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Thursday, July 2, 2009 01:44 PM
Our favourite Canadian plays
Samuel Rosas celebrates his third birthday (in behind are his cousin Andrea Suarez, aunt Carolina Rosas and father Camilo Rosas), by playing on a giant Canada Flag painted on a hillside at a Canada Day celebration in London, Ont.
My apologies for blogging so little of late. I've been working out the posting procedure for our pretty new website, ensconced in a busy festival season and feverishly posting to my new addiction, Twitter. (Follow me Follow me)
Speaking of which, I asked my fellow Twitterers what their favourite Canadian plays were yesterday, in honour of Canada Day.
Link to this postMonday, June 29, 2009 01:07 PM
Dora awards: They wuz robbed!
Peterson (with Shultz, right) in Soulpepper’s production of Glengarry Glen Ross: a cast of characters that are ‘shadier, greyer.’
Happy Dora Day To mark the occasion, my thoughts on this year's nominees (here's the full list) are in today's paper. I'll also be live-blogging the Toronto theatre awards's ceremony - hosted by Jian Ghomeshi - here tonight. Please come and join me starting at 7:30pm.
As I mention in the article today, there's no outrageous omission at this year's Doras - unlike last year when Studio 180's top-notch production of Stuff Happens was completely ignored in the nominations. Nonetheless, there are a few performances and productions that I think were overlooked the General Division this season.
Friday, June 5, 2009 03:32 PM
Des McAnuff: It's not non-traditional casting - it's just casting
Colm Feore as Macbeth and Yanna McIntosh as Lady Macbeth: it was difficult to believe that McIntosh's Lady Macbeth could compel her husband to take out the trash, never mind the King of Scotland.
I may not have been a huge fan of his production of Macbeth, but I give a million stars to Stratford Shakespeare Festival artistic director Des McAnuff's inspiring opening night speech about so-called "non-traditional casting". You can read it here in full, but here's an excerpt:
Tonight’s production employs what is often called “non-traditional casting” – a term that means, among other things, that “ethnically diverse” actors get to play Shakespearean roles other than Othello.
This to me is a fundamental requirement for any theatre that presumes to call itself a leader in the Canada of the 21st century. The term “non-traditional” does raise the question of what we mean by “traditional”.
I think that when some use the term “traditional” they really mean “Victorian” for tradition unfortunately is often limited to the outer reaches of human memory.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 04:15 PM
Shaw Festival: Look, up in the sky. It's a bird, it's a plane... What is it?
Goldie Semple, left, plays Clare and as the honoroable clare Wedderburn and Corrine Koslo is Mrs. Wadhurst in Hands Across the Sea, the final play in Brief Encounters.
In director Jackie Maxwell's staging of Noel Coward's Hands Across the Sea - the final one-act included in the Shaw Festival show Brief Encounters, part of their Tonight at 8:30 extravaganza - blimp-like flying objects tethered to small trucks on the ground appear in the London streetscape during the course of the play.
In my review, I wrote: "[T]here is also something dark bubbling up under Coward's fizz. A character is described as 'more determined than Hitler,' and Piggie impresses her guests by talking about the torpedoes on her husband's ship. Making the gathering storm more obvious, Maxwell has added a mass of zeppelins to the London street backdrop."
Zeppelins? Of course, The Globe and Mail's readers wouldn't let me get away with that. And so, in wrote Ann Crichton-Harris:
I'm probably the fiftieth person to write to you re your review...
Those are NOT zeppelins, they are Barrage Balloons. You must be too young to know this. Many of us who grew up in the war in England remember seeing them. I certainly did.
