Category Archives: Theatre

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Aactor Aaron Craven (er, actor) describes some unexpected happenings on closing night of the play I saw in Vancouver last week.

Aaron Craven's avatarEVERYONE HAS THE MICROPHONE

Half hour to curtain. We actors were finishing off our vocal warmups on the theatre floor.  A sold out house was streaming into the lobby, the pre-show wine and conversation buzzing. This was to be  the closing night performance of David Mamet’s RACE, my theatre company’s play that had sold out several times during its run in Vancouver and been so well received by local theatre critics and audiences.  The collective energy in the building was crackling and the cast and crew were hyped for one final go at this sublime piece of theatre.

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I guess the show was just a bit too hot.

7:35pm.  The fire alarm starts to ring.  Our first thought, of course: false alarm.  Then, the technical director notes smoke at the back of the building.  The cast exits into the back alley, the audience is cleared onto the front sidewalk as fire engines stream in.

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The Prairie Bowl – a different kind of tournament!

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I’ve played in, watched, and volunteered at lots of hockey tournaments, so I know the routine.  You see the list of teams coming from other towns and you’re excited about seeing new talent, while wondering whether the home-town kids are really as good as you thought.  You might get there early on the first night and see the organizers setting up the charts on the wall where they will update the standings throughout the weekend.  You wonder whether the winter weather might be slowing down some of the out-of-town competitors, so it’s a relief to see each new cluster of unfamiliar and bewildered faces get welcomed by the organizers.

The lobby fills up, because lots of fans want to be part of this inaugural event.  You pick up a program and find out that the visitors are from Winnipeg, Calgary, and Red Deer.  A second Calgary team starts play Saturday night, and like any partisan hockey parent you wonder whether that’s fair.  You line up at the concession stand and stock up on red licorice – but you notice that they don’t serve burnt percolator coffee, and they do have beer.  That’s a clue that this is a different kind of tournament.

After they tear your ticket and let you into the auditorium, you get more clues.  It’s warm!  And the seats in Zeidler Hall are comfortable!  The MC introduces a panel of judges who will hold up scorecards, but you’re used to that from watching figure skating in the Olympics.

The first game is between Red Deer and Winnipeg.  The team captains, Serge from Red Deer and RobYn from Winnipeg, shake hands, and the action starts.  And the audience starts to laugh.  Because what you’re watching is the first-ever Prairie Bowl of Theatresports, the somewhat-competitive loosely-codified short-form improvisational-theatre scheme invented in 1981 in Calgary by Keith Johnstone and nurtured locally by Rapid Fire Theatre.

If you’re a frequent Rapid Fire attendee, you’ll love seeing the best of the Rapid Fire company mixing it up with less familiar performers from the other teams, all on top of their game.  On the first night of play, there were lots of jokes with good-natured local colour – the Donut Mill in Red Deer, the Calgary-Edmonton hockey rivalry, crime in Winnipeg, and the lack of tournament representation from Saskatchewan. Apparently there is improv in Saskatoon and Regina but they couldn’t make the schedule work this time.  There was singing (spontaneous musical numbers about dishwashing), dancing (expressive movement in a Chinese restaurant), and physical comedy (the garbageman with a sore back finding a dead body over and over again, the four-bodied drummer showing his/their moves).  Joel Crichton provided musical cues and atmosphere on the keyboard, last night’s MCs were locals Kory Mathewson and Joe Vanderhelm, and members of all teams took turns as judges and as opening-act free-improv players.

I don’t know if this is the kind of tournament where they give Most Valuable Player awards, but RobYn Slade of Outside Joke (Winnipeg) and Ryan Hildebrandt of the Improv Guild (Calgary) are both delightfully expressive.  It was also reassuring to see the judges assess a penalty (sitting out one round while wearing the Ring of Shame) to a visiting player who used a rape metaphor, and to see clear acceptance from everyone on stage that the penalty was appropriate and the rape analogy inappropriate, establishing the boundaries of respect and good taste in a genre without many boundaries.

