. Stowe’s light touch is made of a pinpoint delicacy that feels perfectly conceived and perfectly placed; it feels uncanny with other-worldly nuance; it is beautiful. And, no doubt, to some these thirteen tracks might seem as light as a strand of smoke on a sunny day in, say, 1969. In any case, this is guitar playing of such astonishing lightness and rich delicacy in sound that one pauses in one’s deeper emotions to listen. There is richness of imagination here that takes one through surprising rhythmic shifts, placement of notes, tonal variety that teases one’s imagination, and swing that really does swing. However, as ethereal as this music might be, there is an assertive sense of daring within that improvises with confident purpose. Available from margaretstowe.com or myspace.com/margaretstowe

5)  When is the Dalai Lama not the Dalai Lama? Let me explain. Last winter, as the healing person, who had been enthusiastically recommended to me by a friend, was allowing her energies to dance with mine, she played a recording of a deep-voiced individual chanting a mantra. “That sounds like a cross between a Bulgarian bass and a Tibetan monk” said I, remembering my CD of Boris Christoff singing Mussorgsky and an interview I once did with a group of maybe a dozen Tibetan monks. The healing person proceeded to explain that it was supposedly the Dalai Lama doing a mantra he had once chanted to a dying friend, although she had doubts this was true, and she proceeded to give me a copy. I played this recording endlessly, often hours at a time, for several months, and treasured the unique feeling of peace and serenity that ensued.

 Enter reality. One day, being an obsessive surfer, I decided to check the veracity of this tale, on the internet, and discovered that this deep resonance of a voice belonged not to the Dalai Lama but to one Hein Braat in The Netherlands. His recording of the Maha Mrityeonjaya Mantra was being recorded and passed around by the multitudes, without recompense to him, all because the Dalai Lama had allegedly said that he would record the mantra, but only if it were not sold but given away freely from one person to the next.

Anyway, the pairing of the Mrityeonjaya Mantra and the Gayatri Mantra are one of several imported CDs of Hein Braat chanting available from www.isabellacatalog.com.I can’t imagine life without mine.

6)  Diana Panton’s voice, on the CD If the Moon Turns Green, swings with ease and grace and puts out just enough to seductively draw the listener into her private world. It suggests both ambiguous secrets and understanding good will, and hangs gently like a finely woven gown on a body of partially concealed sensuality, whimsy, longing, vulnerability and purity of trust. Panton thoughtfully caresses each lyric with very slight traces of seductive breathiness, charming slight nasality, and delightful pixiness in a beguiling and very feminine brew. Diana Panton practices an art rarely found nowadays, the art of clean open-hearted delivery with no trace of affectation, mannerism or irony, and I know that somewhere the likes of June Christy, Peggy Lee, Lee Wiley and many others are looking on with approval that here, in our own city no less, we have a special vocalist who means what she sings. And when Diana Panton sings in her distinctive lights-are-low, whisper-in-your-ear voice, the world is a good, romantic place to be. Give her a listen and smell the roses. Available at www.dianapanton.com .

7)  I met Ramblin’ Jack Elliot the first time in 1962 at a folk club in Hamilton called The Happy Medium. He was a disciple of the folk legend Woody Guthrie who once had said, “Jack sounds more like me than I do.” Another Guthrie disciple was Bob Dylan, who had recently dropped into the Medium, without playing, and whose first LP had featured a track called Song to Woody.  Dylan, it turned out, was borrowing some of Ramblin’ Jack’s Guthrie-derived stage act, although the latter’s brilliance as a raconteur, flat picker (Ian Tyson has said he long wanted to flat pick as well as Ramblin’ Jack), and genuine folkloric persona was and is beyond emulation; for the guy was and is unique. Anyway, when I asked Ramblin’ Jack to tell me about Woody Guthrie, he politely drawled, “Well, you see, my woman’s just in from Toronto……” and the case was closed, at least until we met again.

