THEATRE NEWS: Kim Cattrall a Mirvish highlight
8 JAN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency

David Mirvish has surrounded himself with old friends and new, in the 2011-12 subscription season he announced Tuesday at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

The season opens with the Toronto production of THE RAILWAY CHILDREN, announced last month. Slated to open in a purpose-built tent at the foot of the CN Tower in early May, it is adapted from the works of Edith Nesbit and features a Canadian cast headed by Natasha Greenblatt that also includes Emma Campbell, John Gilbert, Richard Sheridan Willis and Kate Besworth.

Next, in September, Mirvish throws open the Royal Alexandra to welcome expatriate Canuck Kim Cattrall back to Toronto, in an acclaimed West End revival of Noel Coward’s PRIVATE LIVES, directed by Richard Eyre. Cattrall was present at Tuesday’s announcement. For her part, she said she is particularly thrilled to bring her Broadway-bound production to a stage that holds some very special memories for her. “In the ’70’s,” she said of the days when she called Toronto home, “I remember seeing NO MAN'S LAND, with John Gielgud — Sir John Gielgud — and Ralph Richardson here.”

While Catrall holds court at the Alex, another bundle from Britain will take to the stage of the Princess of Wales Theatre, taking the long way ’round to London’s West End and giving Torontonians an early glimpse of Craig Revel Horwood’s acclaimed staging of CHESS, THE MUSICAL, with music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and lyrics by Tim Rice. Producer Michael Harrison insists that Horwood has done the famously unstageable musical about chess, politics and life more than proud, perhaps even living up to expectations created by the late Michael Bennett, who was hard at work on the project when he succumbed to AIDS. “I think Craig is the closest you will ever get to Michael Bennett,” Harrison said. “(He’s) attacked CHESS with the choreographic aspect in mind, and he’s cracked it. He’s taken it to a fantasy world. There’s nothing real in it. Tim (Rice) says he’s made it more like an opera.”

CHESS will head back to London in time to surrender the POW stage to the hit Broadway musical MARY POPPINS, in its Canadian première in a run that will extend through Christmas. Mirvish kicks off 2012 with a Toronto première of BLUE DRAGON, at the Alex — yet another work from Canadian theatrical wiz Robert Lepage. Written in collaboration with Marie Michaud and directed by Lepage, it is a sequel to their DRAGON trilogy.

Meanwhile, at the POW, an all-Canadian cast will be prepping for the Canadian première of an open-ended run of WAR HORSE, a visually arresting piece of theatre from Britain’s National Theatre, adapted from the Michael Morpurgo novel by Nick Stafford. It features the artistry of South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, under the direction of Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris. To close the season, Mirvish welcomes the Broadway company of HAIR to the stage of the Royal Alex, where the musical once played for a then record-breaking 53 weeks and launched the Mirvish theatrical enterprise. “HAIR was our first great success,” Mirvish said of that 1969 production. “To be able to bring a successful production back — it’s exciting.”

Subscription packages for all seven shows are on sale starting at $125.

But wait. When it comes to David Mirvish and theatre, there’s always more — and a subscription is really only the beginning. Mirvish subscribers will also have access, at a special price, to other Mirvish productions gracing Toronto stages over the next year. This year’s bonus shows include the Panasonic runs of GHOST STORIES — a West End phenom by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, slated to open in April of this year — as well as a reprise of the made-in-Toronto hit 2 PIANOS, 4 HANDS, featuring creators Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt in what is being billed as a farewell performance. It opens in late October. In addition to the previously announced run of GOOD MOURNING MRS. BROWN at the Princess of Wales in March, Mirvish will also host Kathryn Greenwood, Robin Duke, Jayne Eastwood and Teresa Pavlinek in WOMEN FULLY CLOTHED: OLDER & HOTTER for a limited June run at the Alex.

Mirvish subscribers are eligible, too, for discounts on a wide range of previously announced shows at the Sony Centre.

DANCE NEWS: NBOC's diamond season to shine
7 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency

To celebrate the National Ballet of Canada’s diamond anniversary season, artistic director Karen Kain is polishing off some of the company’s heirloom jewels, resetting others and adding a few new brilliants, just for good measure.

The NBOC 2011-12 season announced by Kain Monday will kick off with the world première of a spanking new production of ROMEO AND JULIET, choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, designed by Richard Hudson and set to the enduring score of Sergei Prokofiev. It will replace the beloved John Cranko version which has enchanted audiences for 46 years. The new edition will play for 14 performances in November.

