THEATRE REVIEW: DOUBLE BILL: (Re)Birth: E.E. CUMMINGS IN SONG
& WINDOW ON TORONTO
10 MAY/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

TORONTO - There’s an unquestionable element of children run delightfully amok in a candy store in (re)Birth: E.E. CUMMINGS IN SONG, one half of a new Soulpepper double bill that opened at the Young Centre Monday. And frankly, it fits the work like a tailor-made Spanx, Cummings having been a poet deadly serious about maintaining a strong tie with his inner child.

Indeed, it may have been that element of innocence that appealed to the members of the Soulpepper Academy a few years back and led them to build an entire one-act show around the late great American poet’s work. Then again, it might simply have the inspired musicality inherent in Cummings’ work — a musicality mined, then enriched by a strong 10-member cast under the tutelage of Mike Ross, Soulpepper’s resident music director, who also appears in the show. Ins Choi, Tatjana Corniji, Trish Lindstrom, Ken MacKenzie, Abena Malika, Gregory Prest, Karen Rae, Jason Patrick Rothery and Brendan Wall round out the cast.

Together, they take an entire spring bouquet of Cummings’ irrepressible poetry — I Like My Body When It’s With Your, Anyone Lived in a Pretty Town and Nobody Loses All the Time, to name a few — and tunefully transpose them for the stage, informed by styles that range from torch to twang, with plenty of other musical influences thrown in for good measure. Musically, this appears to be a gifted class, and Ross capitalizes on it, showcasing performers who clearly know their way around pianos, accordions, fiddles and double-bass, backed up by a wide range of found instruments that include everything from scrub-brushes to suitcases, penny-whistles to squeegee frogs, wielded with enthusiasm and considerable skill.

While Ross clearly provided the musical direction — no program credit required really, as one has only to watch his face throughout to know from where the music has sprung — no other direction is credited.  And while the cast has often struck pure gold by marrying childish innocence with a darker sense of adult knowingness, all of it underscored by MacKenzie’s quite delightful set and costume designs, one can’t help but feel that, in the end, a strong directorial hand on the tiller would lend a bit of bite to this delightful little theatrical amuse-bouche.

In the second half of the program, titled WINDOW ON TORONTO, many of the same performers are featured — joined by André Sills but now sans Ross and Malika — and a director’s hand is obvious, right from the top of the show. As water pours down the window of title, in fact, it sends a certain signal to all familiar with his work that Laszlo Marton is back in town. The window of title is, by way of explanation, the service window of a hot dog truck parked on the edges of Nathan Phillips Square.

From an inside perspective, courtesy once more of MacKenzie’s design, the audience is invited to watch an entire year of business compressed into less than an hour. It is inarguably a rich canvas for the talents of this ensemble as they create and fire off characters with the speed of an AK47, slowing things down only occasionally for Hallmark moments designed, it seems, to fool us into thinking this is more than merely a sustained and ultimately overworked sketch that flirts dangerously and pointlessly with tastelessness and repetitiveness.

Still, if you’re one of those people whose theatrical tastes run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous — slick, even polished cabaret to overworked and overlong Saturday Night Live sketches — then this double bill might be just the ticket. In fact, it’s likely to have you Cummings and going.