THEATRE REVIEW: THE MIDDLE PLACE
19 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

TORONTO - It is fitting -- occasionally frustrating, but fitting nonetheless -- that THE MIDDLE PLACE defies theatrical convention and takes to the stage without a recognizable beginning or a definitive ending. It is, after all, an unconventional piece of stagecraft -- a slice of life carved rare from the too-often forgotten underbelly of suburban Toronto, serving as stand-in for any big city in North America, one suspects.

Specifically, it is a show about kids -- young people in that middle place between childhood and the adult world, between dependence and independence, between hope and despair. They are kids, storm-tossed on a sea of unaccustomed hormones and trying to come to grips with their own individuality in the face of parents, teachers and caregivers who don't seem to understand or, in some cases, don't seem to even care. The kind of kids, in other words, who make a hopefully transitional home at Rexdale's Youth Without Shelter; the kind of kids one is likely to find in any vivisection of a modern community; and finally, the kind of kids who sat down with playwright Andrew Kushnir over the course of several months and talked to him about their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their frustrations and their disappointments.

Now, after an intense period of workshops and dramaturgy, Kushnir has excerpted those interviews, blended them with interviews with YWS staff, and after suitable changes to protect individual privacy, shaped it all into an hour-long stage show that officially premiered at the Berkeley Street Theatre Thursday. A production of Project: Humanity, THE MIDDLE PLACE is presented in a collaboration between the Canadian Stage Company and Theatre Passe Muraille, where the work was staged in workshop last year.

A work for five actors -- Akosua Amo-Adem, Antonio Cayonne, Jessica Greenberg, Kevin Walker and Kushnir himself -- it is, in the final analysis, less theatre than eavesdropping masquerading as theatre. With Kushnir in the role of largely unseen inquisitor, the other four cast members open windows into the lives of 16 homeless youth living at the YWS facility, and four of the caseworkers employed there.

Designer Jung-Hye Kim sets most of the work in an oval of intense light (heightened by the unobtrusive hand of Kimberly Purtell), surrounded by an imaginary force field through which the four staff members can pass at will to offer what is essentially the compassionate outsider's take on things. Inside that circle, however, is the world inhabited by the kids -- alternately troubled and troubling, confused and confusing, hopeful and hopeless, frustrated and frustrating. With director Alan Dilworth firmly in control and choreographer Monica Dottor cuing the character changes, it becomes a stew-pot of life on simmer, rather than at a rolling boil. Each character is given as much or as little time as is necessary to give an audience a glimpse into the world each inhabits or hopes to inhabit, those worlds often playing in jarring counterpoint to the world as they see it.

In the shifting panorama of characters the work presents, Amo-Adem, Cayonne, Greenberg and Walker are all accorded plenty of opportunity to strut their stuff, within the perimeters of Dilworth's tight direction. And while each of them scores at least a few telling moments, Amo-Addem and Walker offer thrilling demonstrations for not just the depth of their talents but their range as well, donning and doffing characters with the ease of chameleons.

Without a regular beginning or a regular ending, this is a work that neither asks tough questions nor answers them. Instead, it dwells in THE MIDDLE PLACE, between the asking and the answer.

THEATRE REVIEW:
THE MAN IN BLACK
17 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

There's counterfeit Cash that's being passed around certain stretches of Yonge Street. Not cash, in the sense of, "Spare change, mister?" that marks so many of the financial transactions on the world's longest street. But rather Cash, as in "My name is Johnny Cash."

In fact those are amongst the first words you'll hear at THE MAN IN BLACK (which opened Wednesday at the Panasonic), and it might throw you for a minute or two, him being dead and all. But chances are you aren't going to have to check your program to remind yourself that the full title of this show is THE MAN IN BLACK: A TRIBUTE TO JOHNNY CASH, for beyond a shock of preternaturally black and Brylcreemed hair, Shawn Barker, for all his commitment and bravado, has few physical credentials to back up his claim. Frankly, he'd be as believable, on the physical front, if he claimed to be one of the lesser Baldwin brothers, or even k.d. lang.