Thank you to Ann and all those wrote in correcting me. For those of you who were also not around during the Blitz, you can read about these clever inflated anti-aircraft devices here. And here is a classic newsreel showing the British balloon brigade at work during the Second World War:
By the way, all my reviews from the first week of the Shaw Festival are now online:
- Brief Encounters (2.5 stars out of 4)
- Sunday in the Park with George (3.5 stars )
- Good King Charles's Golden Days (1 star)
- A Moon for the Misbegotten (2.5 stars )
- Born Yesterday (3.5 stars)
What do you think of the look of the blog? A couple of people have emailed in asking if the old comments are gone for good. I'm afraid they are and I'm very disappointed to lose all your valuable contributions. Thank goodness for Google cache, which has saved some of my favourite discussions for posterity.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009 06:45 PM
Don your monocles: Theatre festival season is upon us
In most professions, the summer means a slow-down, but for the Canadian theatre critic things ramp up to a frenzy.
Tomorrow I leave for Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Shaw Festival’s first week of openings.
Then it's back to Toronto on Sunday to change my underwear, before heading off to Montreal on Monday to catch week two of the Festival TransAmerique (and The Old Trout Puppet's The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan at l'Espace Libre).
Friday, May 15, 2009 03:29 PM
Middle East drama: Michael Healey sides with David Hare over Caryl Churchill
As the Seven Jewish Children controversy continues its global expansion - the latest chapter, in Australia, involves Harry Potter actress Miriam Margolyes - we should perhaps make note of some other new plays out there about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ones that aren't attracting protests. (By the way, protests are great promotional tools: three more performances of SJC have been added this weekend in Toronto due to demand. Good work, B'nai Brith.)
There is, for instance, Jonathan Garfinkel's bizarre House of Many Tongues at the Tarragon Theatre. No one has accused it of being antisemitic yet, but then neither has anyone really strongly suggested you go out and see it. I gave it 2.5 stars out of 4, but others have been less generous. The Toronto Star's Mark Selby, shamelessly pulling a Paula Citron, called it "immature and sophomoric" and gave it a single star.
A more critically acclaimed new play to tackle the subject is British playwright David Hare's Wall, a journalistic monologue about the Israeli West Bank barrier (or "security fence" or "racist separation wall", depending on what side you are on). This 30-minute play - Mahabharata-esque compared to the 10-minute Seven Jewish Children - played at the Royal Court in London earlier this year and opens this week in New York at the Public.
No plans for a Canadian visit from Hare and his monologue - and yet, you can still hear him perform it without travelling to New York.
Playwright Michael Healey, who took a stab at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the most recent Wrecking Ball political cabaret, dropped me an email over the weekend to say that you can hear Wall in its entirety in a podcast on the New York Review of Books website. You can read the script there, too.
Healey believes Hare's approach to the subject is more illuminating than Churchill's:
Caryl Churchill's play bugs me for its pointlessly inflammatory nature. Hare's, by contrast, addresses (as his [1998 monologue] Via Dolorosa did) the endless complications of the situation. Less exciting than throwing around terms like blood libel, but much, much more useful. This distinction, to my mind, also makes it a much better piece of art.
To shift focus from the message to the medium for a moment: How exciting that you can hear, read and/or watch Churchill and Hare's plays online for free from anywhere in the world. Is this a new trend for theatre? Should more playwrights put their work online - in whole or in part - to promote their shows and reach a larger audience? This seems to me a much more interesting and useful way for theatre companies to use the Internet than those shoddy, barely watched trailers they keep putting up on YouTube...
Friday, May 15, 2009 03:06 PM
B'nai Brith asks Toronto mayor to shut down Seven Jewish Children
Oh, oh - here we go. Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, a play some critics allege is antisemitic, is finally igniting a proper furor in Canada.
At first it seemed as if the acclaimed British playwright's 10-minute "Play for Gaza" was going to pass through our country with little of the intense controversy that dogged it in England.
The political play had three sold-out performances in Montreal last Sunday, but while Adam Atlas, the Quebec Jewish Congress' president-elect, denounced the play in advance, he also said there would be no attempt to stop the play from going on.
Seven Jewish Children was also read in full and followed by a discussion on CBC Radio's Sunday Edition this weekend. (In the UK, the BBC had declined to broadcast a radio version, citing a need to remain impartial.)
But now that Seven Jewish Children is set to get a series of star-studded Toronto readings as part of Crow's Theatre and National Theatre School's Directors' Showcase and Exchange next week, the you-know-what is hitting the fan.
