NOTE: POSTS BACK-DATED FROM 12.28.09 THRU 12.02.09

FEATURE INTERVIEW - 28 Dec 09

ARDAL FANCIED A REVISIT
Dora winner updates her You Fancy Yourself one-woman show for new staging

By JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
28 Dec 09


If Thomas Wolfe had a hit show to help break the ice, he might not have been so quick to assure the world that you can't go home again.

Certainly when Maja Ardal decided to revisit her childhood home in Edinburgh, having a little gem like You Fancy Yourself to take with her proved to be a bit of a boon.

You Fancy Yourself, you might recall, is a one-woman show that earned Ardal, who also wrote it, a Dora Award for best performance last year. It tells the story of Elsa, a young girl who, at age four, finds herself transplanted from her Icelandic home to the tenements of Edinburgh and promptly sets about making herself a home. It's a story with which she is intimately familiar, for Elsa is not merely a good yarn given flesh, but the yarn of personal memory, knitted up into a cozy piece of theatre, giving insight into the playwright's own experiences of growing up in the Scottish capital.

In its premiere in Theatre Passe Muraille's intimate Backspace, YFY not surprisingly won the hearts of both critics and audience -- serving to launch a bit of a Canadian tour, which included a stop in Prince Edward Island -- before Ardal and Elsa headed back to Edinburgh just in time for the 2009 edition of the Edinburgh Fringe.

And if Ardal had any concerns about how a hometown crowd would respond to her theatrical woman child, they were soon put to rest.

"My first audience had a lot of Edinburgh school chums that came out of my past and a lot of Icelandic chums," she recalls, now back on Canadian terra firma. "I found it very difficult not to spend the entire performance crying."

Happily, not only did that opening-night audience love the show, "but they became my best ambassadors," Ardal reports.

Not that she needed a lot of help spreading the word, it turned out, for Scottish critics loved the show as well, launching Ardal on a mini-tour for two weeks in England, arranged by TPM's sister company in Farnham, before she headed home.

"Believe it or not, the English seemed to like it even more," Ardal reports gleefully. "They certainly laughed harder. They don't have the Scottish reserve."

After all of that, it would be understandable -- sad, but understandable -- if Ardal were to put Elsa out to theatrical pasture and start looking for more mature roles.

But no, not only is she preparing to bring You Fancy Yourself back to the Passe Muraille mainstage, where it is slated to open on Jan. 5, she's also prepared a sequel entitled Beatles, Bombs and Getting Groovy that's ready for its first performance -- all of which represents a lot of Elsa.

"You know who keeps me fresh?" she asks. "The audiences. They give me back the emotion."

As for the physical demands of the show, well, they're pretty impressive too, according to the 60-year-old performer.

"It keeps me fit," she insists. "At this age, one tends to spread laterally and I have to have good aerobics."

As for the vocal demands, her voice, she says, has never been better. "I have to be in constant vocal training," she explains.

"I suspect I may be the oldest actress in Canada playing the youngest role," she continues. "If someone else had written this play, they would have never hired me to play it."

And while she's looking forward to the day when another performer tackles the role -- Ardal would love to trade places with director Mary Francis Moore at some point -- she's nowhere near ready to let go of the role of the loveably bratty Elsa herself.

"This little brat is incredible," she says with obvious and profound fondness. "I have my little play that could."

She's also starting to realize, it seems, that wherever Elsa is, she's at home.

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NEWS FEATURE - 27 Dec 09

LEPAGE OPERA TOPS YEAR IN THEATRE

By JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
27 Dec 09


It's an ill wind that blows no good, they say -- and for once, it looks like maybe they were spot on the money.

Consider: Even while television's tremendously successful Corner Gas was running out of steam, Toronto theatre fans were reaping some unexpected benefits from its demise, welcoming actor Eric Peterson back to the stages on which he cut his teeth.

So it was that last year closed with memories still fresh of Peterson's compelling turn in Festen. Happily, those memories didn't even have time to fade before Peterson was back burning up Toronto stages, in shows such as Glengarry Glen Ross, Of The Fields, Lately and Hamlet, commanding our attention in a series of demanding roles.

On top of all that impressive work, the true centrepiece of Peterson's theatrical year had to be his return to Billy Bishop Goes To War, a seminal Canadian musical he co-created with collaborator John Gray more than three decades ago.

In his triumphant return to Billy Bishop, Peterson proved that, like fine wine, he simply gets better with age -- and in the process earned his place as Toronto's performing artist of the year.

And while the revitalized Billy Bishop certainly ranks as one of the year's top 10 theatrical memories to treasure, here are another nine, in no particular order.


1. Robert Lepage

Tough to say whether it was his theatrical marathon Lipsynch, or his operatic aquatic masterpiece The Nightingale And Other Short Fables (floated by the Canadian Opera Company) that impressed the most. We'll lump the two together, under his name.

