THEATRE REVIEW: GRIMM TOO
25 Feb'10

‘Grimm Too' a delight

JOHN COULBOURN -QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

They’re still trapped in a library, it seems — and things are looking mighty Grimm.

After running happily amok through a not-always-likely theatrical bibliography that includes the works of such diverse artists as Dante, Boccaccio and Anton Chekhov, the artists of Theatre Smith-Gilmour have finally alighted, almost inevitably it seems, in the works of the Brothers Grimm.

That’s alighted, as opposed to come to rest, for as usual, once they’ve set foot in a comfortable literary canon, these folks lose little time in making theatrical hay out of it. Happily, a rich vein of theatricality runs through most of the works of the Grimm fraternals, even the lesser known works explored in GRIMM TOO, Smith-Gilmour’s latest theatrical offering, which opened at the Factory’s Studio Theatre on Tuesday.

Created by Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour, who also co-direct, GRIMM TOO is a work for five performers, with Adam Paolozza, Dan Watson and Pragna Desai joining Smith and Gilmour to bring the stories to life in the company’s inimitable clown tradition. And such stories, sufficiently far removed from the Grimm brothers’ more well-known fare including Sleeping Beauty and The Princess and The Frog, have been reduced by evening’s end to mere child’s play.

In the array of stories that this quintet enliven in the course of 100 minutes, there are few indeed that end anywhere close to happily-ever-after territory. Instead, these are short, often brutal tales that still have the soil of tradition clinging to their roots, held there as often as not by the blood, sweat and tears of the very people who put the ‘folk’ in folk tales.

Nor is there a fairy in sight, although a few archangels, a hungry frog, a wise old dog and a boy who is half hedgehog do put in episodic appearances to delight their audience.

It’s all presented in what has become the patented Smith-Gilmour style — in which the physical vocabulary of life plays an even more important role than the spoken, a style that often envelops entire chapters in a single gesture of low-key theatricality.

And this is a cast rich in both components of the Smith-Gilmour vocabulary, which means that while the two principals in the company shoulder much of the heavy-lifting in this evening of tale-telling, each of their very talented co-conspirators gets a chance to shine as well.

So Smith’s comic genius — a rather horrific vignette about a mother and her dead daughter — is close to a perfect showcase, while Gilmour’s loopy charm as the evening’s narrator and an archangel hanging a moon are not so much offset by the skills of their castmates as bolstered by them. Watson shines as a boy and his frog, Paolozza gets spiky as the hedgehog boy and Desai runs a delightful gamut between the bearded lady and a princess in distress.

Throughout, things are improved by the simple elegance of Julia Tribe’s set and costume designs, and the equally understated elegance of Kimberley Purtell’s lighting.

For all of its considerable charm, however, this is an evening that possibly might have been a whole lot more if it had contented itself with being a little bit less. Even with the talents of this delightful quintet to back things up, it is ultimately impossible to transform this series of delectable appetizers into a full-scale theatrical banquet. And for all its demonstrated delight with the product, it seemed many in the audience were ready to leave the theatre about 10 minutes before the artists were ready to surrender the stage — a bit of grim reality intruding on Grimm reality.