But there's no way Alberta's angel with a lariat could mine those bass notes the way Barker can -- and they were, after all, Cash's stock in trade. And Barker makes the most of that ability as he -- backed by a tight four-piece band and two back-up singers -- makes his way through the Cash canon, serving up two dozen and more tunes from the master's long and varied career, leaving the impression that there's a bit of Cash in the Presley family tree.

But as he serves up a playlist that includes I Got Stripes; Cry, Cry, Cry; Boy Named Sue; Ghost Riders in the Sky and even the musical valedictory that is Hurt, it dawns that it wasn't Cash's vocal ability to go deep that we loved so much as his ability to strike emotional black gold when he did. All of which would be secondary, one supposes, if writer-director Kurt Brown had used the concert format as a way to impart meaningful biographical details about a man whose music transcended genre, but beyond the fact that he was married more than once and recorded in Memphis, Nashville and Los Angeles, those details are pretty slim. And frankly, if Cash really did have a predilection for the phrase "itty-bitty", did you really want to know?

But if it's a love of Cash's music that has brought you hither, in fairness, Barker -- over the course of the 31 songs on the playlist -- manages to periodically impress, landing somewhere square in the middle of that no-man's-land between impression and impersonation. At its worst, this show stops respectfully short of a send-up -- although the "gee, gol-leee, gosh, ma'am" drawl comes pretty close. And at its best, it is almost possible to believe that, if you closed your eyes, you might think you were hearing Cash himself -- but then, watching your radio could accomplish the same thing.

In the end, it dwells in theatrical purgatory -- a nostalgia show designed to appeal to Cash fans yet almost certain to disappoint anyone with a passion for the music and a good CD. But the good news is the watch you bought down the street is no longer a Rolex knock-off -- it's a tribute watch.

THEATRE: FEATURE INTERVIEW
15 FEB/11

Thankfully Sandra Shamas is at her Wit's End

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency

Sandra Shamas wants you to know she’s a changed woman. In fact, that’s the subject of her latest one-woman show, WIT'S END III; LOVE LIFE, slated to open at the Elgin Theatre on Wednesday.

For the uninitiated, it will be Shamas’ sixth highly personal one-woman show — a cycle that started almost a quarter century ago with an Edmonton Fringe show titled MY BOYFRIEND'S BACK AND THERE'S GOING TO BE LAUNDRY. That one show has since morphed into the story of her entire adult life, spanning marriage, divorce and the ongoing tale of her attempts to shake the smog of the city from her skirts in favour of a more bucolic rural life.

WIT'S END is not merely the title of the last three shows in her sextet. It is also the name of the farm she purchased just before her marriage melted down and disappeared to the place where she still makes her home. Not surprisingly, in the years — eight of ’em, to be precise — since Shamas checked in with WIT'S END II; HEART'S DESIRE, there have been some changes. Shamas has become a farmer, raising a few chickens and committing an entire hectare of her farm to the cultivation of organic garlic — a crop that started small and continued to thrive when the heirloom tomatoes that were to have been her cash crop withered on the vine, victims of a late-season blight.

“When you’re in congress with the land, you obey it,” she offers philosophically. “It doesn’t obey you.”

But the biggest change of all in Shamas’ life since her audience last met with her has been The Change — better known as menopause — an event known to rock the lives of women of a certain age. And for those wondering where Shamas has been and why there’s been such a long stretch between shows, she answers with typical candour.

“I was morphing,” she says. “I was going through the change. That’s what this is all about and I wanted to report from a place of authority, rather than ‘What the f---?’

“It starts small,” she says simply. “You don’t feel right in your skin. (But) it’s tectonic,” Shamas confides. “It shifts your plates. It’s not a destination you would choose — if you knew.” But happily, she’s made it through to the other side — and partly because when she was at her wit’s end, she was also at Wit’s End. Or, as she puts it: “I had space — 123 acres to run around and occasionally strip naked and lie in the snow — just to cool off.”

The trip through the land of menopause proved to be less than pleasant in more than just the climate control department, of course, but in its wake, Shamas finds herself some place where she very much wants to be, both physically and emotionally — and it looks good on her. Her mass of Mediterranean curls is now touched with just a hint of silver and laugh-lines soften the angles of her classically chiseled face.

