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Webplay
Cross-Canada Theatre Reviews
The following is an online selection of recent reviews of English-language theatre from across Canada. In scanning the country, the Canadian Theatre Critics Association has sought out specifically reviews of new Canadian work, Canadian premieres of international work and noteworthy revivals of older work. We make no pretense that this is a comprehensive summary of professional theatrical activity in Canada. Rather, look at it as a smorgasbord offering a taste of theatre – and theatre criticism – from coast to coast.
Ali & Ali 7: Hey Brother (or Sister), Can You Spare Some Hope & Change?
In 2004, Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef enjoyed a success with their post-9/11 satire The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the Axes of Evil. The trio was back at Vancouver’s The Cultch this spring with a sequel tailored to the Obama era: Ali & Ali 7: Hey Brother (or Sister), Can You Spare Some Hope & Change? The Vancouver Sun’s Peter Birnie hailed their return:
“For all its bluster and bombast, this is a very subtle show. Filled with laughs and lots of political digs, Ali & Ali 7 also builds beautifully across a single act of 90 minutes, hitting home with a tough conclusion about Canadian ignorance and intransigence.”
Birnie’s review is here:
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/theatre-listings/Theatre+review+asks+keeps+laughingamidst+startling+reality/2912045/story.html
Billy Bishop Goes to War
Billy Bishop Goes to War, Eric Peterson and John Gray’s Canadian classic about the First World War flying ace, received a 30th-anniversary revival in 2008 by University of British Columbia alumni – including Gray’s son Zachary. That production was recently remounted at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre.
On his Vancouver Plays website, critic Jerry Wasserman assessed this version, in which young Ryan Beil took on the role that, three decades ago, made Peterson a star:
“Beil nails every aspect of Bishop, and though he still has a ways to go to match Peterson’s astonishing ability to evoke multiple characters with the slightest change of accent or body language, he attacks the numerous other characters with panache.”
Wasserman’s review can be found here:
http://www.vancouverplays.com/theatre/reviews/review_artsclub_billy_bishop_goes_to_war_10.shtml
Courageous
Edmonton’s flagship theatre, the Citadel, paired with Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre to premiere Courageous, an ambitious new play about rights and privileges by Michael Healey of The Drawer Boy fame. Venerable Edmonton Journal critic Liz Nicholls felt Healey’s latest lived up to its title:
“It has the guts to give real heft and passion to opposing points of view, without every getting murky. It steps up bravely with appealing characters who have the contradictory impulses of real life. It’s fair-minded about life’s multiple unfairnesses. In fact, that’s one of its own great strengths, and something it attributes to this improbably tolerant country of ours.”
This is the full review:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/life/Rice+Theatre+Courageous+good+piece+theatre/2655224/story.html
Enbridge playRites Festival
Alberta Theatre Projects marked its 34th annual playRites festival – and its first under new artistic director Vanessa Porteous – with the premieres of four new plays.
Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre
Bob Clark of the Calgary Herald took in Larry Tremblay’s Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre, a French-Canadian play freshly translated by Chantal Bilodeau, and pronounced it “[b]y turns absurdly fascinating and maddening”.
His review is here:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/Three+charm+bizarre+play/2565387/story.html
How Do I Love Thee?
Reviewing the playRites premiere of How Do I Love Thee?, Florence Gibson MacDonald’s new play about Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, FFWD Weekly’s Kathleen Renne gave a mixed report:
“It’s fitting that, in a play about poets, the language is the real star of this show — it’s heavy on words and comparatively scant on plot and dramatic action. How Do I Love Thee? will not be everyone’s cup of tea. To follow the dialogue, and the many theories it offers as to the true nature of love — that it’s a lie, that it’s forgiveness of oneself, that it’s in words, that it’s surrender, that it’s in death, etc. — can be fairly arduous. There came a point in the production when I stopped trying to make sense of every line and just succumbed to the poetic rhythms.”