If you enjoy watching improv theatre, or if you’re curious about what this phenomenon is all about, this is a good weekend to come check it out.  There are two shows Saturday night, at 7:30pm and 10:00 pm, and the playoffs are on Sunday night starting at 7:30 pm, all in Ziedler Hall at the Citadel Theatre.  Tickets are available at the door for $12, or you can order over the phone or on-line here.  There is convenient indoor parking in the Library Parkade (which seems to run underneath everything on the east side of downtown) for $5 cash.  You can also get to the Citadel from the Churchill LRT station without going outdoors.  Outside Joke from Winnipeg are in the early lead after two rounds of play, but the scores have been very close and all teams are still in the running.

David Mamet’s Race – Which could have been Sex. Or Rape. Or Power.

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Race, by David Mamet, Mitch and Murray Productions, Studio 16 in Vancouver.  Runs til December 1st.

On my recent trip to Vancouver, I took one evening away from family celebrations to see a play.  The one I chose was the Mitch and Murray production of David Mamet’s 2009 play Race, directed by David Mackay.  The actors are Kwesi Ameyaw, Craig Erickson, Aaron Craven, and Marsha Regis.  An interesting change for me, coming from reading theatre programs in Edmonton, was that all these actors have resumés full of Vancouver-filmed-television credits (Supernatural, Fringe, the Da Vinci and Stargate series, etc).

Race is set in the conference room of a law office, in a city in the USA.  I don’t think the city is specified, but I imagined Chicago and that worked.  The new client, a rich 40ish white man, has been charged with sexually assaulting a younger black woman.  The lawyers are a white man and a black man, partners in the law firm, and their younger associate (or possibly articling student), a black woman.

The story was more about the interactions among the lawyers than about the case or the accused, or at least the interesting parts were.  And of course it wasn’t just about race and the American conversations about race, it was about race and gender and power and the interplay among them.  I could easily see how it was part of the same oeuvre as Oleanna.  It’s also very much about the factors other than objective facts which are relevant in a legal case.

I didn’t feel like anything got resolved in the story, but I don’t think I was supposed to.  The director’s notes in the program acknowledge his discomfort as a privileged white Canadian directing a play by a conservative white American about race relations.  But I would have liked to also see some acknowledgement that as men they might be finding it equally difficult to be telling a story about a woman’s rape.  The one female character on stage, Susan, was the younger black lawyer working for the two male partners in the firm.  Although the rape victim was not a character on stage in the play, watching the other characters interact with Susan showed important glimpses into their treatment of gender, race, and power differentials.  Given this awareness, I found myself conscious of and uncomfortable with the way Susan was dressed.  Her employers are wearing comfortable-looking men’s business clothes, one with a buttoned vest and the other with a suit jacket on.  But she is wearing a very snug collared blouse and skirt, bare legs, and heels, which draw attention to her body shape.  I can’t say that any of that would be inappropriate for a young woman lawyer on a day she’s not going to court – all I know about women lawyers in the USA is from The Good Wife and Damages – but it sure shows that women’s choices get subjected to a different kind of scrutiny than men do.

I don’t think I would like David Mamet as a person, or most of his characters whom I’ve seen in plays and movies.  But I really enjoy the dialogue in his work.  It’s so snappy and snarky and clever and at the same time the disjointed interrupted repetitions sound credible.

The play ran about 80 minutes.  It had three acts or scenes, marked by sudden complete darkening of the stage.  I don’t think there was any music.  The set was an appealing simple representation of a conference room in a small unpretentious law firm, with files, a water service, yellow pads and pencils set out on a glass table, hanging panels creating the sense of walls, and one piece of art hanging on the wall which kept distracting me into trying to figure out how it was illuminated.

The theatre, Studio 16, is in a Francophone community centre just south of Granville Island on the way to Kitsilano.  It had about 90 seats on low risers along two sides of the performance space.

I’m left feeling like the play didn’t really tell me things I hadn’t known before; it just made me think about them.  And it didn’t actually make me as uncomfortable as it could have.  I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, because as an evening’s entertainment I don’t have complaints.

Mad Forest

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Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill (1990), University of Alberta Abbedam Productions, Timms Centre for the Arts Second Playing Space, last performance Sunday Nov 18th 7:30 pm.  $12 adults.