“My health is rocket science amazing,” she says. “I’m blessed. This,” she continues tapping her head, “is an idiot. It collates information and makes phone calls. “But this,” she continues, her hands sweeping down her still very lithe body, “is the magnificence. There isn’t a crack or a crevice I’m not in love with.”

As for her love life — hey, considering the title of the show, we had to ask — she’s on hiatus, she says, taking some time to examine the choices she’s made. “At 50, I have the emotional constitution to do that without rancour,” she says, adding she’s spotted a trend in her failed romances. “It turns out that the one thing they all have in common is me,” she says. “At present I am single, but I don’t think I will be for long, That’s my intuition.”

Meanwhile, my intuition suggests there just may be another show in the offing.

MUSICAL THEATRE REVIEW:
THE FANTASTICKS
15 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

While it would be hard to prove it, one can’t help but think that the people who framed the KISS principle — Keep It Simple, Stupid, for the uninitiated — were inspired by a little musical titled THE FANTASTICKS. In fact, the musical, penned more than 50 years ago by playwright-lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt, makes such a virtue of simplicity that it’s been playing in New York for all but a few years since it opened.

And now it’s gracing the Toronto stage, courtesy of the folks at Soulpepper, who launched a production at the Young Centre Monday. Not surprisingly, they’ve chosen to keep it pretty simple too, with director Joe Ziegler fielding a two-piece orchestra (musical director Paul Sportelli at the piano, backed by harpist Erica Goodman) to share Christina Poddubiuk’s simple set with a cast of eight players, simply lit by Louise Guinand.

Together, they spin out a highly entertaining if oddly familiar musical tale of young lovers, nurtured then ripped asunder by feuding fathers — an homage of sorts to not only Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET, but to his MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM as well, all blended with elements of OUR TOWN, THE WIZARD OF OZ and a host of other theatrical inspirations.

Ziegler in fact reinforces some of those ‘inspirations’ in his casting, playing off them with Jeff Lillico (the romantic lead in Soulpepper’s oft-revived production of OUR TOWN) cast as the FANTASTICKS' youthful Matt and Albert Schultz adding swagger and musical momentum to his performance as OT’s Stage Manager to give us an oddly avuncular El Gallo. Meanwhile, Krystin Pellerin is cast as the innocent Luisa, the object of Matt’s affection, while Michael Hanrahan and William Webster bring the feuding fathers to sparkling life. Oliver Dennis, Michael Simpson and Derek Boyes round out the cast as the doddering (and very funny) Henry, the hapless Mortimer and the Mute respectively.

And under Ziegler’s careful and considered direction, it’s certainly charming work. As the naive young lovers, Lillico and Pellerin walk the fine line between innocence and idiocy to lovely effect, while Schultz deploys just the faintest touch of irony to justify his casting as the swashbuckling master manipulator, El Gallo. Hanrahan and Webster meanwhile enjoy a nice, if unpredictable chemistry, while Boyes and Simpson prove wonderful accomplices to Dennis’ accomplished scene-stealing. In fact, Ziegler has crafted such a fine production that one can’t help but wish he had a cast who could sing as well as they can act. While Schultz has the vocal chops for the iconic Try to Remember — and certainly shows he knows how to use them on occasion — Lillico and Pellerin come off too often sounding more than slightly reedy, even with a modicum of electronic enhancement to lend them power.

In the final analysis, while its story is ultimately about as deep as a dime, a little more vocal power and projection is all it would take to make this production simply fantastic.

MUSICAL THEATRE REVIEW: THE SECRET GARDEN
13 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

In a world where childhood is increasingly considered a time of inviolate innocence, children’s stories from an era when children were considered adults-in-training don’t always make for the best of theatre While the stories of Dickens and his ilk — even our own Lucy Maude Montgomery— offer plenty in the way of life lessons, they are often couched in an unvarnished world of cruelty, heartbreak, sorrow and mean-spiritedness — all things from which we try to shield modern children.

Of course, a little bit of anthropomorphism, à la THE LION KING, can help. And if that doesn’t work, or if the story doesn’t lend itself to lions and meerkats and the like, a heavy dollop of sentimentality — think OLIVER or ANNE OF GREEN GABLES — is almost certain to do the trick; the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.

