Monthly Archives: April 2018

In good Company

Russ Farmer as Bobby, Emily Smith as Marta. Photo credits Nanc Price.

Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company shows us a group of friends in their 30s, five married couples and the single guy, Bobby (Russ Farmer in the current Foote in the Door production).

In a series of gentle vignettes, we see glimpses of each couple’s relationship and challenges. We see that Bobby is friends with everybody, good company, as he spends time with each couple. Harry and Sarah (Stefan Rumak and Melanie Lafleur) talk to Bobby as a way of complaining about each other’s habits (his drinking, her eating sweets). He’s best man for Paul and Amy’s (Alan Cabral and Ruth Wong-Miller) wedding – or he would be, if they agree to get married. Joanne (Kärin Thomas) enjoys flirting with Bobby and telling him about her past husbands while devoted present husband Larry (Joe Garreck) looks on. Susan and Peter (Athena Gordon and Trevor J.) explain to Bobby that being divorced makes their marriage work. Bobby smokes weed with David and Jenny (Simon Yau and Kara Little). All of them fuss at Bobby about not being married and try to find out why he’s not married – and Bobby doesn’t seem to know either.

We also see Bobby with three love interests, naive flight attendant April (Victoria Suen, whom I last saw in Lizzie), Kathy, who’s moving away but says she would have liked to marry him (Alyssa Paterson), and Marta (Emily Smith), one of my favourite characters, who is wholeheartedly in love with New York City and with life.

And I should mention that it was fun to spot assistant director Gerald Mason playing bartender and what seemed to be a nightclub full of show orchestra members and assistant stage managers dancing in the dark.

It wasn’t the plot-heavy kind of production full of big character journeys and closure, but rather was full of lovely examples of longterm love and friendship and of people accepting who they are and being comfortable. My favourite part was “Getting Married Today” in which Ruth Wong-Miller’s character has hilarious physical and emotional range in a wedding dress. I also enjoyed “Side by Side by Side”, which was a great showcase of choreographer Adam Kuss’s contributions, and Bobby’s final solo “Being Alive”. There are also many other touching and/or delightful moments which I won’t tell you about so you can discover them for yourself, with just one hint: Trevor J. lets his hair down.

Russ Farmer as Bobby. Photo credit Nanc Price.

Ruth Wong-Miller as Amy in Company. Photo credit Nanc Price.

I admired how Morgan Kunitz’ direction integrated everyday smartphone use into a script from 1970 without looking anachronistic.

Company is playing at L’UniThéâtre until April 28th. And if you haven’t been to the big auditorium at La Cité yet this season, you will be pleasantly surprised by the new audience seating, which is much more comfortable than the previous seats.

Tracey Power’s Glory!

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Kate Dion-Richard, Gili Roskies, Katie Ryerson, Morgan Yamada, and Kevin Corey in GLORY. Photo: Barbara Zimonick. (Set & Lights: Narda McCaroll. Costumes: Cindy Wiebe.)

When I read that Calgary’s ATP would be putting on a new play about women hockey players, and specifically the Preston Rivulettes of the 1930s, I knew I needed to go to Calgary to see it. And I was right!

I cried a lot during the performance, because the portrayals of the young women and of their community’s responses were so familiar from my own experience of female hockey starting in the 1970s. I felt represented, understood, and honoured. “I’ve always wanted to play on a team!” enthuses future captain Hilda Ranscombe (Katie Ryerson). “Girls don’t play hockey!” retorts reluctant coach Herbert Fach (Kevin Corey).

The playwright Tracey Power (Chelsea Hotel) chose two pairs of sisters, Hilda and Nellie Ranscombe (Ryerson and Edmonton’s Morgan Yamada) and Marm and Helen Schmuck (Gili Roskies and Kate Dion-Richard) to represent the players, and created interesting distinct characters with enough backstory, conflict, and connections to be compelling. The historical background of the 1930s was essential to the story, filled in by the characters talking about their families and community and by listening to CRBC (later CBC) radio. One player couldn’t go to university because her father’s business was struggling and her brothers had lost their jobs; another wasn’t admitted to law school because she was Jewish.

Hockey games were represented on stage in stylized choreography (Power), with different movements and music for each game. Yamada was an agile and stubborn goaltender. Hard shots (of imaginary pucks) had me ducking in my seat. Set and lighting (Narda McCarroll) and costumes (Cindy Wiebe) support the storytelling. I was particularly impressed with the rapid movement of the rink-boards pieces to become changerooms, factory workrooms, and even a baseball park. Director James McDonald (formerly of the Citadel) and playwright Power paced the action well and kept the human stories to the forefront.

I have known of the Preston Rivulettes since I was a young hockey player and fan, looking at team photos and trophies in the old Preston Arena. I vaguely remember meeting Hilda and Nellie much later in their lives, at a Preston Trianglettes game, and finding it hard to comprehend that forty years earlier, they had played for provincial and national championships. In the 1970s there was no provincial or national governing body or championship for female hockey – but in the 1930s there was. The play Glory included enough of the documented facts to make me happy as a scholar, but more importantly captured perfectly what it is like for women to play the game they love despite many obstacles. I hope to tell some of the second-wave women’s-hockey stories on stage myself someday, and this play affirms my sense that they are worth telling.