This play was set around the time of the revolution in Romania in late 1989.   There are extensive program notes about the events of the revolution and about Nicolae Ceauşescu, but I still spent most of the intermission reading Wikipedia on my phone, because somehow this chapter of history didn’t really get into my long-term memory the way Tiananmen Square and the removal of the Berlin Wall did that year.

The play had three parts (three acts?).  In the first and third acts, small segmented scenes told the stories of two families in a time just before the revolution and shortly afterwards.  Many of the scenes were introduced by a performer walking across the stage pronouncing a language-study sentence in Romanian (I assume) and in English.  The sentences sounded innocuous and typical of a language-study book “We are buying meat”.”We visit our grandparents on a sunny day.” “The dog is hungry” but they all described the subsequent scenes.
It wasn’t clear to me whether the characters from the first-third act narrative were in the second act, which was quite different in style.  A large number of performers were recounting the events of the week of the revolution, in a documentary-like manner.  Unlike the dialogue of the other narrative, in this act many of the speeches were delivered in idiomatic and accented English, which added to the impression that the playwright was reproducing stories told to her on her research trip to Romania right after the revolution.

The intermission happened right after the narrative of the revolution, so I was curious about what was still to come.  What came next, apparently, was that things got more complicated.  We found out more about the characters in Act 1, and about how the revolution and their involvements changed things for them.  We became aware of resentments and prejudices about Hungarians, about gypsies, about people who might have been Party members or informers before the revolution, working class or professionals, orphans in orphanages and families who adopted them.  We saw festive young people acting out the final moments of the dictator Ceauşescu and his wife.  We heard a lot of speculation and gnawing persistence about the events of the critical few days, particularly what it meant that the power to the TV station had not been cut off, and it was my impression that none of those questions was answered.

There was also an odd interleaved scene between a vampire (come out of the mountains because of the blood of revolution) and an abandoned dog.  I couldn’t decide whether it was funny, spooky, or poignant.

After seeing various conversations and interactions among the characters feeling their ways into life after the revolution, all the characters were on stage for a wedding-reception scene at the end, but this didn’t mean that their animosities had been resolved.  There were fights, disclosure of secrets, and insults, until the mother of the bride called for dancing and everyone danced.

This was a student-run production with a large cast and crew, directed by Elana Bizovie.  The Second Playing Space is a plain room (a black-box performance space), set up for this show with seats on risers on four sides.   Most scenes were played either on a large central platform or near one of the corner entrances, with the Revolution narrative all in the centre with people running in and out and around.

For once I’ve managed to write up a show before the end of the run, so if this sounds interesting you can catch it Sunday night.

Next to Normal

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I knew I wanted to see Next to Normal as soon as a friend in California recommended it last year.  So when I saw that it was part of the Citadel Theatre’s 2012-13 season I bought a pair of tickets right away, thinking that for this show I’d probably want company.  Unfortunately a cascade of complications overcame all my would-be companions, and I ended up going by myself to the last show of the run.  I thought it was great.  I’d been listening to the Broadway recording for a few months, before the show.  When it looked like I wasn’t going to have company, I decided to protect my emotions by reading the plot summary on Wikipedia.  I don’t know whether I regret that choice.

My general impression of the set was shiny.  Shiny, and the opposite of cozy.  The play was set in Seattle, so sometimes there were shimmery metallic representations of rainfall seen out the windows.  Most of the scenes were in and around a two-story house designed by an architect, and the rest were in medical settings, so it made sense that the framework was all shiny metal trusses (probably they were polished aluminum and lit to look like chromium) and the furniture was all glass, chrome, and black leather.  When I noticed the lighting, it was on the blue side.  There was a shock-therapy scene emphasised by flashing lights which didn’t seem at all out of place in the rest of the set and lighting.   What we saw before the play started was magical – it appeared to be a lighted house far away in a field of stars, and then somehow it looked like that faraway house became the stage set.