That seems to be the theory behind the new staging of THE SECRET GARDEN that opened at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on Sunday, a presentation by David Mirvish of the John Stalker for Festival City Theatres Trust, Festival Theatre Edinburgh Production. Based on the 1911 novel of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett, it’s the story of young Mary Lennox (played by Ellie Coldicutt), left alone and orphaned in India at the top of the story, when her parents and everyone else in her life succumbs to cholera.

The young orphan is shipped home to Britain to make her home on the Yorkshire Moors with her only surviving relative — the widowed and still grieving Archibald Craven (Caspar Phillipson), her uncle by marriage. In the face of Archibald’s still overwhelming grief — and a certain handicap that is vastly underplayed here — Archibald’s estate is managed by his malevolent brother Neville (Graham Bickley), a doctor who has no time for the new ward. Left largely to her own resources in a grand but decaying home, the prickly Mary is taken in hand by the housemaid Martha (Lauren Hood) and her brother Dicken (Jos Slovick), who introduce her to the joys of gardening. It is an introduction that leads her inevitably, almost magically, to a neglected garden once cultivated by her late Aunt Lily (Sophie Bould), a place still particularly haunted by Lily’s memory.

Working with the 1991 musical adaptation by playwright/lyricist Marsha Norman and composer Lucy Simon, director Anna Linstrum and choreographer Gavin Mitford give us a production that is nothing if not committed. In the novel, Burnett created a world steeped in the tradition of the Raj, gilded with the mystery of the Indian sub-continent and haunted by the memories of the too-soon departed — and that’s the world of this production.

But in their efforts to keep the story, Simons’ often overwrought score, and Francis O’Connor’s hyper-kinetic set all running like clockwork, it seems they’ve simply wound things too tight. And that would include the emotions of this piece, all of which seem to be worn prominently on the characters’ sleeves, despite the fact that Burnett set the story in a world of stiff upper-lips. The cast are tremendously committed, but too many characters lose themselves in the sentiment of the story, instead of simply getting on with it and leaving it up to us to figure it out.

Figuring it out is what good theatre — and childhood — is all about.

THEATRE REVIEW: SAINT CARMEN OF THE MAIN
12 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Talk about staying power. Almost 2,500 years after its heyday, classical Greek theatre is still with us, its forms — from deus ex machina to Greek chorus — still informing contemporary theatre on the world's stages.

And while playwright Michel Tremblay probably wasn't aspiring to be some sort of latter-day Sophocles when he penned his SAINT CARMEN OF THE MAIN as a rallying cry for fellow Quebec separatists in 1976, he nonetheless applied the Grecian formula with a heavy hand. A tale ripped from the underbelly of old Montreal — a world of hookers, misfits and petty criminals huddled around the fictitious Rodeo Club, near the corner of rue Saint Laurent, otherwise known as the Main, and rue Sainte-Catherine — Saint Carmen is essentially a story of a people in the process of finding its voice. And while, as written, it offers a powerful argument in favour of Tremblay's separatist cause, it also finds resonance with any group struggling to define itself and find its voice, which accounts in no small part for the revival that opened at the Bluma Appel Theatre Thursday in a co-production between Canadian Stage and the National Arts Centre.

Working with a new translation by long-time Tremblay interpreter Linda Gaboriau, director Peter Hinton and designer Eo Sharp make the most of the Grecian connection too, heightening the ancient classical reference points even while they strive to make it a work very much of the modern world. As the sun comes up on their Main, a chorus of hookers and transvestites all arrayed in blood red, led by Sandra (Robert Persichini) and Rose Beef (Karen Robinson) await the return of the Carmen of title.

A native of the area who rose to prominence singing country and western tunes, Carmen is coming home after a sojourn in Nashville, where she has learned a country trick or two. Played by Laara Sadiq, Carmen arrives looking like Lady Gaga making a wrong turn on Rodeo Drive, but that's more than good enough for the adoring Harelip, a downtrodden lesbian, played by Diane D'Aquila, who serves as her dresser. But not everyone shares Harelip's joy in this homecoming. Maurice (Jean Leclerc), the amoral owner of Rodeo, is unimpressed with Carmen's new voice and wants her to do the same thing she's always done, only better, while Gloria (Jackie Richardson), the Spanish singer who ruled Rodeo's stage before Carmen, wants it back . In this, she has the aid of Toothpick (Joey Tremblay) a thug who is apparently only packing a grudge.