B'nai Brith Canada have taken outrage at the play to a whole new level and are actually trying to stop the readings from taking place.
In a press release sent out earlier today, Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of the Jewish advocacy organisation, called upon Toronto mayor David Miller to prevent the show from being performed at Theatre Passe Muraille, a theatre the city saved from closing two years ago.
Said Dimant: "The City of Toronto should not allow a venue that it funds to be the staging ground for a divisive play that promotes anti-Jewish hatred. As its name denotes, 'Seven Jewish Children' does not even pretend to target Israel exclusively. It is clearly aimed at maligning Jews, depicting them as oppressors of Palestinians, blood-thirsty aggressors and child killers. It disturbingly inverts history, using Holocaust imagery to allege that the Jews, once the victims, are actively teaching their own children callous disregard for the suffering of others."
"We call on Mayor Miller to ensure that our tax dollars are not inadvertently being used for the promotion of a play whose thrust is antisemitic. It is unthinkable that the City would allow this communal theatre to be used as a venue for promoting hatred and discord amongst its citizens, as this play threatens to do."
I guess we'll see how the mayor responds. (I've just asked him on Twitter.) I can only imagine that he'll decline to intervene. No one wants the City of Toronto to start second-guessing artistic decisions at the arts venues it supports.
I could, of course, see the City withdrawing its support from a theatre that presented hate speech. But it will be exceeding hard to argue that a play that has been performed in the UK, the US and Montreal, was read in full on the national broadcaster and is being acted by such esteemed artists as RH Thomson, Ann-Marie MacDonald and Rosemary Dunsmore is hate speech in the legal sense.
I'd say B'nai Brith has misplayed this one - all they're doing is attracting more attention to the production.
As I've blogged before, you can read Seven Jewish Children online and decide for yourself what to think of it. I'm going to keep mum about my thoughts until I attend the reading at Theatre Passe Muraille next week. Assuming the Mayor doesn't shut it down...
Friday, May 15, 2009 03:06 PM
Celebrating Canada's 0.3333 Tony nominations
The Tony nominations came out yesterday and Montrealer David Alvarez is up for a third of an award.
How's that? Well, 14-year-old Alvarez alternates in the title role of Billy Elliot: The Musical with two other boys, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish.
The trio are competing as one for leading actor in a musical against such singular sensations as Gavin Creel (Hair), Brian d'Arcy James (Shrek), Constantine Maroulis (Rock of Ages) and J. Robert Spencer (Next to Normal).
Have multiple people ever shared a single acting nod before? The LA Times's Tom O'Neil has tracked down four fractional precedents:
- In 1960, Lauri Peters, who played Liesl in The Sound of Music, was nominated for featured actress in a musical. But the full nomination was for "Lauri Peters and the Children", which meant she shared it with the other six Von Trapp children - two of which, of course, are actually boys. And so William Snowden and Joseph Stewart hold the dubious honour of being the only males ever to be nominated for a featured actress Tony.
- In 1966, Donal Donnelly and Patrick Bedford shared a nomination for leading actor in a play for Philadelphia, Here I Come They both played Gareth O'Donnell - a character who is split into two in Brian Friel's play as Gar Public and Gar Private.
- In 1975, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were jointly nominated - and won - for their roles in an Athol Fugard double-bill, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island. (It took their power combined to beat Henry Fonda, whose daughter Jane is up for a Tony this year for 33 Variations.)
- Most recently, in 1998, Emily Skinner and Alice Ripley earned a joint best actress in a musical nomination for playing Siamese twins in Side Show. They were beaten by Natasha Richardson, who died after a tragic skiing accident in Quebec earlier this year.
Fear not: If Alvarez, Kowalik and Kulish win in June, they won't have to melt down their Tony and split it in three or come up with some sort of time-sharing agreement. The New York Times reports that though the teenagers will have to share the glory, each will get his own statuette.