Read more at:
http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/arts/theatre/love-is-like-5225/
Tyland
Greg MacArthur’s Tyland also made it debut at the festival. A drama about two pregnant women thrown together on a remote Arctic island as part of a politically motivated government program, it got a chilly reception from FFWD’s Richard Lam:
“As this claustrophobic play progresses, the perplexing setting and the staunch characters make it difficult to decipher the meaning of it all. Can mothers and their babies be used as political weapons? Is the entire campaign just a cruel social experiment? Is life about violent acts of creation, or making meaningful human connections? Tyland poses these questions, amongst others, yet stubbornly refuses to take sides.”
The full review is at:
http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/arts/theatre/cold-cabin-fever-5283/
The Highest Step in the World
Back at the Herald, Stephen Hunt was bowled over by the playRites finale, The Highest Step in the World, David van Belle and Eric Rose’s highly physical fantasia on aerial themes. Wrote Hunt:
“It's hard to know whether to give David van Belle – star and co-creator of The Highest Step in the World – a score for his play or one for the high-flying gymnastics routine he gamely performs on different occasions throughout the lightest, brightest, most life-affirming 75 minutes of theatre you're likely to see this season.”
His rave is at:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/festival-guide/Review+Giant+leap+playRites/2601407/story.html
Mother Courage and Her Children
The Manitoba Theatre Centre teamed with the National Arts Centre for a revival of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, directed by Peter Hinton and starring Tanja Jacobs. Kevin Prokosh of the Winnipeg Free Press compared it with John Hirsch’s famous production and found it didn’t quite measure up:
“Unlike the rapturous outpouring of approval that followed the antiwar epic's legendary Canadian première at MTC in 1964, a revival's opening night performance Thursday drew a respectful ovation from a small audience thinned to half its size at intermission.”
The full review:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/entertainment/arts/brechts-message--still-relevant--if-didactic-84292212.html
And So It Goes
Toronto theatre icon George F. Walker, who now spends more time writing for television and film, unveiled his first new play in 10 years at his old stomping ground, the Factory Theatre. And So It Goes, as the title suggests, involves Kurt Vonnegut, as well as a downwardly mobile middle-aged couple and their schizophrenic adult daughter.
The National Post’s Robert Cushman found it “ striking but unsatisfying”:
http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/story.html?id=2556549#ixzz0mLzsCzSU
Communion
Another playwright making a comeback, in this case after a personal hiatus, Daniel MacIvor brought his new three-hander Communion to the Tarragon Theatre.
At Eye Weekly, Christopher Hoile found it quite the change from past MacIvor masterpieces like Monster and Cul-de-sac:
“Communion, now having its world premiere at the Tarragon Theatre, is a fascinating but very different Daniel MacIvor play. Gone are the horror, violence and convolutions of time. Where previous MacIvor characters have been only too able to create images of themselves through storytelling, in Communion characters struggle to find the story that explains who they are.”
His complete review is here:
http://www.eyeweekly.com/theatre/article/84714
who knew granny: a dub aria
A third new work by an old hand, who knew granny: a dub aria by ahdri zhina mandiela received its premiere from the Obsidian company .at the Factory Theatre. On the Aisle Say website, Toronto correspondent Robin Breon savoured mandiela’s dub poetry:
“The thing to remember about the long and distinguished career of the writer/director, documentary filmmaker, choreographer and theatre producer, ahdri zhina mandiela is that before she was any of these, mandiela started out as a poet. And in particular the cultural form and style of a poet from Jamaican origin who early on sensed that the language of poetry can release the creative spirit like the soothing massage of a warm island sea bath.”
Breon’s review is at:
http://www.aislesay.com/ONT-WHO-KNEW.html
Art
Popular Canadian improv comedian Colin Mochrie (of TV’s Whose Line Is It Anyway? and (This Hour Has 22
Minutes) went legit for a Canadian Stage revival of Yasmina Reza’s ever-popular Art.
