Tag Archives: michael peng

Tiny Beautiful Stories

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Michelle Todd, foreground, and Michael Peng, Sydney Williams, and Brett Dahl, in Tiny Beautiful Things. Photo Marc Chalifoux.

If you haven’t already seen Tiny Beautiful Things, the Shadow Theatre production of the Nia Vardalos play currently running at the Varscona, do try to fit it in before it closes on Sunday afternoon.

Tiny Beautiful Things is a set of vignettes portraying the interactions of an advice-columnist, inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s essays based on her time writing as Dear Sugar. Michelle Todd is wonderful as the writer who lands the columnist gig, giving advice from her heart and from her own messy experiences. The character seemed so warm and human and honest, folding laundry in her house wearing mismatched loungewear/pajamas (Leona Brausen costumes), that I wanted to take her home.

The rest of the ensemble (Michael Peng, Sydney Williams, and Brett Dahl) portray people who write to her, and other people in her stories such as her mother. Each of them gets a chance to play people of various ages and genders, adding to the impression that there are a lot of different correspondents. I didn’t ever feel like any of the portrayals were caricatures.

During the performance, I was reminded of several other plays I’ve seen. The first comparison was with Veda Hille, Bill Richardson, and Amiel Gladstone’s Craigslist Cantata, the series of songs and sketches about transactional connections on an internet classified-ads site, but I quickly decided that Tiny Beautiful Things was less frivolous and more thoughtful, as the interactions through an advice-column were about seeking understanding, rather than finding second-hand property, missed-connections on a commute, or a metalhead roommate for a metal house (although that one was so catchy that now it’s an earworm again).

When I realized that the conversations between Sugar and the letter-writers, often physically located at Sugar’s kitchen table or in her living room, were being done without the actors touching, and usually facing towards the audience, I remembered Duncan MacMillan’s Lungs, also directed by John Hudson for Shadow Theatre, with Elena Porter and Jake Tkaczyk as an unnamed couple recollecting the milestones in their relationship, while speaking to an unseen listener and never touching, not even in the sometimes-hot sometimes-hilarious sex scenes. And then in one of Sugar’s conversations, they do touch, and it matters.

Sugar’s advice and support, completely grounded in love, and the heartbreaking range of the ordinary people’s problems, also reminded me of a newer script which none of you have seen yet, unless you’ve been in a rehearsal hall at Walterdale Theatre during preparations for next week’s new works festival From Cradle to Stage. The festival, running May 14-19, presents three staged readings each night, for a total of nine new scripts by local playwrights. I helped select them, so I think they’re all worth seeing – but the one that came to mind yesterday when I was watching Tiny Beautiful Things was Kristen M. Finlay’s Modern Day Saints. In Finlay’s script, ordinary contemporary women struggle to do the right thing in a range of difficult and painful and familiar situations, starting from a student without enough money to pay her tuition fees dealing with unsympathetic bureaucracy. As in Tiny Beautiful Things, the glimpses of compassion and hope in the ensemble vignettes are life-affirming.

Tiny Beautiful Things starts with an electronic tone, and then another – I thought, is that a message notification? is that a piece of original music? and then I thought, Oh, there’s a Darrin Hagen sound credit, I bet it is both. And it was.

It goes without saying that it made me cry. In a good way. It also made me feel grateful for having friends to tell life stories with, and for seeing how crafting an experience into a story helps make sense of it.

Tickets for Tiny Beautiful Things are here. Tickets for Walterdale’s From Cradle to Stage festival May 14-19 are here. Modern Day Saints plays on May 17 and May 18 – but descriptions of all the new plays in the festival, by Bridgette Boyko, Donna Call, Kristen M. Finlay, Grace Li, Shawn Marshall, Madi May, Blaine Newton, Logan Sundquist, and Michael Tay are here.

More to see on local stages this weekend and beyond

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First, you have three more chances to see Flop! before it closes Sunday evening May 28th. If you haven’t yet been to a show at Rapid Fire Theatre’s permanent home, Rapid Fire Exchange on 83rd Avenue, this is a great reason to check out the venue. Ron Pederson and Ashley Botting bring an inspired variation on the musical-theatre-improv genre which uses the framing of two performers unexpectedly being stuck without script, lyrics, set, or costumes, just a musician (Erik Mortimer), so they call for audience suggestions and build a musical on the fly. Like skilled stage magicians, they increase the entertainment value of what they’re doing by making it look hard, sometimes stepping out of character between scenes to work out what to do next. I’m accustomed to improv troupes who appear to do impossible things easily – Rapid Fire’s own Off Book: The Musical, Gordon’s Big Bald Head – and I loved the extra layer of entertainment in seeing Pederson and Botting acting being terrible at something they are actually brilliant at. I hadn’t seen Ashley Botting on stage before – except in her recent guest appearance in Die-Nasty’s current improv drama Doctors – and she is delightful. Tickets for Flop! and future Rapid Fire shows are available here.