2 & 3. The Canadian Opera Company

In addition to the aforementioned The Nightingale, the COC gave us a few other memorable evenings as well, not the least of which was a stellar production of Simon Boccanegra and a timeless Madama Butterfly that, despite its age, seems tailor-made for the stage of the Four Seasons. And those were just the highnotes.

4. Toronto The Good

Lots of theatre pieces have a lot to say about race relations, but Andrew Moodie's latest undertook a compelling look at the state of race relations and hit the nail squarely on its head in a near flawless production at the Factory Theatre, directed by Philip Akin.

5 & 6. Two Stratford productions

While The Stratford Festival seems to have lost its way when it comes to the world of old Bill Shakespeare, they still came up golden in two superb productions this summer -- a breathtaking revival of West Side Story (in which choreographer Sergio Trujillo seemed to drench Jerome Robbins' original choreography with testosterone and set it alight) and a delicious revisiting of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, not only directed by Brian Bedford but starring him as Lady Bracknell as well. Bedford pulled it off in spades, despite the fact that cross-casting this role is getting to be a bit of -- how should I put this -- a major drag.

7. The Shaw Festival

While productions of In Good King Charles' Golden Days and Born Yesterday were good, It was the festival's intimate staging of Moon For The Misbegotten that claimed top place in our memory banks. It made us grateful not only for directors such as Joe Ziegler and actors such as Jim Mezon, but for the kind of visionary programming that brings them together on a project like this.

8. The National Ballet of Canada

Historically, it seems, it is the full-length-story ballets that sell out for Canada's top purveyors of quality classical ballet, but a few more evenings which feature potent programming like the mix of The Four Temperaments, Watch her and Glass Pieces would ensure that their evenings of mixed programming would become the hottest ticket in town.

9. Martin loves Shirley

During his time at the head of Canadian Stage, erstwhile artistic producer Martin Bragg's programming sometimes left us scratching our heads. But reuniting Nicola Cavendish with Shirley Valentine on the Bluma Appel Stage was little short of inspired.

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NEWS FEATURE - 16 Dec 09

Rock of Ages cast found

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
16 Dec 09

After a continent-wide talent search, producers of the forthcoming Canadian production of Rock of Ages, slated to begin previews at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in late April, ended up finding what they wantred pretty close to home, it seems.

There are, in fact, some very familiar names in limited casting announced yesterday by Mirvish Entertainment for the forthcoming production.

Elicia MacKenzie, for instance, is certain to be a familiar face to the legion of fans she earned while starring in The Sound of Music, while Yvan Pedneault will be equally familiar to fans of We Will Rock You and most recently, Ross Petty's annual Christmas panto, where he's appeared as one of Robin Hood's rocking sidekicks.

David W. Keeley, meanwhile is a popular actor, with major cred on both the musical and classical stages, having appeared in everything from Hamlet to Mamma Mia! Stage stalwarts Peter Delwick and Victor Young round out yesterday's announcement.

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NEWS FEATURE - 15 Dec 09

Mirvish picks up Funny Thing

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
15 Dec 09

The Stratford Festival's production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which played the stage of the Avon Theatre this past summer, has been picked up by Mirvish Entertainment to play as part of their 2010/11 subscription season, it was announced yesterday.

Featuring music by Stephen Sondheim and directed by Des McAnuff, Stratford's production of Forum played to mixed dreviews, with Stratford regular Bruce Dow originally starring in the role of the slave Pseudolus, around whom the story pivots.

Dow was forced to withdraw part way through the run for health reasons, h owever, and was replaced by funnyman Sean Cullen for the remainder of the season.

Casting for the Mirvish run has not been finalized.

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THEATRE REVIEW - FIDDLER ON THE ROOF - 13 Dec 09 Rating: 4 out of 5

Tradition upheld
Broadway vet Harvey Fierstein and Fiddler's Tevye make a near perfect match

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
13 Dec 09


At this time of year, it seems, tradition is something we all understand, regardless of little things like race and creed and colour.

Which makes Fiddler on the Roof, in its way, the perfect musical for the season -- regardless of little things like race and creed and colour.

Because, in adapting Sholem Aleichem's stories of a group of Jewish peasants in the Russian village of Anatevka to the musical stage, Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick managed to pull off something in the nature of a minor miracle, remaining touchingly true to the Orthodox roots of their story while at the same time giving it a spin that makes it enduringly universal.

And happily, it's all yours, Toronto, just in time for the holidays.

A touring production of director Sammy Dallas Bayes' Tony Award-winning revival of Fiddler set up shop at the Canon Theatre this past week, where it opened yesterday, as part of the ongoing Mirvish season.

It was, of course, the production that initially was to have starred Chaim Topol, recreating on stage the role that earned him an Oscar nomination when the movie was released.

But just over a month ago Topol was forced to withdraw from the production, clearing the way for Broadway's own Harvey Fierstein to return to a role he'd made his own on the Broadway stage.

