Tag Archives: christina odell

Two big musicals of alternate-history – Brigadoon and Hamilton!

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Brigadoon ensemble. Photo by EPIC photography.

I got to watch big musicals two nights in a row last weekend, with fireworks in between. Talk about spectacle!

ELOPE is performing the Lerner and Loewe classic Brigadoon at the Westbury Theatre, running until this coming Saturday July 9th. Jon Shields is directing. With a cast of about twenty-nine and about a dozen musicians (Sally Hunt, music director), the deep Westbury stage was full but not crowded. In the story (which I vaguely knew ahead of time – I think I saw the ending of the movie once?), two young American men from 1947 (Mathew Glenn and Randall Scott MacDonald) are lost in the woods in Scotland, and discover a mysterious town from 200 years earlier. This allows for lots of local festive colour (with plaids and dancing), as they arrive on a day that two young residents of the town (Lilly Hauck and Brendan Smith) are getting married. I got distracted by trying to figure out the size of the population (were were just seeing a few of them or all of them?) and whether it was sustainable, but a more interesting question was whether everyone stuck there actually wanted to be there. Of course, the visitors are swept up in the life of the town, with one of them falling for the bride’s older sister Fiona (Christina O’Dell) and the other one being targeted by the, um, outgoing and vivid Meg (Kathleen Sera). O’Dell has a spectacular voice which is well suited to Fiona.

I only recognized one song in Brigadoon, “Almost Like Being in Love”. I enjoyed watching the interestingly diverse ensemble of villagers, and I appreciated the costuming (Julieanna Lazowski).

If you like classical large-cast musicals, you can get tickets to Brigadoon through Tix on the Square or at the door.

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The next night, I saw the Broadway Across Canada touring production (the #AndPeggy cast or third North American touring cast) of Hamilton. It is in town for a three-week run (most BAC shows are here for one week), with a rush-seat lottery operating through a phone app, which is how I was able to see it.

I do not know the US founding-fathers’ history in detail and I didn’t grow up with ownership to the story. As for Hamilton the phenomenon, I’d listened to the cast recording, read lots of articles about Lin-Manuel Miranda and his choice to cast performers of colour, and watched the Disney+ filmed version, so I had a pretty good idea what to expect.

The BAC production completely satisfied my expectations, and exceeded them. I was seated up close, so the cast of 21 on the proscenium stage felt like they were surrounding me. With multiple levels, side balconies, people drifting in and out of scenes and observing in corners, there was always lots to watch. Julius Thomas III played Alexander Hamilton, and we had understudies Milika Cherée and Charlotte Mary Wen playing sisters Eliza and Angelica Schuyler. I thought Charlotte Mary Wen was especially compelling. The actor playing King George, Rick Negron, interpreted the part quite differently from the Jonathan Groff version I’d seen filmed, losing some momentum in favour of Christopher-Walken-esque momentous pauses. But the audience still reacted strongly to him, someone near me even shouting out about it while Negron was singing. The movement in the show was great, especially the energy of a couple of ensemble numbers with no music. And the songs varied widely in genre with lots of earworm-catchy parts.

Hamilton tickets are available through Ticketmaster, for shows in Edmonton until July 10th and then in Calgary.

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COMING UP NEXT: Walterdale Theatre’s production of Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses opens tomorrow, Wednesday July 6th, 8 pm. I got to see a few scenes in an early rehearsal and I’m fascinated to see more of these quirky characters. Tickets directly from Walterdale online, or at the door.

A Little Night Music

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The other night, before the wildfire smoke blew in to town, I was walking in my neighbourhood in the evening about how lucky I am to be living at this latitude, with the magical long twilights as we approach the summer solstice.  The long light warm evenings feel rich with extra opportunity.  And I wondered how to share that feeling.

Last night I watched Foote in the Door’s production of A Little Night Music, a Sondheim musical based on an Ingmar Bergen movie directed by Mary-Ellen Perley.  It’s set in Sweden around 1900.  The second act takes place at a country estate, much of it outdoors.  And there are songs about that magical extended twilight, songs that describe the feelings better than I ever could, with lighting (Sarah Karpyshin) and abstract set pieces (Leland Stelck) to support them.

A Little Night Music has a cast of 18.  At first I kept referring to my program to figure out who was who and how they were connected.  But later on, it just made more delightful threads of plot arcs to follow, to wonder how the cat’s-cradle of romances and affairs would untangle itself.   Commenting on the liaisons and prospects of the others, and on the nature of love in general, are a grandmother (Pauline Farmer) and granddaughter  Fredrika (Rebecca Erin Curtis, a MacEwan grad I will watch for again).