Boy Trouble, the new two-performer version of Mac Brock’s script, has two more performances in the Studio space at the Fringe Arts Barns, this afternoon at 2 pm, and this evening (which is showing as sold out on line.) I haven’t been able to see this one yet but I loved the solo version of it which inspired this retelling, at NextFest 2019 and then again at Fringe 2019.

Prison Dancer at the Citadel closes tomorrow afternoon. The performance this afternoon (Saturday May 27 at 1:30 pm) is the last audience-masks-required performance of the Citadel season. Tickets are available here.

Several years ago I attended a staged reading at the APN Script Salon of a new play called Anahita’s Republic, about women’s lives in contemporary Iran. Even in a music-stands reading in a plain meeting room, the script grabbed my attention and shook up some of my assumptions, so I was excited to see it fully staged. The company AuTash Productions, and playwriting team Hengameh E. Rice, have had two full productions – a recent one at Toronto’s Factory Theatre directed by Brenley Charkow, and this one directed by Brian Dooley, with a completely different cast and creative team. Roya Yazdanmehr is compelling as the eponymous Anahita, a woman who runs the family business and weathy household according to her own rules. From the first scene, when she strides in after a swim, applying lotion to bare legs, and then responds to her brother/business-partner (Yassine El Fassi El Fihri as Cyrus) who is pleading for money for his children’s activities, she did not fit my assumptions about how women live in that particular regime. But their history, and its effect on them, unfolds more slowly, making it more shocking to imagine this woman as a militant 16yo beside her late mother in a crowd of protesters. The next character who enters is a woman in a chador, Omid (Jennie George), but once again, my first assumptions about her life were wrong. Michael Peng plays Omid’s father, business associate of Cyrus and Anahita. Late in the play, when they are all in a situation with no good solutions, Anahita talks about different kinds of freedom and about how nobody is really free. Their situation has a resolution, but it’s not ideal. The play made me want to see more complex stories like this, coming out of a context I don’t know well but not limited by it. Program notes and vocabulary are provided through a QR code, and a large display timeline about event’s relevant to women in Iran on the lobby wall – including both mandatory “unveiling”, with enforcement, and mandatory “veiling”, also with brutal enforcement.

Tickets to Anahita’s Republic, playing until June 4th at the Fringe Backstage, are available here.

In a complete change of mood, last night I attended the opening performance of Elyne Quan’s Listen, Listen! as part of the Teatro Live! season. I giggled so much that another audience member commented to me and my companion about it at intermission.

Farron Timoteo plays a mall bookstore worker passionate about selecting background music, Nadien Chu plays a customer who objects to the music, and Nikki Hulowski and Alex Ariate play a hilarious collection of ensemble characters in the bookstore workplace. The play is set in 1986, which means that the sound designers (director Belinda Cornish and stage manager Frances Bundy) got to use all the catchy tunes of that era, costume designer Leona Brausen, fresh from designing for 10 Funerals, with half its scenes in that era, got to evoke memories of women’s soft-tie business blouses, asymmetrical hairstyles for young people, and leather ties, and the playwright got to stick in lots of dramatic-irony jokes about how people in 1986 expected the future to go.

Like many of Stuart Lemoine’s works performed by Teatro, this play was an affectionate portrayal of quirky characters, plot-driven but with lots of scope for entertaining character business. It was a lot of fun. Tickets are here.

Other theatre events coming up – I may not make it to all of them, but I’m noting them here for you –

Helen, the Euripedes comedy about Helen of Troy directed by Amy de Felice outdoors at the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium, runs to June 4th.

CHUMP, by Sue Goberdhan, is “about growing, grieving, and being Guyanese”. It is being workshopped and will have one public performance at the Fringe Studio June 11.

Nextfest, the annual festival of and for emerging artists, runs June 1-11.

The Sterling Awards nominations will be announced at 5 pm on June 5th at the Arts Barns, and winners will be celebrated at a more affordable event than the pre-pandemic Mayfield galas, also at the Arts Barns on Monday June 26th.

Walterdale Theatre’s 2023-2024 season launch event will also be held June 5th – doors at 7 pm, event at 8 pm.

And … in August it will be Fringe! Fringe 42: The Answer. (Do you know where your towel is?)

The Photo

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The Photo is about an hour long.  I’m glad that it wasn’t longer because I was so worried about the characters that I could hardly breathe.

Elena Porter and Michael Peng stagger separately onto the stage, not quite aware of each other.  At first they both seem shocked by something that’s just happened, but their responses are different enough that the nature of the awful thing wasn’t immediately clear to me.  But the basic sad event is clarified quickly, so that one character seems to be grieving in a conventionally comprehensible way and the other is alarmingly detached from reality.  I did keep wondering in the back of my mind whether I was wrong, or whether more horrible details would come out later, but I was relieved to have my guess confirmed, and could then watch the couple cope and connect.