With Toronto the first stop on Fierstein's Fiddler tour, he's lost no time settling into the role of Tevye, an impoverished and hard-working dairy man in the time of the Czars. A simple man, with a huge heart and a simple faith, Tevye is the patriarch of a family that includes not only his long-suffering wife Golde (Susan Cella), but five daughters as well, each one of whom will have to be married off.

And happily, according to tradition, Yente, the village matchmaker, played by Mary Stout, has been hard at work, arranging a union for his eldest, Tzeitel (Rena Strober) with the widowed village butcher (David Brummel).

Tzeitel, for her part, has other ideas, however, having fallen in love with the impoverished tailor, Motel (Erick Liberman).

Having already promised his daughter to one man, Tevye finds a way, in his tradition, to give her to another, setting a precedent that gets more and more complicated as each of his daughters falls in love, the second (Jamie Davis) with a student revolutionary (Colby Foytik) and the third (Deborah Grausman) with a Russian boy from the village (Eric Van Tielen).

And while Tevye's home life spins dangerously out of control, life in the broader world is taking a few sharp turns as well -- and the carefully balanced life that Tevye has made, juggling family, community and religion, threatens to topple into chaos.

It's a powerful story about the making of Americans, for all that, under Bayes' direction, it is awash in sentimentality, with Fierstein and the rest of the cast playing far too broadly to the humour of the tale and paying only scant lip service to the pathos with which it is so carefully balanced.

But if it is a production short of grit, it is undeniably long on charm, despite the fact that while some people might have accused Fierstein of being a singer, no one to date has been able to make the accusation stick. Ultimately, Fierstein makes Rex Harrison sound like an operatic tenor, but few can deny that his heart is in the right place, and heart is what counts here.

Because, thanks to the enduring magic of Stein's book, Bock's tunes, Harnick's lyrics and the amazing vision of director Jerome Robbins, on whose vision this production is based, it's a show that still packs a wallop.

When it comes to tradition, a show, over-sentimentalized though it may be, is still a
mitzvah any time of year.

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DANCE REVIEW - THE NUTCRACKER, NBOC - 12 Dec 09 Rating: 5 out of 5

Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker is a holiday treat for all ages

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
12 Dec 09


The smell of a roasting turkey, the moon glinting off new-fallen snow, the taste of fresh-baked shortbread, the mystery of lovingly wrapped parcels -- just a few of the things that make this a season to treasure.

But truly, nothing says 'Christmas' with such persuasively magical power as the combination of the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the look of wonder on the face of an enthralled child.

Of course, few things brings those last two things together with more effect than the National Ballet of Canada, with their annual Christmas presentation of The Nutcracker.

And for those who find they're needing a little Christmas in their lives as December bears down on us -- and, frankly who, doesn't? -- the good news is, the NBOC's annual production of The Nutcracker opened yesterday at the Four Seasons Centre, where it is slated to run through Jan. 3.

It is, of course, a timeless story full of the kind of familiar quirky elements that have, over the years, become firmly entrenched in our Christmas tradition: duelling siblings, danced this year by Megan Storm Hill as Marie and Sebastian Lecomte as Misha; a memorable party for extended family and friends; a magical uncle full of tricks (Noah Long once again tackles the role of Uncle Nikolai with no small success) and finally a wonderful gift that whisks us all away to a magical kingdom ruled over by a beautiful queen -- and few are more beautiful than Sonia Rodriguez floating through the role the Sugar Plum Fairy.

But while the story may be familiar, there is something about the potent magic cooked up in 1995 by choreographer James Kudelka and designer Santo Loquasto, that makes it all seem new and vibrant and wondrously magical, year after year after year -- a feast for the senses, filled with enough wonder that there is something certain to delight audiences of any age and any taste.

For the young and the young at heart, there's the magic -- roller-skating bears and dancing horses and a midnight battle where everyone is fighting like cats and dogs, including the mice.

For the romantic, there's the passion that springs up between the Nutcracker, who just happens to bear a striking resemblance to Peter the Stableboy, both danced by Aleksandar Antonijevic, and the aforementioned Sugar Plum Fairy, after they've all arrived in her magical kingdom and seen her Faberge home.

For those who simply want to be charmed, there's charm aplenty in the array of darling lambs and dancing bees and prancing unicorns with which the story is larded. For those who want beauty, there is the timeless opulence of Czarist Russia, perfectly captured in Loquasto's scarlet and gold designs -- the perfect foil to the richness of Tchaikovsky's music, served up with verve every year, it seems, by the NBOC Orchestra, this year once again under conductor David Briskin.

And finally for those who love dance, there is, first and foremost, Kudelka's enchanted choreography, which runs the gamut from the delightful to the breath-taking, showcasing as it does both the developing talents in the students (drawn from the National Ballet School and a host of others) and the mature and towering talents that are the artists of the National Ballet of Canada.

