The WB network harps on Harper, hysterically
Could you get into the Wrecking Ball near you last night? I was at the one in Toronto at Tarragon Theatre and dozens of would-be spectators were turned away at the door from the evening of written-in-under-a-week political playlets. (There were nine others WBs across the country from Corner Brook to Victoria.)
The first star, la première étoile of the evening was Rick Roberts, both as writer and performer. His 30 Seconds To Apocalpyse, directed by Vikki Anderson, was a series of satiric television advertisements tracking the downfall of civilization (which apparently begins with Stephen Harper's re-election).
But Roberts was particularly gasping-for-air funny as a Spartan playwright sentenced to death for his subversive work in Ottawa writer Pierre Brault's The Last Days of Sparta.
Up next, Teresa Pavlinek's The Road to Ordinary was a sweet, simple two-hander about a pair of Canadians from different backgrounds (lovely performances form Ieva Lucs and Hardee T Lineham) forced to sit together on a bus, a pleasant change from weeks of divide-and-conquer political campaigning.
The script-in-hand theatrical portion of the evening was capped off with a new monologue from Judith Thompson, who is swiftly turning into Canada's David Hare. Nail Biter was a chilling piece about one of the CSIS officers sent down to Guantanamo Bay to interview Omar Khadr. Though I detected a couple of straw men in Thompson's monologue, Gray Powell, from the Shaw Festival, brought the self-doubting agent to life extremely effectively.
Make no mistake: This wasn't a fair-and-balanced evening of politics. Theatre artists are angry at one guy whose name is Stephen Harper. They're angry over the recent funding cuts, but especially over his infamous "rich gala" comments... Luckily, most of the ones on hand last night were angry in an entertaining or illuminating way.
The only part of the evening that veered too far into the realm of agitprop for me was spoken-word artist Belladonna's bit. When she attempted to get the audience to chant, "This is how a revolution happens," I wanted to flee. I find that sort of thing excruciating.
Playwright and co-organiser Michael Healey got the best line of the evening, I thought, when he ventured an opinion that actually startled the crowd: "Stephen Harper is a patriot." After reading funny snippets of various fringe parties' websites (Marxist-Leninists, Rhinos, the Work Less Party), Healey got serious and said that they were all patriots, and Harper too. That these people loved their country, wanted to change it for what they thought was the better and were willing to put their time and money where their mouths were. His message: if the audience's vision of the country was different, then they need to get out there and articulate it and fight for it.
There was a Wajdi Mouawad call-to-arms read out before we all left buzzing into the night, and it was... interesting. The first person I spoke to about it on the way out fought it infuriating. I'd like to say more, but I'm waiting to see if I can get a copy because I had stopped taking notes at that point. But it seemed to be arguing - shades of Stephen Harper - that artists aren't ordinary people at all.
UPDATE: <a href="http://thewreckingball.ca/blog/337/from-sea-to-shining-sea-theatre-artists-of-canada-get-their-wrecking-balls-on">Ah, here it is</a>. Like I said, more later.
The Wrecking Ball is a good father, and its kids are lovely
It's Monday night. The theatres of Canada should be dark. But they're not.
The special election edition of the Wrecking Ball political cabaret is taking place tonight in Toronto, the city where it originated, as well as for the first time in Corner Brook, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Victoria.
The very impressive list of Canadian theatre artists taking part includes Judith Thompson, Ken Cameron, Rick Chafe, Chris Craddock, David Fennario, David Ferry, Lucia Frangioni, Michael Healey, David Jansen, Jillian Keiley, Kate Lynch, Ruth Madoc-Jones, Ross Manson, Wajdi Mouawad, Rick Roberts, Michael Rubenfeld and Marcus Youseff. To, as they say, name just a few. Here are the full details.
I don't know if I can go, however, because the theatre critics of the country are descending on Toronto to give the Herbert Whittaker Award to Shaw Festival artistic director Jackie Maxwell tonight... It's at times like this that I ask myself: What would Herb Whittaker do?
Wrecking Ball, it is then... Check back here tomorrow for a recap.
Theatre, theatre everywhere...
And I am but one theatre critic. So, when times get theatre-y, as they tend to at the start of October, The Globe and Mail calls on its crack team of cross-continent cultural critics to pitch in.
In Vancouver, Marsha Lederman catches the Canadian premiere of Alan Bennett's The History Boys and gives it three stars. (Sounds like the Arts Club needs that money for renovations...)
In Toronto, Paula Citron takes in Newfoundlander Andy Jones' An Evening With Uncle Val at Theatre Passe Muraille and gives it three stars.