Friday, May 15, 2009 03:06 PM
Three short things about Daniel MacIvor
1. The Da Da Kamera production of Daniel MacIvor's lovely play A Beautiful View is being remounted right now at Tarragon Theatre right in Toronto. I saw it at Buddies three years ago and later ranked it as one of my top 20 "artastic" people/places/things of 2006. (Ah, back then on my lazy personal blog, I could make up words like "artastic" with impunity.)
I remember being shocked by A Beautiful View's surprise ending and debating it furiously with a friend after. (Ridiculous or amazing?) And I remember loving the low-key/offbeat performances from Tracy Wright and Caroline Gillis.
We're not re-reviewing, but I recommend it.
2. Volcano's Ross Manson emailed me yesterday with a link to a positive Philadelphia Inquirer review of Appetite, the dance-theatre show that you'll recall received a one-star review in The Globe and Mail from my colleague Paula Citron.
What hit me when I read it was: What Manson and company should really be getting worked up about isn't a single bad review, but that they had to wait until Appetite toured to Philadelphia to get a second opinion from a critic at a daily newspaper. The Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun and the National Post all skipped it.
I can safely say that Paula Citron's pan sent more people to see Appetite - and got more people talking about it - than those silences did... When you look at what's happening in other cities like Vancouver, where critics are dropping left, right and centre, I think it's reduced arts coverage, not arts coverage that people should be writing letters about. (And Manson does, I should note)
Anyway, what's the MacIvor link? Manson's email reminded me that I've been meaning to link to MacIvor's thoughts about the one-star review on his blog:
[T]here is something positive in this kind of over-the-top negative reaction. Having lived and worked in cities that lack any kind of real critical eye in the press (”Good work all round”) it becomes a bit of a you-win-you-lose situation. When all the reviews are good reviews they don't mean anything any more.
3. MacIvor's blog is always worth a read, but here's another great recent entry I feel is worth highlighting: In it, he describes watching his old friend Bryden MacDonald's new play, With Bated Breath, at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal. I hadn't realised that these two Canadian playwrights - who sit almost side by side on my bookcase - were both from Cape Breton and knew each other back in school.
Can anyone guess which two Canadian playwrights separate MacDonald and MacIvor on my shelves? (Ann-Marie MacDonald's to the left and Michael Lewis MacLennan's to the right.) I'll send my How Do You Solve a Problem Like Medea? T-shirt to whoever guesses right... Hint: One wrote a play featuring Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett, the other wrote a play partially set in a Tim Horton's.
Friday, May 15, 2009 02:42 PM
Flop flips: The Story of My Life up for four Drama Desk awards
The big news about the Drama Desk nominations announced yesterday was that 9 to 5, Dolly Parton's new musical based on the popular 1980 movie, is up for 15 awards. That's a new record in nods for these New York theatre awards, which are less important than the Tonys but still quite prestigious.
The previous DD record - 14 nominations - was first reached by Ragtime, then matched by The Producers, Hairspray and, most recently, everyone's favourite Canadian musical that could, The Drowsy Chaperone.
The biggest surprise in the nominations, however, was that 9 to 5 is competing with a new Canadian-written show for best musical: The Story of My Life.
This two-person "tuner", you may recall, ran for five performances in February, setting a new record itself - for least successful CanCon on Broadway.
But The Story of My Life's extremely short run and the disappointing reviews didn't stop it from picking up four nominations from the critics and journalists who vote on the Drama Desks. Neil Bartram is up for both best music and best lyrics, while Brian Hill is up for best book of a musical.
I don't think these ex pats have any chance up against the big hitters behind 9 to 5, Billy Elliott and Shrek: The Musical, but this is surely a case where it really is an honour just to be nominated. And it's a good sign that haven't heard the last of Bartram and Hill yet.
Nestruck on Theatre Contributors
J. Kelly Nestruck
J. Kelly Nestruck has covered theatre in Canada, as well as in New York, London, Dublin, Edinburgh and other thriving international scenes. He joined The Globe in February of 2008 and has been blogging in some form or another since February of 2003.