Firmly anchored by Antonijevic and Rodriguez, the company not only boasts seasoned performers like Victoria Bertram, returning once again to the roles of Baba and the Empress Dowager, but dancers like Long and Tanya Howard (cast as the Snow Queen and teamed with Nan Wang and Brett van Sickle) who are the ever-shifting backbone of Canada's pre-eminent classical company.

It's Christmas, all tied up in a package to treasure.

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THEATRE REVIEW - CIVIL ELEGIES - 12 Dec 09 Rating: 4 out of 5

Civil Elegies a poetic reflection

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
12 Dec 09


TORONTO - From Shakespeare to the works of Leonard Cohen, poetry has been used to add spice to theatre since theatre first began.

And based on the latest offering from Soulpepper, it's a safe bet that things poetical will continue to find their way onto theatrical stages for the foreseeable future as well.

It's called Civil Elegies, named for a collection of poems authored by Torontonian Dennis Lee, some 40 years ago, long before he earned recognition among the younger set (and those who love them) for works like Alligator Pie.

Apparently, this show got its start a decade or so ago, when a young theatre artist named Mike Ross took a few of Lee's adult verses from Elegies and started noodling with them, setting them to music -- an effort he continued as he matured, relocated from his Prince Edward Island home to Toronto and became professionally involved with Soulpepper as a participant in its inaugural Academy program.

And it was at Soulpepper, not surprisingly, that his work with Lee's poems caught the attention of artistic director Albert Schultz, who teamed up with Ross and scenic artist Lorenzo Savoini to turn Lee's poems and Ross's tunes into an evening of theatre.

A pretty memorable evening of theatre too, based on Tuesday's opening at the Young Centre.

It begins as the lights come up on a derelict stage, littered with old set pieces and a baby grand piano, prominently placed.

As those lights come up, Ross, cast as the troubadour poet, makes a casual, somewhat harried entrance, juggling coffee and a jelly doughnut, both of which will play their part in the evening ahead.

He takes his place at the piano, juggles a few papers and begins to play.

For the next hour, not a word will come out of his mouth, either spoken or written, that was not authored by Lee.

But as he ranges through Lee's poems, riffing on everything from skyscrapers to the MacKenzie Rebellion to Tom Thomson, a sense of time and place begins to emerge.

This is Toronto in the mid-'60s -- a city at the centre of a country obsessed with the determination to redefine itself and chart a course for the future in a world that sees its people as little more than hewers of wood and drawers of water. Through Lee's poetry and his own music, Ross opens a magical window into Toronto's past and present (much of Elegies is framed by the then-new space that is Nathan Phillips Square and an ode to the ill-fated Spadina Expressway figures prominently), flirting with eerie prescience along the way.

As a singer, Ross draws more from passion than from any deep-rooted vocal technique, one suspects, and it is largely thanks to his diffident, winsome charm and his source material that his audience is able to overlook the unfortunate balance his sound engineer has struck between his amplified voice and the piano he plays.

Meanwhile Savoini's video projections fade in and out of the background, at times illuminating the poetry, as often underscoring it with such a heavy hand that one suspects this designer has absolutely no faith in the imagination of his audience. That suspicion is underscored, in fact, by the use of a live overhead projection that occasionally delights but more often feels -- with its all-but-illegible script on a too-small screen -- like it's been used simply because it was available, not because it adds depth and texture to the evening.

Happily, thanks to Lee's powerful verse and Ross' aforementioned charm, it is an evening that doesn't require much in the way of added depth and texture -- although with the current amplification, a bit of help with the diction wouldn't hurt.

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OBITUARY - 10 Dec 09

Shaw veteran Goldie Semple dies

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
10 Dec 09


The Canadian theatre world today mourns the passing of one of the Shaw Festival's most-beloved leading ladies, the elegant Goldie Semple.

Semple, 56, died yesterday after a long battle with cancer. She is survived by her husband of more than 30 years, Lorne Kennedy, also a veteran of the Shaw stage and by their daughter Madeline.

Semple recently completed her 17th season at the Shaw that saw her earn critical acclaim for her comic turns in multiple roles in Brief Encounters, the first three one-act plays in Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30 series, but fans of the Shaw Festival will also remember her in more serious fare as well, in everything from Sondheim's A Little Night Music to J.B. Priestley's Eden End.

At the Stratford Festival, earlier in her career, she proved her mettle in roles ranging from Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra through Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams' Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.

Funeral arrangements are not yet available.

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NEWS FEATURE - 9 Dec 09

DECADE ROUNDUP - TORONTO STAGE

By JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
9 Dec 09


It was the birth of a millennium, and theatre lovers were full of dreams.

Dreams that Toronto could continue to play a vibrant, vital role in the international commercial theatre community, despite Garth Drabinsky's fall from grace; that the fledgling Soulpepper Theatre Company would somehow become Toronto's version of Chicago's Steppenwolf Company; that vibrant productions of the work of William Shakespeare would once again be the cornerstone of the Stratford Festival, rather than the perfunctory affairs they had become.