In New York, Simon Houpt sees how Daniel Radcliffe handles Peter Shaffer's Equus and gives the production 2.5 stars. (Here's what I thought when I caught the production a year and a half ago in London. )
And me? I checked out Montreal theatre company DynamO's Ghosts and Ladders at Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People in Toronto. It gets 2.5 stars.
Wajdi Mouawad: bringing couples together, one play at a time
The hottest playwright in Canada right now is Wajdi Mouawad, bien sur. How often do you see this: someone was on Craigslist in Montreal offering $200 for tickets to see his new solo piece, Seuls, currently on at the Theatre d'Aujourd'hui.
Writes the poster:
So you'll know everything, it's for me and the girl who will become my wife! Not only is it a good deal, but it will also be a lifesaver :-)
Despite adding four extra shows, Seuls is entirely sold out in Montreal. If you haven't got tickets and aren't willing to pay scalpers, you'll have to go catch it in Ottawa at the NAC from October 14 to 18. I'll be there. On election day, no less. (Which reminds me, there is now an English-language translation of Mouawad's letter to the Prime Minister floating about the blogosphere.)
As for Mouawad's presence in English Canada, Richard Rose's marvelous remount of Scorched sold out its run at the Tarragon Theatre. (Here's my four-star review - I unlocked it especially for you.)
There's so much demand that the show will come back to Toronto in June for a third time. Torontonians may want to grab tickets now.
Or impatient T-dotters could head down the 401 to Montreal for a weekend trip and catch it at the Centaur Theatre, which is hosting the production from October 7 to November 2.
Winnipeggers can - and should! - catch it from November 13 to November 29 at the Manitoba Theatre Centre, while Edmontonians can see it at The Citadel in January.
Hmmm... I'm sounding a little bit like a press release here, aren't I? Well, I meant it when I said Scorched, "may be the best piece of theatre this country has produced this millennium."
If you're looking for a dissenting opinion (the Star gave it full marks, while The Sun gave it 4.5/5 stars), I'll pass you over to Robert Cushman, the only Toronto-based critic who hasn't bought into Scorched. Among his concerns, he doesn't like that it takes place in a "generalized Everycountry", which he says leads "to generalized characters".
Generally, I'm on side with the dramaturgical principle that universality springs from being specific with your characters and context, but you can't be dogmatic about it. Mouawad isn't writing in a realistic mode, but a poetic, semimythical one.
And when something works, it just works, regardless of whether it's following the rules. I knew I was connecting with Scorched on an intellectual level while I was watching it, but I was really surprised by the way it snuck up on me emotionally. I just started sobbing at the end. Embarrassed by my own reaction, I dashed for the exit while the applause was still going on and stumbled, tear-blinded out onto the street. I was overcome. (The last time that happened was at Chiwetel Ejiofor's Othello, when I just did not want him to kill Desdemona... Oh, I was devastated when he did!)
Another of Cushman's questions, I might be able to respond to with my head rather than my gut: "Why does [Alphonse] the lawyer (delightfully played by Alon Nashman) get his English proverbs wrong but nothing else? It isn't very plausible or, after the first few times, very funny."
For me, there's a thematic reason for Alphonse's malapropisms, in addition to it providing a little comic relief.
Scorched sets up the loveable lawyer, who is played with superb squirreliness by Nashman, as a man prone to garbling phrases. The next character we meet comically mangling words, however, also has a penchant for mangling bodies.
This chilling clown, played by Alex Poch-Goldin, is an artist as well as a murderer. He's a smiling sniper who takes snapshots of his kills with a camera strapped to the end of his rifle.
By contrasting Alphonse with the sniper, Mouawad challenges some of our assumptions about art and comedy. As I noted in my review, Mouawad wields humour "like the double-edged sword it is."
This to me, is what blows me away about the play. Scorched is deeply poetic and humanistic, but it somehow avoids ever lapsing into mindless romanticism or sentimentality.
Three cheers for crashing stock markets! Sorta...
Are recessions good for the theatre business? That's the oh-so-timely question highlighted by this story in The Stage yesterday:
The opening of the 51st Dublin Theatre Festival last week coincided with official confirmation that the Irish Republic is now the first EU member state in recession.
But the economic downturn has had no impact on the event, with ticket sales 40% ahead of the same period last year and some of the 27 shows to be staged over the 18 days of the festival already sold out.
“We are one of the few sectors of the economy where revenue and sales are growing,” said Loughlin Deegan, festival artistic director and chief executive. “It would be interesting to know why, when times are bad, people return to the theatre.”