John Coulbourn, reviewing the show in the Toronto Sun, found it “in many ways… an appealing production”, but took issue with director Morris Panych’s laughs-over-substance approach:
http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/columnists/john_coulbourn/2010/03/19/13293681.html
A Boy Called Newfoundland
Up-and-coming indie company Theatre Smash assembled a strong cast – including recent Genie Award winner Martha Burns – for the premiere of Graeme Gillis’s A Boy Called Newfoundland.
Reviewing the play, about a screwed-up family’s amorous adventures, Eye Weekly’s Byron Laviolette found its production detracted from the writing:
“Textually, Graeme Gillis has created a Royal Tenenbaums-esque domestic drama with some real heartache and sorrow. Texturally, however, the production occurs in an '80s-themed temple, full of Christmas lights, synth-pop remixes and brightly painted H&M-hued risers. While the script-driven pathos builds fairly slowly and complexly, the show’s overall design seems too loud for it, trading some of the tension for theatrical trickery.”
His full review is here:
http://www.eyeweekly.com/arts/theatre/article/87441
Mrs. Dexter and Her Daily
Veteran playwright Joanna McClelland Glass’s latest, Mrs. Dexter and Her Daily, paired two of Canada’s acting dynamos, Nicola Cavendish and Fiona Reid as domestic and employer, respectively.
In the Ottawa Citizen, Patrick Langston was appreciative of their finely wrought performances, but felt the play’s double monologue structure was wearying:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Theatre+Review+Dexter+Daily/2591392/story.html
Where the Blood Mixes
Kevin Loring’s Where the Blood Mixes, winner of the last year’s Governor General’s Award for English drama, was remounted in 2010 for a tour of Canadian cities. It kicked off at Victoria’s Belfry en route to the Vancouver Playhouse, where it played as part of the 2010 Winter Olympics’ Cultural Olympiad, then moved east to Toronto (Factory Theatre) and Ottawa (the National Arts Centre).
CBC Radio critic Alvina Ruprecht, writing on the Scene Changes site, caught the Ottawa engagement and pronounced the play “brutally revealing but also at times intensely poetic” – and comic as well.
Her review is here:
http://www.scenechanges.com/reviews.html#blood
The Madonna Painter
Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Madonna Painter received its English-language Montreal debut from the Centaur Theatre, in a translation by the trusty Linda Gaboriau.
On the Rover website, critic Marianne Ackerman used the occasion to analyze the celebrated Quebecois playwright’s m.o.:
“Bouchard is the literary equivalent of Robert Lepage, the Quebec master of visual theatre. He gathers up rich ideas, characters, settings, bits of history and images, and shakes, rattles, transforms them by way of poetic language into a series of powerful individual scenes which, if staged as exquisitely as director Roy Surette has done, can be impressive and at some moments, quite gripping.”
Ackerman’s full review is at:
http://roverarts.com/2010/04/high-on-incense/
Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy
Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy, the latest international touring show from Canada’s marionette maestro, Ronnie Burkett, touched down this spring at Place des Arts. The Montreal Gazette’s Pat Donnelly picked up on the personal aspects behind Burkett’s tale of a cruise-ship puppeteer facing a midlife crisis:
“While Billy Twinkle, Requiem of a Golden Boy is far more fantasy (often X-rated) than autobiography, there's no denying that certain elements of the story – Billy's prairie childhood, his early obsession with his metier, his apprenticeship in Michigan – resemble Burkett's own life.”
Read more at: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/theatre/Artful+show+flash+depth/2945511/story.html#ixzz0mAGh0EIm
Problem Child
In Newfoundland, a new company called Class Act Enterprises chose an earlier George F. Walker play, Problem Child from his Suburban Motel cycle, to make its debut.
Heidi Wicks, writing in the Telegram, was riveted by Walker’s extreme characters and the company’s treatment of the play: “Class Act Enterprises serve us their debut production like a seriously spiked bowl of punch.”
http://www.thetelegram.com/index.cfm?sid=337575&sc=84