Dreams that we would all somehow live long enough to see Canadian plays by Canadian playwrights at the Shaw Festival; that World Stage would not only thrive but survive in the absence of major sponsorship; that Toronto's precious but woefully undervalued chain of not-for-profit theatres would no longer be forced to careen from financial crisis to financial crisis.

And, finally, dreams that Toronto might finally build a home for the National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian Opera Company, surely two of our city's and our nation’s most precious cultural resources.

A decade later, some of those dreams have come true, others are in abeyance and a few have turned to nightmares.

We now know that Toronto’s vibrant, vital role in commercial theatre was actually little more than chimera built on grandiose dreams and creative book-keeping. And while the give-and-take between the Mirvish organization and Aubrey Dan's upstart Dancap Productions may not yield the fireworks (or the Tonys) that Livent gave us, the commercial sector seems to have found a model that works for all, that it might occasionally seem pretty dull, or in the case of The Lord Of The Rings, desperately over-reaching.

And thanks to the undiminished nerve and talent of Canadian theatre artists, shows such as The Drowsy Chaperone, BASH'd, Goodness and the like continue to prove there's an appetite out there for made-in-Canada quality.

Soulpepper, meanwhile, seems to have plateaued a trifle short of Steppenwolf's heights, as it gets comfortable in its new home — perhaps too comfortable? — while company's such as the Company Theatre, Theatrefront and Theatre 180 doggedly pursue that bigger, bolder vision.

As for Stratford, the retirement and untimely death of artistic director Richard Monette has had little positive effect on the quality of the Shakespeare produced on Stratford's stages, where the the quality of the Bard's work continues to slide under the part-time artistic direction of Des McAnuff.

The Shaw Festival has expanded its mandate to include, among other innovations, plays by Canadian authors.

World Stage survives in much-altered form, while an underfunded Nuit Blanche continues to whip Luminato's over-financed upstart butt in the battle to be Toronto's dominant arts festival.

Theatres in our not-for-profit sector continue to lurch from one financial crisis to the next, with balance sheets from Theatre Passe Muraille and Canadian Stage making it into the news most recently.

And they're not alone. The current financial downturn meant red ink last season for both the National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian Opera Company, despite the fine new home they’ve acquired on the corner of Queen and University — a home launched with Canada's first Ring cycle and one that, for many of us, will always be wonderfully haunted by the ghost of a proud, beaming Richard Bradshaw.

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THEATRE REVIEW - THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE - 6 Dec 09
Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Comedy out of the black into blood red

By JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
6 Dec 09


If black comedy were ever to be designated an Olympic sport, then Irish playwright Martin McDonagh would be the man to beat for the first gold medal.

There are, of course, hints of his dark vision in the film In Bruges -- but as Toronto theatre fans can tell you, one has to have a taste for things theatrical in order to explore the deepest reaches of McDonagh's stark and often hilarious vision.

But chances are, even those who have been lucky enough to catch local productions of The Beauty Queen of Leenan, The Lonesome West and The Pillowman might be surprised, indeed even shocked, at how much darker McDonagh's vision can be.

Just how deep is evident -- however faintly -- in the production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore which opened at the Berkeley Street Theatre Friday, in a production by Rep 21 Contemporary Theatre.

The second in McDonagh's Aran Islands trilogy -- preceded by The Cripple of Inishmaasn and followed by the not surprisingly as-yet-unproduced and unpublished The Banshees of Inisheer, Lieutenant recounts the disaster that befalls the island of title when a black cat is found dead on one of its quiet little byways.

The cat in question, however, is not just any cat, but rather the beloved pet of local lad Padraic (played by Matthew Krist ), a demented sort who has made a name for himself by running off and joining the struggle for an independent Ireland, where he has become an expert in torture, if not explosives.

Rather than tell his son that his beloved cat is dead, Padraic's drunken father (Tim Nicholson) simply says instead that the cat is ailing -- a little lie that nonetheless brings Padraic home posthaste, where he quickly discovers the deception his father has wrought.

Padraic's grief at the loss of his pet is, to say the very least, profound -- and driven mad by grief (not much of a drive at all, it must be admitted) he unleashes a bloodbath of horrifying proportions, showing the folks back home everything he's learned in his time away, while they, in turn, demonstrate that homegrown violence can have a bit of a kick too.

It's a disturbing look at the futile one-upmanship that violence represents -- and while this production, under the direction of Rod Carley, certainly gives one ample opportunity to see the bleak comedic potential in McDonagh's extreme bloodbath, it emerges finally as a strange sort of banquet of black comedy, set out behind a plate glass window -- one that can be seen, but sadly never tasted, thanks to a lacklustre production that, in the end, doesn't even demonstrate the gumption to be memorably bad.

Despite a game effort on the part of his largely inexperienced cast, Carley has put together a production that trips all over itself in its effort to amuse, impressively unmarked in any way by the realization that the only possible way to make this kind of theatre funny is to mine the pathos and the madness on which it is built, until we are forced to choose between laughter and tears.

