THEATRE REVIEW - VIRTUOSITY - 7 Jan '10 Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Virtuosity turns out to be an empty threat

John Coulbourn - QMI Agency
7 Jan '10

The Bluma Appel Theatre
Starring: The ensemble
Director: Vivian Reed

Like promises, threats aren’t worth a hill of beans unless there’s a bit of follow through involved.

And while the publicity for Virtuosity: A Celebration of Song and Dance boasts that all of its performers are triple threats, the show itself gives the assembled cast but scant opportunity to prove it.

The brainchild of Vivian Reed, whose two Tony nominations were scored back in the last century, Virtuousity opened a blessedly limited run Tuesday in its world premiere on the stage of the Bluma Appel Theatre.

Now, for those of you who took a pass on the CBC series Triple Sensation, a triple threat, theatrically speaking, is not rooted in some sort of arcane mob mythology but rather simply a term used to define a performer who is equally adept at singing, dancing and acting and can therefore meet the performance demands of virtually anything that might be thrown at them. And the problem here is not so much in how Carleigh Bettiol, Angela Brydon, Austin Owen, Destan Owens and Jay Staten handle what Reed and her collaborators throw at them but rather in what it is that is thrown — a sad-ass collection of mostly forgettable songs, rendered even more lacklustre by the musical arrangements, the choreography, the costuming and the staging with which they are embroidered.

And the worst of these is, quite frankly, the staging.

For, while Reggie Ray’s costumes (featuring an overabundance of sleepwear) and Michael Carnahan’s sets (rudimentary geometry gone bizarrely awry) might be masked by better showings from the combined choreographic team of Leslie Dockery, Keisa Parrish and Roumel Reaux (much of whose works would be right at home at Filmore’s) and the musical arrangements of musical director Atsushi Tokuya, nothing can disguise the deficiencies in Reed’s staging.

In her theatrical world, it seems, Virtuousity’s every song, whether it be her own rendition of Verdi’s Pace, Pace Mio Dio through to the staging of her own compositions like I Love Him Still, demands to be cocooned within a vignette that gives the performer a completely unneccessary licence to sing and dance. A true triple threat — think Brent Carver, Chilina Kennedy, Louise Pitre or even the late Bea Arthur — creates reason to sing, dance and act simply by opening his or her mouth.

Happily, there are occasional numbers that survive Reed’s misdirected ministrations — her own rather overwrought performance of Billie Holiday’s God Bless the Child and an anthemic rendition of another overwrought Reed composition titled Woman — but for the most part, they run the gamut from the banal to the outright ridiculous, from the trite barfly take on There’s More to Makin’ Love through the bizarrely bedazzled hounds of hell unleashed during the misguided Pace, Pace.

Virtuosity lacks even the virtue of being truly bad — proving conclusively that even with a range of singing, acting and dancing talent, nothing trumps utterly forgettable.

So in the end the most threatening thing about Virtuousity is the boredom that constantly threatens to overwhelm the show at nearly every turn, all of which means that, at the very least, there should be no problems at the border when these threats head home to roost and embark on the American leg of their tour.