Following the annual Christmas presentation of THE NUTCRACKER in December, the ballet’s winter season launches in late February, 2012, and will include three full-length ballets — Sir Frederick Ashton’s LA FILLE MAL GARDÉE and John Neumeier’s THE SEAGULL, bracketing a run of Rudolf Nureyev’s THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, a work that figures prominently in both the company’s history and Kain's own.

Much of Kain’s international reputation as a prima ballerina is woven around Nureyev’s classic work and it was Kain who, as artistic director, oversaw the work’s refurbishment and restoration for the move to the Four Seasons Centre in 2006, ensuring that it can still be enjoyed in its original splendour.

The 2012 summer season kicks off in early June, with the North American première of Kevin O’Day’s HAMLET, a work which premièred at the Stuttgart Ballet in 2008. Set to music by John King, it will feature set and costume design by Tatyana van Walsum. The summer season concludes with an evening of mixed programming, comprised of Wayne McGregor’s CHROMA, which premièred with the company to great acclaim in 2010, teamed with Maurice Béjart’s enduring SONG OF A WAYFARER and Kenneth MacMillan’s celebrated ÉLITE SYNCOPATIONS.

Kain also announced that the company will undertake a tour of Western Canada this fall, performing William Forsyth’s 'the second detail', Jerome Robbins’ OTHER DANCES and Crystal Pite’s EMERGENCE for audiences in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria and Winnipeg. A jaunt to Ottawa featuring the same program is planned for spring 2012.

Kain also spoke of the late prima ballerina Lois Smith, who passed away in late January, and her importance to the company and the world of dance. Calling Smith “a beautiful, unique talent,” Kain announced that the first performance of the upcoming run of DON QUIXOTE, opening at the Four Seasons Centre March 9, will be dedicated to Smith’s memory.

OPERA REVIEW: NIXON IN CHINA
7 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

Wags of the time no doubt dismissed it as just another bull in a China shop story — but almost 40 years later, we look back at Richard Nixon's historic visit to China and are forced to conclude: Some bull. Some China shop.

And even while it began what has been a long slow thaw in relations between an isolated Communist China and the west, that visit also struck a few sympathetic chords in the world of opera, where spectacle plays as important a role as it does in politics. It started small, with the Houston Opera's 1987 première of a new work by composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman, titled NIXON IN CHINA. It documented, in highly theatrical form, the details of that ground breaking meeting between east and west, and the emotions that ran through it.

And something about it — nostalgia for what, in its time, was almost blanket news coverage, a growing taste for the rhythmic, repetitious work of iconic composers like Stravinsky and Glass or even an abiding love of the grand gesture — caught the collective imagination of a continent.

New productions have been popping up ever since. The latest of which is, almost coincidental with an opening at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a  production that opened in Toronto under the aegis of the Canadian Opera Company at the Four Season's Centre Saturday, a co-production of several American opera companies. Directed by James Robinson, it's a pretty slick affair, featuring an often impressive set design by Allen Moyer, incorporating actual film footage shot during the visit, blended with an often impressive live cast, all of them treading (not always gracefully) a very fine line between character and caricature.

With baritone Robert Orth cast as Nixon and soprano Maria Kanyova as his wife Pat, the American contingent is rounded out by bass-baritone Thomas Hammons as a buffoonish Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, on the Sino side, tenor Adrian Thompson is an aging Mao Tse-tung,  soprano Marisol Montalvo is his fiery wife Chiang Ch'ing and baritone Chen-Ye Yuan essays a dignified, even noble Chou En-Lai.

In an almost dreamlike way, it tells the story of mortals caught up in events they only suspect are far larger than themselves, and, overall, it makes for a biting, often funny meta-theatrical commentary on the flawed personalities involved. Which is not to say it doesn't have its touching moments. As Pat Nixon comes face to face with a world beyond her ken and conquers it by force of will, we feel the tectonic plates of two nations slowly shift.

But while this staging does a fine job of capturing nostalgic elements, thanks to a good dozen or more TV screens, echoing the way the visit was watched by most of this hemisphere, there are major missteps. While much is made of the fact that footage shot during the actual visit is being used, don't expect to see a lot of it, for sadly, these screens never come together to present a single picture large enough to be seen at the back of the hall. It's grand spectacle with much of the spectacle underplayed.

And while Pablo Heras-Casado impresses in his company debut at the helm of the COC Orchestra, he fails to modulate his hardworking musicians as they labour through what proves to be a powerfully filmic score, to allow the singing to be heard. Even though it is sung in English, surtitles tell too much of this tale.