For all its violence, the play's full tragedy could nonetheless be encapsulated in the character of the waif Mairead, but even here, under Carley's direction, Jennifer Matthies turns the character into a misplaced supermodel, failing to even live up to the way she's described in the script.

So, finally, instead of serving up a memorable tragi-comedy about people so immured in desperation and violence that they are, in the end, immune to its horrors, Carley and his cast serve up a community of demented leprechauns who can only be captured if you close one eye and make a wish that you were someplace else, watching a pot of gold that contained something more than a mess of iron pyrite like this.

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NEWS FEATURE - 5 Dec 09

Opera Atelier singing sad song

By JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
5 Dec 09


Add Opera Atelier to the list of arts organizations hit by the ongoing economic doldrums.

Despite a surge of 31% in its annual subscription base during the 2008/09 season and more than $1 million in fundraising revenue, Toronto's baroque opera company finished the past season with a loss of $68,072 on an operating budget of $2.3 million, it was announced this week.

In order to offset further losses, all senior managers with the company have taken a 3% minimum salary cut, although artist salaries are protected.

The current Opera Atelier season continues in April with an all-new production of The Marriage of Figaro, at the Elgin Theatre.

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THEATRE REVIEW: ROBIN HOOD: The EnvironMENTAL Family Musical
5 Dec 09 Rating: 4 out of 5

'Robin Hood' holiday musical merry

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
5 Dec 09


TORONTO - In a season when it's all too easy to get caught up in the excesses of gift-giving, it's best to remember that sometimes, less really is more.

Even if all you're doing is producing a Christmas panto.

In the wake of last year's delightfully muddled production of Cinderella, producer Ross Petty has assembled many of the same team members for this year's edition of his annual holiday entertainment, revving them up and setting them loose on the legend of Robin Hood, transforming it into Robin Hood: The EnvironMENTAL Family Musical ... That Targets Your Funnybone, which opened Thursday in the Elgin.

Which is good news for Petty's ever-expanding fan base -- that broad mix of the young and the young at heart for whom a festive season would not be complete without a super-sized portion of Petty's hi-test theatrical silliness.

Good news indeed-- but not great news, for in addition to re-assembling many of the elements from last year's hit, he's thrown a few new ones into the mix that, taken individually, might well add a lot of spice, but taken collectively, only serve to overwhelm the delicacy of the brew.

At its heart, of course, this remains a love story between the altruistic Robin Hood (played with loopy charm by Jeff Irving) and Maid Marian (singer Eva Avila).

He's the head of a gang of do-gooding cutpurses -- Jaz Sealey as L'il Sean John, We Will Rock You's Yvan Pedneault as Jacques le Rock and Scott Hurst as Friar Tuck -- known collectively as the Merry Men, while she is the ward of the evil Sheriff Of Nottingham (Petty, shedding last year's drag rags and morphing once again into the man all Toronto loves to hate for the holidays.)

But while those elements of the story are familiar, they all but disappear under the layering added by writer Chris Earle and director Ted Dykstra, who pile nonsense on top of silliness in a full-out pursuit of panto mayhem.

In their world, Maid Marian is an ecologist, determined to save Sherwood Forest -- a legacy from her late father -- from the horrors of clear-cutting, blissfully unaware that her beloved woodlot is home to Robin and his group of overgrown campfire boys.

Unaware, that is, until they rescue her and her love-starved nurse (Dan Chameroy reprising his over-the-top take on last year's Plumbum Von Botox), from an incident with a pair of liberated lumberjacks, employed to advance the evil designs of the Sheriff and his dementedly double-jointed deputy, played by Colin Heath.

All of which, one suspects, would be more than enough panto for most plates, especially as it includes the obligatory romp through the entire canon of popular music to showcase the wide range of vocal talent assembled.

But no, they keep piling it on, borrowing heavily from not only the headlines but from Shakespeare as well.

All this proves a lot to pack into one evening and though director Dykstra and choreographer Tracey Flye do their level best to keep things on track, it is an evening that teeters constantly on the edge of excess -- in the world of panto, an admittedly strange place to be.

Finally, they further impede themselves by keeping Petty in the wings for far too long before unleashing him on an audience that is clearly on board to cut loose and join the fun.

After all these years, they should know that if they want to pack us aboard the panto train, Petty's villain is just the ticket to get us to ride.

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THEATRE REVIEW: PARFUMERIE - 4 Dec 09 Rating: 4 out of 5

Romantic scent of Parfumerie

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
4 Dec 09


TORONTO - There's something in this story -- call it a lingering scent of romance -- that makes it truly timeless, in it's way.

Which accounts, in no small part, for the fact that people have been rediscovering, resurrecting and/or retelling and re-inventing Parfumerie since it first premiered in Budapest, circa 1937.

Happily, after spawning a clutch of Hollywood movies -- the latest being You've Got Mail -- Hungarian Miklos Laszlo's lovely little tale has now made its way back to the stage, just in time for Christmas.