That the denizens of the Main are thrilled to find Carmen singing songs about them rather than cowboys only serves to make the homecoming queen more dangerous. Tragedy of classical proportion ensues. In the process, however, Hinton (a director who never lets a good play get in the way of a concept) goes Grecian with such a heavy hand that the very human elements of the story are all but swamped by his vision. While Gaboriau captures elements of Quebecois joual in her new translation, Hinton and Sharp strip the story of time and place, in a setting more of the temple than the street — a world where there is definitely no sex in secular.

For all of their costuming excesses, the chorus emerges as oddly asexual — a religious order with very bad habits — while Sadiq's Carmen all but disappears under wig and make-up that render her all but invisible from the neck up. In this production, it's not in the translation from French to English that Carmen loses her way finally, but in the translation from English to Greek.

THEATRE REVIEW: DIVISADERO: A PERFORMANCE
10 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Mostly, theatre happens in the watching. So, to discuss DIVISADERO: A PERFORMANCE — a new work from Necessary Angel that opened Tuesday on Theatre Passe Muraille's mainstage — it might be wise to jettison conventional notions of theatre, radio plays and books-on-tape and look to the world of music instead.

For in the final analysis, this theatrical adaptation of novelist Michael Ondaatje's award-winning novel by the author (in concert with director Daniel Brooks and the company) defies most conventional theatrical definitions. And even while it flirts with being theatre for the ear, dismissing it as a mere radio play would be a dis-service both the play and audience.

Finally, DIVISADERO is to conventional theatre what a cantata is to an opera — the former shaped more for the ear, the latter for both ear and eye, both demanding, for maximum enjoyment, to be seen rather than merely heard. Relying primarily on the spoken word and on music to tell its story, like most radio plays, DIVISADERO nonetheless very carefully — occasionally almost self-conciously — plays to an inner ear informed by memory and emotion and all of the things of which great theatre is made, rather than any random vibrations of the tympanic membrane.

It tells the story of three siblings — Anna, played briefly as a girl by Aviva Philipp-Muller, and her adopted siblings, Claire, played by Liane Balaban and Coop, played by Justin John Rutledge — but it plays out largely in the memory of a mature Anna, played by Maggie Huculak. The cast is rounded out by Tom McCamus, in a variety of gambler's roles and Amy Rutherford as a wayward, tormented child in a woman's body. But even when characters other than Anna step to the fore to assume control of the narrative, there is precious little interaction between them in a story driven more by what they feeling and think than by what they say and do.

The tale itself centres around a single explosive event that proves to be a dividing line, or in Spanish, a divisadero, between the protaganist's almost careless childhoods and something much bigger and darker — a single stone hurled into the pool of their collective memory, creating ripples that still threaten to swamp each of them and pull them under. But memories, unless fleshed out to become memory plays, rarely make for compelling theatre — but to strip this tale, told by a masterful writer, of its language would be to peel away the pigment of an old master's painting merely to get to the sketch beneath.

So instead, Brooks creates a new kind of memory play, using a potent blend of almost inaudible speech and intrusive amplification to heighten intimacy, setting the story in his audience's memory instead of playing it out in the playwright's. Limited in terms of action, the cast's challenge comes in holding our attention with nothing but a combination of vocal skill and the power of the playwright's words.

In this, Huculak scores an understated triumph, creating a perfect 'writer's voice' — considered, dispassionate, articulate and just the tiniest bit affected — that flows out of her like golden honey. McCamus impresses too, in his ability to hold his audience spellbound, but for the rest, Brook's casting criteria is unclear.

Clearly, Rutledge is cast for musical abilities and, for a non-actor, turns in a strong performance, But while Rutherford has been cast, at least in part, for her physical attributes, Balaban's determination to fully inhabit Claire is undone by her failure to exhibit a disability important enough to be mentioned twice in the telling.

Of course, these things wouldn't be important in a radio play, but...