I loved the detail, consistent through the show, that star actress Desiree (Glynis Price) was surrounded by clutter and chaos – stockings and scarves draped over her furniture, enough male visitors that they cross paths in her apartment – her current lover Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Russ Farmer) and her former lover Fredrik Egerman (Morgan Smith), both sporting mustaches of importance.  Count Malcolm’s indignant wife Charlotte (Monica Roberts), a likeably sarcastic character, comes up with a unlikely scheme to defend both herself and Egerman’s young wife Anne (Ruth Wong-Miller) from Desiree’s designs on their husbands.   Anne is an astonishingly naive 18 year old.  She claims to love married life but seems oblivious to being more passionate about teasing her stepson (Allan Cabral) than about her much-older husband.   It was “amusing” (as the character often says) to watch Wong-Miller in this role, since she usually plays characters with more agency but was completely believable as the protected and petted young wife.   Desiree’s daughter Fredrika, canonically about 13, seemed to be wiser with more understanding of the world and relationships, just from listening to her grandmother’s stories of liaisons and from having toured with her mother’s acting troupes.

Monica Morgan night music

Monica Roberts, as Charlotte, and Morgan Smith, as Fredrik, in A Little Night Music. Photo by Nanc Price Photography.

There were a lot of bits in this production that had me laughing out loud – some of them were funnier to me than to other members of the audience.  The part where Fredrika’s grandmother says that she brought Fredrika home to do a better job raising her because “ Stage managers are not nannies, dear; they don’t have the talent.”  The bit where Fredrika takes Anne to watch Desiree on stage in a French comedy, the play-within-a-play a more exaggerated version of the grandmother’s liaison stories and the contemporary affairs and intrigues, and Brian Ault playing a footman or herald in a truly bizarre wig.

One of the common features of Sondheim musicals is complex music.  Daniel Belland is musical director, with an ensemble of eight other musicians.   As well as the characters named above, there are several servants, some with their own romantic plotlines, and a chorus of six, singing clever harmonies and hinting at further layers of complication (“Remember”) that we don’t get to see.

A Little Night Music is a musical for people who like musicals, a change from this company’s last production, the stage-musical version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  It’s long but it moves along at a good pace and I was surprised when it was already time for intermission.  It’s playing at La Cité Francophone, until June 8th, with tickets through Tix on the Square.

 

 

 

She Loves Me!

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The other night I watched a musical that was new to me.  Not new to other people, She Loves Me (book by Joe Masteroff, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and music by Jerry Bock) first hit Broadway in 1964, and is opening again next spring.  The Hungarian play on which it’s based was also the basis for the 1998 romantic comedy movie You’ve Got Mail.

The current production, in the Amphitheatre at Faculte St Jean (across the street from La Cite), by Foote in the Door Productions, is directed by Barb Mah, with music direction by Michael Clark.  The setting, a 1930s perfume shop in Budapest, was simply evoked with shades of pink and green in backdrops, counters, and sales-staff shopcoats.  The shop seemed like the equivalent of something like The Body Shop or Lush – selling a variety of necessities and luxuries, focusing on customer experience, and doing a huge business in presents before Christmas.

As in the usual workplace-set story, there’s a cast of characters that includes a boss (James Toupin) with some unreasonable demands and prejudices, an eager-to-please errand boy (Sam Banigan), and a loyal sidekick (Dustin Berube), and in this case there’s also some sub-plot material in the affair between co-workers (Christina O’Dell and Mitch Caddick).  The story soon focuses on Georg (Russ Farmer), a senior employee mistrusted by the boss, who confides that he’s been writing letters through a lonely-hearts correspondence club to Dear Friend.

On a busy day in the shop, then, in bounces Amalia (Ruth Wong-Miller), costumed in a beautiful peacock shade of blue that stands out dramatically from the rest of the show palette, and she quickly talks herself into sales work with a very funny demonstration.  Amalia is also a member of the Lonely Hearts correspondence club, and you can guess the broad strokes of where the story goes from there.

My favourite bits of the show were some of the ensemble numbers with dancing, the stylized couples in the restaurant with the snooty waiter (Kent Sutherland), and the Twelve Days of Christmas shopping crowds in the store.  Six musicians behind the scenes provided accompaniment, atmosphere, and extra entertainment, and the singing was delightful.  Ruth Wong-Miller has a strong pleasant soprano voice and is particularly well cast in this show.  The part with her jumping on the couch in pajamas is also charming.

The last show of the run is tonight (Saturday 28 November) at 7:30.  If you haven’t seen it yet, they should have tickets available at the door, and it’s a lot of fun!