Parfumerie opened at the Young Centre Wednesday in a new English language translation/adaptation from Adam Pettle and Brenda Robins, produced under the Soulpepper banner.

It is a production that has much to recommend it.

Principal amongst its strengths, of course, is the love story at its heart -- the same love story told and retold in movies like The Shop Around the Corner, In the Good Old Summer Time, and She Loves Me.

Set in an upscale notions shop in Budapest in the days before the Second World War, Parfumerie is primarily the story of a pair of all but invisible social misfits -- both employed in the shop where the story is set -- who carry on a smoldering professional feud, even while they are falling madly in love in an ongoing but anonymous correspondence that anchors the story firmly both in time and place.

Oliver Dennis and Patricia Fagan are almost perfectly cast as George and Rosie, the romantic antagonists at the heart of the tale, and despite the obvious disparity in their ages, they are almost letter perfect, meeting both the demands of pathos and comedy placed on them by the convoluted relationship in which they find themselves.

Meanwhile, life swirls on around them, both the life that is the interior world of the upscale shop in which they are employed, beautifully rendered in an art nouveau jewel box designed by Ken MacDonald, and outside it.

As fellow employees in the shop owned by the venerable Mr. Hammerschmidt (Joseph Zeigler), Maev Beatty, adaptor Robbins, Michael Simpson, a villainous Kevin Bundy and Jeff Lillico all do some fine work, although Lillico doesn't so much slip into wretched excess in the second act as dive into it headfirst and then splash around doing the goose step for good measure.

Meanwhile, William Webster, Stacey Bulmer, Miranda Mulholland, Noah Reid and Kristina Uranowski do an equally fine job of bringing the broader world that exists beyond the shop's revolving door to life, playing police officers and detectives and middle-class shoppers caught up in a pre-Christmas frenzy.

But while MacDonald's set does a bang-up job of capturing time and place to perfection, director Morris Panych fails to plumb the rich vein of hidebound Hapsburg haughtiness running through the tale, imposing on it instead a sense of brash North American bonhomie that one would have considered nothing short of vulgar in the city and the era in which this play is set. While Hammerschmidt's staff may indeed be a family of sorts, they are a family more along rigid Victorian lines than the sitcom model Panych imposes.

There are hints of the rigid Austro-Hungarian class system and the fierce pride of position in the performances of Ziegler -- as a betrayed husband -- and Simpson as the his long-serving clerk, and from Robbins, too, in a lovely little supporting turn -- but they are all but lost in a directoral vision that fails to recognize the societal changes that have been wrought on both sides of the ocean in the past 70 years.

Happily, there's enough heart, both in Laszlo's timeless tale and this skilled and committed cast that Parfumerie still comes out smelling like a winner.

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NEWS FEATURE - 3 Dec 09

Theatre opts out of co-production

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
3 Dec 09

It's official.

The Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company has opted out of it's previously announced co-production with Theatre Passe Muraille of Julie Tepperman's Yichud (Seclusion), slated to take to the TPM mainstage in February.

In it's place, HGJCT has programmed Michael Nathanson's Talk, a finalist in the competition for 2009 Governor General's Literary Awards for Drama.

Talk, directed by Ted Dykstra, will open in the Jane Mallet Theatre on March 4.

Meanwhile, TPM will proceed on their own with the production of Yichud (Seclusion) although according to HGJTC co-artistic directors Avery Saltzman and David Eisner, their company has "made a financial commitment to ensure that Yichud will be experienced by Toronto audiences."

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THEATRE REVIEW: ORSON'S SHADOW - 3 Dec 09 Rating: 2 out of 5

Orson Welles play fails to inspire

By JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
3 Dec 09


TORONTO - Talk about casting a lo-o-o-ng Shadow.

At first blush, Pilot Group Theatre's presentation of Orson's Shadow, currently playing the Theatre Passe Muraille mainstage (where it opened Tuesday), seems like one of those interminably talky plays that, given one or two productions, succeed only in boring an audience to distraction and giving theatre a black eye in the process.

But make your way past the too-often flawed casting and the leaden, uninspired direction of Rona Waddington, and you'll discover that, in playing fast and loose with the lives of the late and great, playwright Austin Pendleton has in fact written quite an entertaining and theatrical little essay on the often crippling nature of genius.

The genius in question is the kind of genius displayed, at various points in their careers, by a menagerie of stage and screen legends in the first half of the 20th century.

First and foremost, of course, there is the late Orson Welles, the man who, for many, moved American cinema into auteur territory, a man whose career seemingly peaked when he was 26 with the making of Citizen Kane and then went steadily downhill from there for several decades.

In Pendleton's tale, based loosely on fact, Welles, played with satisfying hubris and vulnerable bombast by Steve Ross, is recruited by critic Kenneth Tynan (Christopher Stanton) to direct the legendary Laurence Olivier (Paul Eves) in a production of Eugene Ionesco's absurdist Rhinoceros for Britain's fledgling National Theatre.