“When we fight to win, we have a whole lot more at stake”, one of the characters in Glory says, explaining why fans find their matches exciting. And Hilda Ranscombe finishes with a monologue daydreaming about what will happen someday, despite the loss of competitions and opponents on the eve of war. Someday, she says to her teammates, there will be so many teams we won’t be able to play them all. And there will be women coaches. And women referees. And women announcers. And Olympic medals.

There are, Hilda, there are. Thank you.

Glory is playing at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary until April 21st.

Blue Stockings, by Jessica Swale

Lucy Vogue and Aidan Thomas in Blue Stockings. Photo: Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

Blue Stockings is set at the University of Cambridge, in 1896, and mostly at Girton, a women’s college of the university. It follows a study group of four young women in their first year at the college, Tess (Lucy Vogue), Carolyn (Monica Lefurgey), Celia (Jocelyn Jay), and Maeve (Maggie Salopek), showing their passion for learning science, their struggles with learning to disagree with sources and defend their ideas, and their commitment to future careers in teaching, research, and medicine. The play also shows how they are treated by faculty male and female, by their male peers, and by College staff including a chaperone (Julie Sinclair) and a maid willing to circumvent the chaperone (Rebecca Collins).

I was pleased to see the way the script touched on many issues of women’s education which were not black-and-white. The male faculty’s attitudes ranged from enthusiastically supportive (Dave Wolkowski as physics lecturer) to pseudoscientifically condescending (Martin Stout as renowned psychiatrist). The head of the women’s college (Elizabeth Marsh) is single-minded in her attempts to gain degree-seeking status for the young women through the university Senate and vote of members. This cause drives her to disavow any connection with the too-radical suffragist cause and to expel a student who is needed at home because letting her stay might be used as a demonstration that women’s education hurts families. The students also sometimes find themselves torn between their passion for study and the temptations of romance, with significant consequences.

Director Laura Ly used a cast of 19 to portray the 25 characters, and set designer Alan Westen used rotating backdrops and moving furniture to present various university settings.

If, like myself, you learned about the history of women’s university education in England through Dorothy Sayers’ wonderful 1935 novel Gaudy Night, you may be unsurprised by the women’s constant need to justify their presence, but surprised by some of the history. Gaudy Night is set at Oxford rather than Cambridge, which explains the main difference.

Blue Stockings plays at the Walterdale Theatre until Saturday April 14th, including a matinee today. Advance tickets are at Tix on the Square and same-day tickets are at the door.

To separate, to cling, to Cleave

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One character in Elena Belyea’s new play Cleave explains the concept of words that are autoantonyms – words that have two near-opposite meanings, like screen, fast, or bound. This gives the viewer a hint toward unpacking the play’s title, as it may refer to characters clinging together or being split apart, drawing towards new choices in their lives or detaching from unwanted ones.

Like many of my favourite stories on stage, on screen, or in library books, the narrative of Cleave shows the separate but intersecting objectives of several characters through a cusp time in their lives. Four of the characters are part of a family, parents (Dave Horak and Elena Porter) who turn out to have their own secret unhappy histories and teenage children (Emma Houghton and Luc Tellier). I was particularly delighted by the subtlety of Emma Houghton’s character journey, as I had misjudged her on first appearance as a sulky shallow cheerleader wheedling money out of her dad for new workout clothes in which to make an impression.

The other two characters are a new kid at school, 17 year old Aaron who is intersex and trans (Jordan Fowlie), and his therapist. As he explains to his new therapist (Natasha Napoleao) in the first scene, he’s moved away from his parents in order to avoid the stigma of transition in a small town and in order to get the therapist’s recommendation he needs before gender-affirming surgery. The therapy scenes provide useful exposition of the background concepts of intersex and trans lives. Sometimes Aaron is explaining things to his therapist and sometimes she is providing vocabulary and information to the audience while connecting with Aaron. They also give important insight into Aaron’s thoughtful sarcastic character by providing a context in which he is relatively open, compared to his careful cautious demeanour at school, with his new friend’s family, and in another situation.

I loved the scenes with the two outsider boys sitting on the school steps not quite looking at each other and not rushing into friendship. And the wordless gestures of trust on both sides of that relationship in the final scene moved me immensely. I can imagine happy endings in the future for at least some of the characters, but the play ends appropriately with the loose ends not all tied up.

I also want to write about another scene that horrified me and hypnotized me in ways that also thrilled me as a fan of compelling stories. But I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else. So I will put a brief comment about it at the end of this post.

Cleave is playing at the Backstage Theatre until Saturday April 7th. There is an allowance of Pay-What-You-Can tickets available at the door for every performance.

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The broken beauty of Betroffenheit

Ephemeral Pleasures

A few notes to save along with the theatre programs, restaurant bills, and concert handstamps