I was prepared for the story to be powerful and disturbing.  But it was also much funnier than I expected.  The protagonist Diana, played by Kathryn Akin, was witty, angry, and very likeable.  The actor’s timing and body language showed the character in a wide range of mental, biochemical, and emotional states.  Her daughter Natalie was also easy to identify with, while the Henry character was mostly a humorous contrast and distraction.  I found the husband more self-serving than sympathetic, which certainly made the story more interesting than if he had fitted that stereotype of patient spouse.

The narrative moved quickly, with very short songs and lots of echoes and reprises, and not much dialogue between them.  The voices and orchestra were good and well-balanced.

The performance at the Citadel Theatre was a co-production with Theatre Calgary, directed by Ron Jenkins.

Spring Awakening: two local productions

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This year I’ve seen two local productions of  Spring Awakening, the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater Broadway musical based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 stage play.  I know there was a Citadel Young Company production last year, but I didn’t see that. I haven’t seen or read the original play, but I’m going to get the script from our library and read it.  I saw the Strathcona Alumni Company production at the Fringe festival, and then the Grant MacEwan Theatre Arts production in early November directed by Jim Guedo.

It’s interesting, seeing two productions so close together and comparing them.  The sets, staging, and dance moves were very similar.  One thing that’s bothered me since encountering the play for the first time at the Fringe was how much the story seemed focused on the two main male characters, Melchior and Moritz, rather than the main female character, Wendla.  But after seeing the MacEwan production, I had a more balanced impression.  I don’t know if it was because the actor playing Wendla in the MacEwan production, Kayla Nickel, was stronger, or whether there were some directorial choices involved, but I was more comfortable with that aspect of the MacEwan production.

When I first saw the Fringe production, not knowing the story ahead of time, I felt like parts of it dragged a bit.  This second viewing was at an advantage for me, then, because this time around it felt like a stark compelling series of events rushing to some awful conclusions.  And I was better able to take in some nuances, because I wasn’t quite as busy being shocked.  For example, in the scene about disclosure of child abuse I hadn’t noticed before that the abuse-victim and the abuse-survivor finish the song together in a way that feels like support and solidarity, the only possible way to make that bit at least somewhat hopeful.

I didn’t find the Moritz character quite as likeable in the MacEwan production as I did in the Strathcona Alumni one, but I don’t know why.

Bloodless

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On a business trip to Toronto, I read the tourist magazines looking for some kind of theatre event that would fit in my schedule and my budget.  I considered The Normal Heart at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, but it was sold out at the only times I was free.  I ended up choosing “Bloodless: The Trial of Burke and Hare”, a new Canadian Theatre 20  musical about the serial murderers in 19th century Edinburgh who sold their victims’ bodies to a medical school.  It was at one of the big Mirvish theatres, the Panasonic Theatre, which is a modern functional space on Yonge Street with a tiny lobby and the bathrooms in the basement, rather than one of the ornate refurbished theatres like the Elgin or Royal Alex.  I picked this show because it seemed less predictable or tourist-oriented than most of them. People who go to a matinee of a musical on a weekday seem to be mostly old people or school groups.

Reviewers didn’t like it much, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was neat that it got its start as a Winnipeg Fringe show three years ago.  There were about 14 people in the cast, with the ensemble smoothly filling various minor roles and moving scenery between scenes.  I liked the way that it started out with a sort of likeable-scoundrels tone but gradually darkened as it drew us in, showing conflicts between the conspirators as they attempt to define and redefine what’s not okay, and showing the disturbing class-based double standards, depending on who the victim was and also contrasting the doctor who purchased the bodies and the hand-to-mouth labourers who provided them.

The sets were simple and not distracting.  The period costumes were fun to look at.  The production is new enough that it doesn’t have a page on Wikipedia or a cast recording on iTunes, and there wasn’t any souvenir merchandise for sale in the lobby either.

A Few Good Men

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Last weekend I saw Aaron Sorkin’s play A Few Good Men at the Citadel Theatre. Maybe I should have bought a season subscription, but I was more excited about some of the offerings than others, and I couldn’t buy a subscription on line or see the prices by the time I thought about it. So I got one really fabulous seat for the first performance, instead. (Row C, centre).