You'd think expenditures on arts and entertainment would be one of the first things to go when times get tough. But strangely enough, that isn't usually the case. As UK magazine MoneyWeek recently noted:
[R]ecession has famously favoured theatre. In the 1989-94 recession, after an initial fall, West End attendance actually rose by 5%, going from just under 11 million to 11.5 million. Data is not available for earlier periods, but it is a time-and-again proven fact that people's need for entertainment and, in particular, escapist stories, increases during hard times. "When the economy dives, Hollywood thrives", runs the saying. The 1930s, for example, saw the rise of the Hollywood musical. More recently, The Rocky Horror Show opened during the 1973-4 oil crisis, and Jesus Christ Superstar just before; Cats – on which investors are reported to have made an annual dividend of more than their original investment every year for 21 years – began in the depths of the 1979-82 recession; Miss Saigon opened during the 1989-93 recession. All made lots of money for their investors.
Might this apply to Canadian commercial theatre as well? Was it a coincidence that Livent's rise coincided with the early 1990s recession? And is it one that as of Friday, when The Sound of Music opens, Toronto will, for the first time in a long while, have four big-budget musicals running at the same time? (Mirvish's Dirty Dancing and We Will Rock You, and DanCap's Jersey Boys are the other three.)
I'm a theatre critic, not a financial analyst, so I'm not even going to try to answer that. But given the current market instability, theatre no longer seems like quite that foolhardy an investment...
This year's must-have prop...
... is the pool table. A new production of Othello by England's Frantic Assembly takes place in a pool hall. Earlier this year, the amazing metamorphosing pool table from the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch visited Toronto for the Luminato festival. And at Stratford this summer, director Adrian Noble had Claudius and Laertes plotted Hamlet's death over a pool table. (I hope they've learned how to look like they actually play billiards at this point in the season...)
Remember when the must-have set piece was an actual pool, as in Michael Healey's The Innocent Eye Test for instance? Personally, I've always been a sucker for seeing water on stage...
But now, pool tables are the new pools.
This has been your mostly irrelevant Monday morning theatre blog post.
How I spent my summer vacation, part I
Well, after visiting London, I went to Kiev on a bit of a Mikhail Bulgakov pilgrimage. I read his first novel, The White Guard, and then walked around the streets and squares where the book and play adaptation, Day of the Turbins, take place. And I visited Bulgakov's Kiev home, which was the model for the Turbin family's home and is now the Bulgakov museum.
Across the street from the museum is the celebrated Kiev Drama Theatre on Podil, where this week's Bulgakov International Art Festival is taking place. Here's my report on the celebration of the playwright and writer of The Master and Margarita, which a Canadian troupe is attending for the first time. (Many thanks to Vanessa and Yanna for acting as my Ukrainian, Russian and surzhik translators!)
Thought of the day; plus, new Wrecking Ball on the way
Nicholas Hytner, director of Britain's National Theatre, isn't scared of audience fragmentation:
A play that asks what it means to be British should be of universal interest, and the great Olivier amphitheatre is ideally suited to shows that bind the entire community in an act of self-examination. But universal interest and, in particular, universal approbation, are overrated virtues. Wide-ranging subject matter and experiments in form inevitably have the potential to enrage and confuse as much as they stimulate and delight. It would be a poor theatre that pleased everyone all of the time, and it's time to free ourselves from the obsession with the perfectly formed, beautifully diverse audience. There is no such thing.
The wide-ranging carnival of British performing arts pulls in any number of different kinds of crowds. It would be terrific if every child emerged from school fully equipped to enjoy a Prom, and no effort should be spared to open up the glories of classical music to those who haven't encountered it at school. But meanwhile the 5,000 who typically pack the Albert Hall on an August evening have only their musical enthusiasm in common. They don't look like each other and they don't look like the crowds who recently packed the Arcola Theatre and the Royal Court for two tremendous plays, by Femi Oguns and Bola Agbaje, about the tensions between British West Indians and British Nigerians. But so what? Audiences are heat-seeking missiles. They go to what grabs them. It's the variety of what's out there that counts.Food for thought...
In other exciting news, The Wrecking Ball, Toronto's political theatre cabaret, is planning an election special. Watch this space.
The long and the short of the Siminovitch
I'm glad no one took me up on my Siminovitch pool. The shortlist for the $100,000 prize - this year it's going to a playwright - was announced this morning and I was way off with my picks.