I don’t think I’ve seen Michael Peng and Elena Porter on stage together before, but I’ve seen both of them in challenging roles in dark or painful stories – Peng in An Accident and in The Kite Runner, Porter in The Three Sisters and in The Clean House.  And they were both good in The Photo.   Peng’s thin-lipped quiet background anguish and Porter’s sparkling surface cheer over pain suited the roles well.  The script provided enough resolution that I could breathe again, and I felt as if the two characters were beginning to understand each other’s needs and would be able to take care of themselves and each other.

I do not have personal experience of the kind of loss experienced by the characters.  I don’t think I’d recommend this play to someone who has, without offering to warn him or her, but on the other hand without knowing what to expect I found the initial scene disturbingly effective, and I don’t want to spoil that for anyone else.

The Photo is playing at C103 until May 23rd.  It’s a Theatre of the New Heart production, written by Dana Rayment and directed by Michelle Kennedy.  Advance tickets are, of course, at Tix on the Square.

The Three Sisters, a play about lacking agency

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It can’t count as a spoiler if it’s something that everybody knows, something that’s entered the cultural lexicon.  Godot never comes.  Rosebud is his sled.  And the three sisters don’t get to Moscow.

That’s actually all I knew about Anton Chekov’s famous play The Three Sisters, before attending the Broken Toys Theatre production last night.  They don’t get to Moscow.  Oh, and one of them would be called Masha.

The Broken Toys production was directed by Clinton Carew, and he also did a new translation of the play from the Russian.  Before the show started, Carew came to the front of the stage and told the audience that he would be filling in for an ill cast member until further notice, and he alluded to the broadsheet he was carrying, with Russian headlines, which he would be referring to throughout the show.  (Maybe it had lines or cues on it, but he didn’t actually spell that out.)  I eventually figured out that the ill cast member must be Ken Brown, cast as Chebutykin the old military doctor and friend/tenant of the family.  I also spent the whole evening trying to figure out whether I’d seen Clinton Carew on stage before or whether his voice and movement just reminded me of someone, and this morning a theatre friend has pointed out to me that Carew had played in the Catalyst Theatre production The Soul Collector.

There were many more familiar faces and names on the Varscona stage as well – almost as many as in the cast list for The Christmas Carol (no overlap of course).

Lora Brovold (A Few Good Men, Let the Light of Day Through) was the oldest sister, competent comforting Olga the unmarried teacher.  The middle sister Masha, the discontented married one, was Melissa Thingelstad (An Accident, Kill Me Now).   The bitter sarcastic edge that her paralyzed character showed in An Accident and the impatient strides of the caregiver aunt in Kill Me Now were perfect in Masha, and the scenes in which she is parted from her lover and welcomed back by the husband she doesn’t love are heartbreaking.  The youngest sister Irina, with her enthusiasm for family, her naive ideas about working for a living that are gradually disillusioned as she tries working as a telegraph operator and a township council clerk and then gets a teaching qualification,  and her longing for the Moscow of her childhood, was played by Elena Porter.  I don’t think I’d seen her on stage before but I will definitely watch her again.

I did not quite recognise Jesse Gervais (Let the Light of Day Through) in the bearded off-topic character of Ferapont.  Ryan Parker of the Be-Arthurs was the brother Andrei, the petted only son who fails to live up to his sisters’ ambition for him and their hope to follow him to Moscow, finding himself stuck in marriage to banal social-climber Natasha (Laura Metcalfe), in a job with local government, and in debt due to a gambling problem.  And Michael Peng (The Kite Runner, An Accident) was very strong as Vershinin, the military commander with unhappy homelife, tendency to make philosophical speeches, and passion for Masha.

During the play, various characters sing or hum bits of song, unaccompanied and with about the same attention to rhythm and tune as ordinary people in real life.  This struck me as unusual for the stage, where people don’t usually sing without singing well.   Between acts, the cast members set up new furniture as needed for a bedroom and then the grounds of the house.  Instead of removing the furniture used for previous sets, they piled it all up at the back of the stage, building the impression of the family being less and less settled in the military town and in the family home that Natasha is gradually taking over.  I also really liked the modern language in Carew’s translation, “Weird!” “Well, that happened.” “She has … people skills.” and very occasional profanity.  I thought the play was a lot funnier than Chekov’s Cherry Orchard, which I remember studying in Grade 13, but I can’t tell how much of that was due to the strengths of this production, and how much was just that it went over my head in the  English classroom.

Playing til December 7th, tickets ahead of time at Tix on the Square, same-day tickets at the door.  I really wish that Tix on the Square and their partner companies could do same-day on-line sales the way the Fringe box office and Eventbrite can do.