As Pendleton tells it, this does not, when it comes to fruition, result in a meeting of great minds, but rather a titanic clash of greatly damaged egos as each man looks to validate his own genius by subsuming the others'.

Nowhere near the bottom of the slide in his post-Kane career, Ross's Welles is desperate to make a success of the production he hopes will not only contribute to getting his life's work on Othello made, but garner a new and more appreciative audience for his adaptation of Falstaff as well.

Eves' Olivier is no less desperate. His marriage to a deeply troubled Vivien Leigh at an end, his best stage work supposedly behind him and his new relationship with Joan Plowright (Janet Porter) on seemingly shaky ground, he's determined to re-invent himself, even while he's afraid to let go of the past.

Faced with a recipe for a rich and meaty dramatic character stew, Waddington allows her cast to serve up a thin gruel of impersonation instead, seemingly blissfully unaware that good theatre is as much about good reacting as it is about good acting -- and frankly, both commodities are in short supply here.

Virtually unanchored in either time or place, except for the playwright's exposition -- no costume or set design credit is given, so no blame can be assigned -- Orson's Shadow keeps constantly tripping over caricatures when the work demands three-dimensional character work of the highest order.

While Ross gives us a Welles we can often believe in, Eve's Olivier is so riddled with tics he risks unleashing an epidemic of Lyme Disease on his audience, which could, at the very least, put paid to Stanton's fresh-faced Tynan before the emphysema he tries to suffer from can progress much further.

Scott's Leigh, teetering on the edge of madness, and Porter's Plowright, clinging resolutely to sanity, fare only slightly better in this leaden production, undone by a director who seems determined to take the golden nuggets of wit the playwright has scattered throughout the script and convert them into theatrical dross as qucikly as possible.

In that, at least, she succeeds. The measure of her success is in just how long a shadow Orson's Shadow seems to cast.

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FEATURE INTERVIEW - 2 Dec 09

Glenn Gould archive good as gold

By JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
2 Dec 09

When filmmakers Peter Raymont and Michele Hozer set out to make a film about Canadian musical legend Glenn Gould, they very quickly ran up against a major problem -- one every filmmaker should have.

"It was a very difficult film to make because there is such a wealth of material," Raymont recalls, taking a breather as the two of them rush to get a final print of Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould ready for screening at last fall's edition of the Toronto International Film Festival.

"It's an embarrassment of riches."

Much of that embarrassment of riches can be attributed directly to Gould's genius -- not just his musical genius, but a heretofore largely unexplored genius for exploiting the media.

"He was very skilled at using the media. He really understood the media and how to use it. He was ahead of his time," Raymont says.

Happily, he was also ready to claim centre stage during what many have come to recognize as the golden days of the CBC, and that didn't hurt a burgeoning artist like Gould either -- or his career, according to Raymont.

As a rising star and a Canadian, Gould fascinated folks at the CBC -- and small wonder.

"He was hip, he was sexy, he was articulate, he was accessible," Raymont points out.

And because he was all those things, they gave him plenty of exposure and turned him into a homegrown star.

"It was the CBC who gave him that," Raymont points out, adding that times have changed for the CBC. "Many people who knew Gould say that Gould today would not exist."

But the fact that Gould and the CBC came of age together has left a legacy of Gould material in the CBC archives that is only beginning to be tapped -- some of it showcased, in fact, in Genius Within.

That is, however, merely the tip of the iceberg, Raymont suggests.

"I'm sure, five or ten years from now, someone will make a film about Glenn Gould filled with stuff that has never been seen before. There's that much depth (in those archives)."

In addition to his music, Gould is also remembered for the weird little tics that set him apart -- the gloves, the chair, a host of idiosyncrasies, some infuriating, others endearing.

"Some of them were affectation, for sure," Raymont concedes. "He used it to promote himself and the music he was playing."

But it wasn't all affectation.

"When you see him as that young, fresh guy, he's a different person altogether -- perhaps the drugs changed him," Raymont says, adding with a shrug, "there's a lot of burdens that go into being a genius."

All of which makes for an interesting movie, albeit a strange bedfellow for the team that brought us the award-winning Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire, which Raymont directed and Hozer edited.

"It may seem like a leap, but it's not as big a leap as one might imagine," Raymont insists.

"They are both fascinating men whose lives were full of crisis and struggle. They were both extraordinarily important Canadians in their own way -- both very articulate, both icons, and in both cases, the films humanize these people -- get inside all the hype about them."

Nor was it a big leap for Hozer to move from the role of editor to that of co-director, at least not by Raymont's lights.

"She's an editor and she's edited many, many films. This is her first time as a director, yes, but she almost deserved being called a director many times before," he insists. "It's been a very good collaboration."

And in documentary filmmaking, collaboration is paramount, he continues.

"It would have been impossible for me to do this all by myself, and I wouldn't have wanted to. I really enjoy collaboration."


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