I did say that one of the French-Canadian playwrights on the long list - Larry Tremblay, Daniel Danis and Jasmine Dube - would no doubt make the short list. In fact, two of Quebec's finest playwrights did: Larry Tremblay of Montreal, whose "representative play accompanying the nomination" is Abraham Lincoln va au théâtre, and Daniel Danis of St-David de Falardeau, Quebec, whose RPATN is his homage to Aeschylus, Le Langue-à-Langue des chiens de roche.
As for the three English-language nominees, they are:
- Daniel MacIvor, whose RPATN is the lovely A Beautiful View;
- Colleen Murphy, whose RPATN is the GG-winning play about the Montreal Massacre, The December Man; and
- Morwyn Brebner, whose RPATN is the Vegas-set wordfest The Optimists.
Who will win? Well, right off the bat, I'm going to say my hunch is the little-known-in-English-Canada Tremblay (no relation to Michel), but don't listen to me because I picked Rick Chafe, Drew Hayden Taylor, Vittorio Rossi and Michael Hollingsworth as possible winners from the long list. Also, I haven't read or seen Abraham Lincoln va au théâtre, so will have to get on that and then give you an informed opinion.
(Danis's RPATN, which won the Governor General's in 2002, has been translated as In the Eyes of Stone Dogs by Linda Gaboriau, but I'm not sure if it has ever been produced in English Canada... It got a staged reading at Tarragon in 1999 directed by Jackie Maxwell.)
More on this when I'm not about to run off to lunch... Who do you think should win?
Shaw Festival looks forward (in anger?)
So, who is it that said of Bernard Shaw that he "writes like a Pakistani who had learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become a chartered accountant"?
Why, none other than British playwright John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man. He did so in a 1977 letter to the Guardian newspaper, reacting to critic Michael Billington's description of Shaw as "the greatest British dramatist since Shakespeare". The full letter is archived online for all to enjoy.
Why bring this anti-Shavian diatribe up? Well, because the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake announced its new season yesterday.
The big news is that the festival is producing all 10 of the one-act plays in Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30. (A decision, Jackie Maxwell said yesterday at the season launch, that greatly irritated her marketing team: "Our shows begin at 8!")
But what particularly interests me is that none other than John Osborne is making his first appearance at the Shaw Festival. His 1957 play, The Entertainer, is on the bill for a limited run in the festival's new Rehearsal Studio. (And if the rumours are correct, Benedict Campbell will be stepping into the shoes of washed-up vaudevillian Archie Rice, a role originated at the Royal Court in London by Laurence Olivier.)
This is a further stretch of the Shaw Festival's mandate. Originally, the festival was dedicated to plays by Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. Then, it expanded to include plays set during Shaw's lifetime. Now, the festival is producing The Entertainer, a play written seven years after Shaw's death.
And it's by a playwright who is generally regarded as having changed the British theatre forever with his 1956 play Look Back in Anger, moving it away from "well-made plays" set among the upper-middle-class to plays that were politically engaged and had a "kitchen sink" realism; away from the understated and genteel to the angry, loud and chaotic.
At least that's the myth. The idea that British theatre before Osborne was all escapist fare is simply untrue, as the Shaw Festival has long demonstrated with its many relevant productions of supposedly dead plays.
The Look Back in Anger mythology does seems to be slowly eroding elsewhere. In his recent theatrical history, State of the Nation, Michael Billington argues that JB Priestley engaged with political reality well before Osborne in plays like 1944's An Inspector Calls (which the Shaw Festival continues to stage this season, starring Benedict Campbell). Bernard Shaw himself has been reappraised and resurrected in the UK in recent years. And even the supposed anti-Osborne - Terence Rattigan - is being reassessed these days as a potent playwright.
By programming Osborne, Maxwell is making the case that there is a continuum from Shaw to Osborne and that it passes though the likes of Noel Coward. As Maxwell put it to me yesterday, the festival is "very deliberately pushing through the mandate". It will be quite interesting to watch these playwrights rub up against each other next season.
I'm sure there will be some sparks. There certainly were in the past... Since we got to hear Osborne tear into Shaw earlier, I'll close this blog post by linking to what Coward wrote in his journal about Osborne in 1959 (later on, he came to respect his work a lot more):
"The Entertainer was verbose, unreal and pretentious and this is unspeakable… destructive vituperation is too easy. I cannot believe that this writer, the first of all the ‘Angry Young Men,' was ever really angry at all. Dissatisfied perhaps and certainly envious and, to a degree, talented, but no more than that. No leader of thought and ideas, a conceited, calculating young man blowing a little trumpet."
This is where critic J. Kelly Nestruck posts his review after-thoughts and keeps an eye on what's going on theatre across Canada and around the world. Feel free to send him an email at knestruck@globeandmail.com.
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