I never saw the movie, so I didn’t know more than the basics of the story beforehand. I thought it was really good. The thing that impressed me the most was that although everyone was in uniform with the bearing of military personnel and the expressionless faces of enlisted Marines, the actors managed to convey a lot of information about the characters just in small changes in stance or facial movement. And because we knew that they weren’t going to make those things obvious, the audience (or at least me) was working hard at paying attention.

The set was not elaborate but it set the mood and it made it easy to tell which scenes happened in which location. It made use of a rotating thing in the middle of the stage to bring different bits to the front.

The story had a satisfying resolution, but it also brought up a bunch of more complicated questions about right and wrong. And I liked it that the one female character (Lora Brovold), her story didn’t turn into a romance.

Since then, I’ve also watched the 1992 movie, which is full of famous actors. It was good, and very similar, but I actually preferred watching the play. Because instead of letting me find out from scratch who the characters were, it felt like the Jack Nicholson character was just loudly Jack Nicholson, and so on. Again, I was hugely relieved that although the Demi Moore and Tom Cruise characters come to respect each other, they didn’t end up romantically engaged.

The tragedy of Fanny Gabor, and theatrical asides

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I saw the musical Spring Awakening at the Fringe, and I liked it but found it depressing. Parts were compelling and parts sort of dragged. I also really liked some of the music. Since then I’ve been listening to the Broadway-version soundtrack and the music’s really grown on me, and I’ve been hearing a lot about the show from an actor friend who is very fond of it. So I guess I’ve changed my mind about not wanting to see it again.

Grant McEwan is going to be performing Spring Awakening at the end of October and first weekend of November. I’m going to go see it on the first Saturday in November.

Also, I’m going to see Next To Normal the weekend after that – that’s the musical about the effects of mental illness on a family, which a friend in California recommended last year.

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In Spring Awakening, in the song “And Then There Were None”, the despairing teenage character Moritz has written to his best friend’s mother, asking her for help, specifically money to flee to America which he thinks is the only solution to his problems. The friend’s mother, Fanny Gabor, responds to him in a spoken-word monologue, and he sings his anger and frustration about her answer, now seeing no way out except suicide.

The play is about the teenagers and their troubles. It’s not about Fanny Gabor. But I keep thinking about her. She’s only in a few scenes of the play, but you can see that she’s a kind person who pays attention to her son and his friend, who respects them and wants the best for them. She won’t give Moritz the money to escape, partly because she doesn’t have it and partly because she doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She reassures him that she likes and respects him, she offers to intervene with his angry parents, she points out that lots of successful men had trouble in school, and she directly addresses his veiled hints of suicidal plans. She does exactly what I’d hope to do in that situation.

As far as I’m concerned, Fanny Gabor does everything right.

It’s not enough.

And because the play isn’t about her, we don’t see any more about that, except that she’s one of the people putting a flower on Moritz’ grave in the next song. She goes on to worry about her own son, who’s got himself in a different kind of mess, and nobody in the play has an unequivocally happy ending because it’s not that kind of play.

The more I listen to the recording, the more Fanny Gabor reminds me of me, though. I like supporting and appreciating young people and like Fanny Gabor I’m flattered when they consider me a friend. And when they’re in trouble, I worry about them and I do what I can to help them, and I try to make choices for that help that are balanced and appropriate.

Some of my friendships are more balanced and reciprocal than others. Some of the help I’ve provided has been rewarding for me. And sometimes I’ve been sad and angry to discover that the person is unwilling or unable to take my advice, or that the help provided isn’t sufficient to enable the person to rescue himself or herself in the way I’d envisioned.

Fanny Gabor’s story reminds me that those are the costs of being a compassionate person and an amateur helper. And her story also reminds me that maybe I’ve been lucky so far. I haven’t yet encountered a situation where my help wasn’t enough to deter someone from suicide. But I might. No matter how good I am at saying and doing the right things, that’s not going to be within my control. And that would really suck.

All I can do is to be thoughtful about who I reach out to and what I do and say, to have realistic expectations of how I might make a difference for my friends, to let them know how I want them to treat me, and to take care of myself.