But, for all its flaws, in its blending of the very modern — conventional melody is an elusive commodity here — with some grand traditions — an extended ballet sequence takes on an opera buffo tone in its staging — it proves opera is far more than museum art.

THEATRE REVIEW: OLEANNA
4 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

If you’ve ever suspected that playwright David Mamet stacked the deck a bit when he created the power structure in OLEANNA, his controversial 1992 drama, you’re not alone. In his often bloody-minded dissection of the relationship between a self-satisfied university professor and a troubled young female student, Mamet doesn’t seem too concerned with fairness in a world where people eschew talking to each other in favour of talking at each other.

That said, one wonders just how Mamet himself might react to the production of OLEANNA that opened at the Young Centre Thursday under the Soulpepper umbrella. It is a production in which the director tips the scales so heavily that he all but destroys any illusion, however fleeting, that Mamet might have tried to create a level playing field on which to stage what is clearly an evisceration of gender politics.

For the uninitiated, OLEANNA encompasses three encounters between John, a smug and self-satisfied university professor, and a student named Carol, a wallflower who turns out to be a meat-eating venus flytrap in the course of the two-hour play. All three encounters take place in John’s office, beginning with a post-class session in which a tongue-tied and seemingly terrified Carol (played by Sarah Wilson) tries mightily to convey her academic ineptness to John (Diego Matamoros), who seems clearly more concerned with the house he and his wife are buying to celebrate his newly-achieved tenure, than with the problems of this mousey little student who can’t grasp anything he says. Still, something about Carol’s dilemma strikes a chord. He tries, in his self-absorbed fashion, to help her find her way.

In their next encounter, John is dealing with the shock of finding himself charged with professional and sexual malfeasance in his dealings with Carol, who has come to his office at his request to discuss the complaint she has made to the school powers — a complaint that threatens John’s hard-won and suddenly precious chance at tenure.

In the third, John’s smug world has been reduced to rubble, but a victorious and suddenly empowered Carol overplays her hand to such a degree that the play ends in disaster for both of them.

Director Laszlo Marton approaches the work with a heavy hand, reducing all of John’s sins to minor misdemeanors, while playing up all of Carol’s faults until they become cardinal sins, tipping the scales of sympathy so far in John’s favour in the process that even Carol’s most valid complaints seem ridiculous. Tragically, an out-of-her-depth Wilson furthers Marton’s vision, making Carol appear little more than a mouthpiece for dark and malevolent forces, instead of a full participant in the tale.

Not content with placing a heavy thumb on the emotional scales of Mamet’s work, Marton further muddies the waters with a set, designed by Teresa Przybylski, that is as visually skewed as the vision behind this staging. Worse, when Marton tries to incorporate it into the action of the play in the third act, it takes so long to establish that it is more than merely a malfunction of a flimsy set - it removes you from the play.

In truth, OLEANNA has long been seen as a bit of a rigged fight from the get-go, but in this staging Marton et al reduce it to the level of professional wrestling, replete with hot-button stereotypes of good men and evil women. In the end, Marton seems to have abandoned the conventional role of the director as an interpreter of the work and cast himself as judge of the characters. And while his decision may make for easier answers for the theatre-going public, it certainly doesn’t make for more interesting theatre.

OPERA NEWS: Opera Atelier heading for Glimmerglass
4 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency

Opera Atelier is heading south — but only for awhile. In announcing the company's 2011-12 season, Toronto's baroque opera company revealed that, for the second production of their new season, they will team up with the folks at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival to co-produce a reprise of their production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's ARMIDE.

First mounted by OA to mark their 20th anniversary season in 2005, the remount will once again feature tenor Colin Ainsworth as Renaud, with soprano Peggy Kriha Dye stepping into the title role and bass Joao Fernandes tackling the role of Hidroat, all under the direction of artistic director Marshall Pynkoski. After an April 2012 run at the Elgin, ARMIDE will play at the Glimmerglass Festival in New York state through July and August of 2012.

To launch its 2011-12 season, OA will kick off with a revival of their acclaimed production of Mozart's DON GIOVANNI, featuring baritone Phillip Addis in the title role, slated to run at the Elgin from Oct. 29.

THEATRE REVIEW: THE BIG LEAGUE
3 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Considering the number of times we’ve had to endure heartfelt renditions of the whole hockey-as-a-metaphor-for-Canadian-life scenario — as served up by Don Cherry and his ilk — it’s surprisingly refreshing, even liberating, to find the metaphor kicking back. At least, in a theatre-as-metaphor-for-life kind of way.