 Memories aside, the release of THE LIVE WIRE: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949 is a major event for so many reasons. Guthrie’s impact on both folk music and popular music -as a source of classic songs like This Land is Your Land, as an icon of the feisty everyman troubadour speaking eloquently for the working classes, as a major template-setting influence on Dylan, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, Ramblin’ Jack, son Arlo, and countless others- has been enormous. But other than brief footage of Guthrie singing John Henry with Brownie and Sonny, who could tell further what this small-framed national treasure sounded like in front of an audience, what his irresistible magic might be. Thus, this CD, available exclusively from www.woodyguthrie.org is a recording of major historic importance because it documents the voice of unions, of migrant workers, of miners, of the downtrodden everywhere and of the American land –and that voice is Woody Guthrie just being himself.

 THE LIVE WIRE: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, the 2008 Grammy winner for best historical album and a fundraiser for the Woody Guthrie Foundation, took place at the YM-YWHA’s Fuld Hall in Newark, New Jersey and consists of “18 tracks of songs, stories and conversation.” The songs include Tom Joad, Guthrie’s condensation in song of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Pastures of Plenty with its spine-shivering line, “We come with the dust and we go with the wind,” and Jesus Christ, set to the folk tune Jesse James. For the latter song, wife Marjorie notes that Woody, after  being torpedoed , came home with a long beard and wearing a fez, which caused neighbourhood kids to yell “Jesus Christ has come!” Marjorie, acting as hostess of the gig, adds that Woody “lives the life of Jesus Christ very much in his travelling.”

 Along with Marjorie’s endearing giggle and attempts to control Woody’s rambling tales with warnings like “I’m gonna time you” and “very briefly this time please,” we have her explanation (quoting Woody) that “folksingers don’t have voices, it is the words that are so terribly important.” From the man himself, unbending individual that he is, we have elasticity of tempo, a false start too high for 1913 Massacre “about the scabs and thugs,” some biographical background (my mother was “an awful scared nervous kind of woman”), historical background about Woody’s home state Oklahoma where the Indians and poor Negroes were cheated out of their land and its oil, and insight into his creative process with Marjorie noting that Woody keeps clippings “stuck up on the wall” and writes up to ten songs a day. I especially love the folksy wisdom of “Oklahoma’s first in everything worst” and Guthrie’s famous ironic wordplay with “since I was there and the dust was there I thought I’d write a little song about it.” We are so damned lucky to have this priceless recording available.

8)  In the exquisitely designed booklet of her musically abundant and aesthetically seductive new CD, Kulak Misafiri: Events in Small Chambers, singer Brenna MacCrimmon offers seven definitions, of the title, that suggest we inhabit and are remade by a lifelong continuum of sound that works its magic upon us, through us. MacCrimmon’s magical contribution to the listener’s aural life is a collection of eleven (of thirteen) tracks that are subtly potent and undeniable with syncopation, juicy-ripe with musical textures, vocally haunting, mysterious in aura, and solid yet spontaneous in musical sophistication. Canadian MacCrimmon certainly conveys a love and reverence for this blend of mainly traditional and several modern songs, but so brewed is she in the complex idioms of Turkish music that one senses the roots of her spirit are planted in the blood of Turkish soil. Recorded in seven cities with small groupings from a pool of thirty-one ace musicians, the riches here are many and each track seems an event in its unique way. Gems include Dolama Dolamayi with its punctuated lilt and descending refrain, the jazzy underpinning of Oj Ti Mome Ohrigance, the heart-broken and blood-bleeding wail of Yildiz Dagi with George Chittenden doing eerie turns on the zurna, and the deeply blue Semsiyemin Ucu Kare for which MacCrimmon explains “There are days when the rain and the mud and the clouds get into your soul.” Tracks eleven to thirteen include birds singing, MacCrimmon singing the self-penned, loving and soothing Mussels in the Bay, in English, that suggests the kind of drifting smoke one imagines to find in Istanbul, and, finally, what sounds like the interior of a train station somewhere (a continuum of sound, remember?) MacCrimmon’s distinctly pure voice, one that is crystalline yet fleshy, timbred when needed with an edge of nasality that is de rigueur when one moves east from the music of western Europe, is, like this CD, one of a kind. Kulak Misafiri: Events in Small Chambers certainly has many qualities to make it a special classic of contemporary world music -and holding graphic designer Yesim Tosuner’s beautiful booklet in one’s hand is a bonus. A must have, to be sure. Available from www.greengoatmusic.ca or www.cdbaby.com/brennamaccrimmon