Five musicals at the Fringe

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In 2012 I saw five musicals at the Fringe theatre festival.

Middleton a folk musical.  This was of uneven quality. The accompanying recorded music was sometimes amplified too loud to be able to hear the lyrics. It didn’t quite work for me and I’m not sure why not. There were some comic/heartwarming characters typical of a musical, there were some big issues and some funny bits, there was one very good song about being a victim of domestic violence, but I ended up restless and disappointed. Middleton is the town in the Annapolis Valley where I bought my brown apple-applique quilt on my bike trip.

Spring Awakening: a musical, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson:  Both of these had large casts of local young people. Both of them had professional microphones and amplification used properly, and the music was by live small orchestras, all of which was an improvement over Middleton, which I saw the first  weekend of the festival.

Both of them had musical scores that I would call alt-rock or punk, which at first seemed bizarrely anachronistic in the period pieces, but then I realised that any other kind of “show tunes” would be equally anachronistic. And I liked the music a lot in both shows. Spring Awakening had more songs that I could see buying and listening to again though.

Both of them had extremely partisan crowds of young friends who were very responsive. In Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, there was a bunch of appropriate heckling from the back that I couldn’t tell if it was scripted or spontaneous.

If you look up Spring Awakening on Wikipedia, you can see that it was originally a scandalous stage play of the late 19th century, made into a Broadway musical about six years ago. I can see why it was scandalous, if it was anything near as explicit about sexual issues of adolescents and their consequences as the musical is. It was mostly not a happy story, and it couldn’t have been with integrity. I thought it was a good show well done, and I might buy some of the music, but I don’t really want to see it again.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson had a very different mood, that I don’t know how to describe. Way beyond tongue in cheek to making fun of everything. There were a few serious points, like the problems of direct democracy and the disconnect between a Washington elite and the needs of the frontier people, and it was clear that the main objection to Jackson that the scriptwriter and performers had was his role in the Trail of Tears and earlier ruin of Indian nations.

I’m curious about the economics of Fringe shows. I’m assuming that they only reason these two companies can afford to put on these large-cast shows is that the actors don’t need to make enough money to put food on the table etc, and that their producers might also be getting donations for costumes and stuff – and also, they must have a waiver or subsidy of royalties. Spring Awakening was done by a company of recent alumni from Strathcona High School, with a director and music-director who teach and run student theatre there. The production felt more polished and disciplined than Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Fiorello! – I missed this in the regular Fringe time, but it was an unofficial holdover at the Varscona Theatre. It’s a musical about Fiorello LaGuardia, the anti-corruption New York politician in the 1920s and 1930s. I enjoyed it. It had some cutesy-stereotype-y stuff but the pace was good. The number where he was campaigning on street corners in different neighbourhoods, in English in one verse, then in Italian in the next and in Yiddish after that, was great. Donovan Workun, a local improv guy, played the title role.

Reefer Madness – In the holdovers weekend I went back to the Westbury for Reefer Madness, the 1998 musical. I didn’t see any programs, but I was more caught up in it than for many other shows. It was really funny. Some of the music was catchy and some wasn’t my thing. There were 6 actors each playing 1-2 main characters and some other attributes and chorus. There was a hilarious blasphemous bit with Jesus in gold lamé shorts. I kept thinking about the similarities with Rocky Horror Picture Show – the innocent young couple subverted and seduced in a den of depravity, the didactic lecturer telling the story, the other characters in the reefer house and their interactions with the boss, etc. At one point the actor playing the didactic lecturer was then playing Franklin D Roosevelt, in a push wheelchair with a lap blanket, so that made me think even more of the guy in Rocky Horror. I guess Rocky Horror Picture Show (1977) was playing on the tropes of the original 1936 scare-tactics movie and others of that genre – but since I’d never seen it, I didn’t realise it until now.

One of the reviews, I think in the Vue, alluded to how the dramatic warnings about marijuana are now known to be so ridiculous that it’s easy to laugh at, but that it’s disturbing to be realising that if you substituted heroin or crack, they are or might be true. Which was creepy, for me too.