The name of the play is THE BIG LEAGUE and, six years after it premièred in Manitoba, it finally got around to making its Toronto debut Thursday in a Lorraine Kimsa Theatre For Young People production on the mainstage of the Front Street space. Written by James Durham and given an ebullient production by director Mary Ellen MacLean, THE BIG LEAGUE tells the story of one boy’s experience with what many consider to be Canada’s national sport — but it’s an experience with which a lot of young boys and an increasing number of young girls will no doubt identify for all that.

Like a lot of Canadian kids, young Tommy, played by Simon Rainville, was introduced to skating at age three, and to hockey about 30 seconds later, by his adoring father (Mark McGrinder), who clearly loves the sport just about as much as he loves his quickly hockey-mad son And for years, father and son have shared a growing passion for the sport — but by the time the play opens, and Tommy is about to try out for the local AAA Peewee team, something about their shared passion has gone horribly awry. Tommy, for his part, still loves the game and enjoys playing it with his friend Deke (Matt Bois), but he is becoming increasingly un-nerved by his father’s off-ice interference.

And with the competition high for a berth with the team, both father and son are feeling the increased pressure — and the tension soon spills over not just into Tommy’s friendship with Deke, but also into the friendship the two boys have formed with Bobby, a girl whose goal is to stop goals (played by Tamila Zaslavsky). When dear old Dad starts pressuring Tommy to play hockey in a way his son knows is wrong, the burgeoning hockey star considers giving up the sport and a reckoning ensues.

Played out entirely on inline skates, THE BIG LEAGUE is structured not unlike a hockey game, with three periods, ending with sudden death overtime — actually, in what proves to be MacLean’s only really bad call in an otherwise strong production, it might be more appropriately called lingering death overtime, but we digress.

The setting, fittingly enough, is a pretty fair emulation of a hockey rink, created by designer Jung-Hye Kim and MacLean and her team use it like the pros they are. And in addition to some pretty impressive blade work by the whole team, Bois and McGrinder even buddy up to do a good-hearted send-up of Coach’s Corner, starring Ron McKleen and Don Berry respectively, that even includes a guest appearance by Blue Berry, for good measure.

Nestled somewhere in the crease between homage and send-up, THE BIG LEAGUE succeeds nonetheless, in being squirmingly good in its evocation of a loving parent who nonetheless allows his own passion and ambition to colour the way he sees his child — which makes it a whole lot easier to swallow an ending that is simply too pat for prime-time.

In the end, it’s hard to say which places the greatest strain on credulity — the ease with which McGrinder’s pushy Pater is redeemed and reconstructed, or the notion that a whole lot of hockey dads are going to take their kids to see a play about hockey in the middle of winter. Two minutes for high expectations.

THEATRE NEWS: The importance of being too successful

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
2 FEB/11

With the extension of his Broadway production of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, Brian Bedford has fallen victim to his own success and been forced to withdraw as director of this summer’s production of THE MISANTHROPE at the Stratford Festival. Although Bedford will star in the production, as previously announced, the work will now be directed by David Grindley, who last directed on the Festival stage in 2009, when he helmed A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

WINTER IN SUMMER
While they’re still playing the rest of their 2011-12 season close to their vests with an announcement expected later this month, the folks at Canadian Stage have announced that William Shakespeare’s THE WINTER'S TALE will be the play featured in their annual Dream In High Park next summer. Slated to begin performances June 28, this summer’s offering will be directed by Estelle Shook.

JAPANESE STAGE ON FILM
Unlike sushi and a few other Japanese exports, kabuki doesn’t play a large role on Toronto menus — or, more appropriately perhaps, on Toronto playbills. For those with a taste for the highly-stylized 400-year-old classical Japanese brand of theatre, things will be looking up this weekend, at least in the world of celluloid.

On Saturday, the Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond St. W.) will play host to the Canadian première of HERON MAIDEN at 1 p.m., and RAKUDA: PARTY WITH A DEAD MAN at 2:30 p.m. On Sunday, things kick off with TRIPLE LION DANCE at 1 p.m., with a reprise of HERON MAIDEN at 3 p.m. It’s called Cinema Kabuki, a presentation of the Japan Foundation and all movies are in HD, with six channel sound and English subtitles. Tickets ($23 and $17) are available at cineplex.com. Call 416-966-1600 ext. 229 for further info.

CALL FOR FRESH PERSPECTIVES
For the second year, the Harold Green Jewish Theatre is offering aspiring playwrights the chance to have their latest efforts workshopped by professional actors and directors. The competition is titled In The Beginning and seeks to find Jewish voices that offer fresh perspectives on Jewish history, heritage and experience. For details, visit hgjewishtheatre.com