9)  On I Love (Heart) Jokes: Paula Tells Them in Maine, the quick and kind comedienne, Paula Poundstone, is brilliant at connection with her audience members. She points out and probes the absurdities of their lives and ways of speech, all with a benign aggressiveness that does not patronize or condescend or abuse, but lovingly celebrates the average guy or gal. She is a mirror that, without judgment, says “look at yourself, laugh and enjoy.” Poundstone makes the folks in her audience talk and, whatever each one says, she picks up on the potential of every sentence -or silence- and takes their words -or lack of words- at face value and riffs on them. She does so with a snow ranger, a woman who “runs a national park,” and a professor of statistics, and each exchange is hilarious. She also applies her modus operandi of wide-eyed amazement and awe to Maine and its people, parenting, aging with its wrinkles and poorer vision and jowls, cats (she has 12) for whom she sifts “all day long,” and tosses in that “Canadians are the nicest people in the world” -with a caveat about our reticence to speak up for ourselves also tossed in. Poundstone is special and already I’m playing her CD a third time, as you will too. But be careful while driving: this CD is pee your pants funny. Go to www.paulapoundstone.com to order.

10)  Here’s a take on Richard Thompson, using the five CD set RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson (on Free Reed Music) as reason and evidence. As a lyricist, he is unflinching yet compassionate, incisively aware of a world where people live impossible realities, always surprising in his turns with colloquial language, deliciously acidic in his irony, achingly poignant without even scratching sentiment, and funny as hell (a song on Janet Jackson, folks, and Madonna too). He is good because he rarely points at others in accusation, unless they are ridiculous, or at himself in congratulation for his versatile genius.

 As a guitarist, Thompson shapes each riff as if it’s conceived for this very moment alone, while sonically he incorporates a range of sounds from the nuances of Celtic music, especially the pipes, to rock of all styles from Chuck Berry to The Who, to pure sound of shifting tonal base into a unique experience that, for all its musical savvy, emanates whole from a creative centre and not as an amalgam. As a picker, he is versatile, imaginative, and no slave to any stylistic form as he creates his own distinctive sound. His sense of sonic space is gripping, his musical imagination unending, his technique masterful.

  As a singer, Thompson can do an everyday bloke or a wandering everyman in purgatorial solitude or a George Formby clone with a macabre edge or a human spirit surveying a bottomless personal chasm or a knife poking commentator full of phlegm. His individual cuts are memorable as complete creative entities where all his masteries meld. Just the unreleased recordings in this collection would make a distinguished career. Available at Records on Wheels in Dundas.

11)  In his Pensees of 1670, Pascal stressed the underpinning of human essence in the arts, saying, “When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man.”

 Where the creative person matters most deeply, to be sure, is not in doing art for the sake of doing art, or for profit, or for, say, Canadian Idol status, although the latter is a nice gig for the perks, prestige and bucks. The creative person matters most in manifesting and sharing his or her genuine individuality and profound concerns through mastery of a given art form.

 Yes, it is hard to reveal, and sometimes to accept, one’s own uniqueness in our “more of the same” culture. Moreover, even offbeat artists can become cliched if all they seek is to achieve difference from the norm. But as film director Terry Gilliam once told me: “It’s our duty to do something, if we’ve got skills or talents, to help improve things.”  By being real, the genuine artist can initiate real change in the world itself or how we experience the world, and both changes are essential to our worth as humans.

 That’s why it is always encouraging to witness a major talent plugging away, in a given creation, for both truth and consummate artistry at the same time.

 In classical music, for example, Magdalena Kozena’s recent Mozart Arias on the Archive label, with offstage mate Simon Rattle conducting, reveals the Czech mezzo’s vulnerable, yet uncompromising, sincerity that consistently aches with the beauty of human risk and of universal truth. Or in country music, Rodney Crowell’s Fate’s Right Hand pulsates with unrelenting introspection and existential guts that compel the singer-songwriter to find and know himself. Or Mexican Chavela Vargas whom the singer Lhasa once made me promise to check out for her unflinching honesty. Vargas turned out to be intensely real and unforgettable. 

 But not all art, to be true, needs to be angst and pain. Joy is equally honest and real, although many performers in our age of perpetual smiles seem unable to realize their own profound inner buzz without resorting to façade or gimmickry of some kind. That’s why nowadays, when I find many new and “smooth” jazz singers as stimulating as Prozac, I turn to Alex Pangman for life and music as one inseparable high. Alex is a quintessential upper, an unaffectedly hip singer with style in her blood who lives and breathes the swing idiom.

The narrative line of Cirque du Soleil’s  Quidam is thus described: “Young Zoé is bored; her parents, distant and apathetic, ignore her. Her life has lost all meaning. Seeking to fill the void of her existence, she slides into an imaginary world—the world of Quidam — where she meets characters who encourage her to free her soul.”

 Inside the vast expanse of Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum, however, it is a series of dazzling, sometimes breathtaking, acrobatic or aerial or clown acts that rules one’s imagination and frees one’s spirit to the workings of wonder and awe. Especially in a distant seat, faces are difficult to read and facial expressions that tell a story don’t register. Moreover, and let’s get the negatives out of the way at the outset, the choreography connected to “plot” sometimes seems cursory and unexpansive, at least, again, from a distance. These briefly experienced figures don’t have time to intrude long enough in one’s psyche.

 But it isn’t the story we have come to see, after all, is it? We’re here to celebrate physical beauty and its defiance of gravity and other limitations, we’re here to celebrate the body as magical. And that’s what we get. Moments like the Aerial Contortion in Silk which, as well physically breathtaking, is sensual and erotic, a performance that makes time stop. 

   Aerial Contortion in Silk

 Likewise, the male-female Statue in Part Two stops both time and the show. Even the live band soundtrack forgoes its over-pumped Eurobeat, faux ethnic loudness for a softer mood-shaping mysterious blend of sounds that helps to transform the imagination. The two performers use surprising and very pointed fulcra of balance and to do so their strength, especially in horizontal positions, is hard to believe. Much of Quidam seems to float in air, but these two, ethereal as they are, seem made of that same air.

Statue

 Some of Quidam’s acts are simply pure physical fun, and they do things we can almost imagine ourselves enjoying, albeit with years of training under our belts. The German Wheel with a human spoke spins all about and thumbs its nose at gravity. Skipping Ropes shows a collective mastery of coordination and rhythm as twenty acrobats keep the beat going as solos or groupings of two or more negotiate  multiple ropes.

 The quite charming Diabolos act, with four performers, is a Chinese children’s yo-yo game that requires two sticks linked by a string on which a wooden spool is juggled, tossed and balanced. Cloud Swing is a delightful trapeze act full of fun and feminine pizazz and, like Skipping Ropes, a study in perpetual motion. The gutsy clown who masterfully uses audience members as part of his acts –a romantic date in a car and a film shoot in the pre-sound era- is magical in his own zany way, someone whose laughter and delight we can share, whatever our age.

 Quidam has some flaws as noted, partly because a large venue doesn’t accommodate a need for narrative or choreographic detail. But Quidam does offer moments of pure beauty, moments of ethereal magic, moments delight and fun, moments of freeing energy, and it’s always a good thing to have one’s jaw drop in surprise and wonder, n’est-ce pas?

 German Wheel