Tag Archives: theatre

Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches: from almost 30 years later

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Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, Part 1:  Millennium Approaches is set around 1985, and was written (along with Part 2:  Perestroika) in 1993.  The University of Alberta student-led performance group Abbedam chose this play as their 2013 production, and it opened last night at the Timms Centre Second Playing Space.  The director is Nick Eaton, director and co-creator of the Fringe 2013 show Into Oblivion. 

I had never seen or read the play before.  Unlike the majority of the opening-night attendees, I remember 1985, although I wasn’t particularly paying attention to American politics then, I wasn’t yet part of queer community, and I was just starting to be aware of AIDS.  Also, I’d never encountered any Mormons and had met very few Jewish people.  So the play has been making me think about changes in those issues and in my life in the last 30 years.  But if I waited ‘til I could say something articulate, I’d miss posting before the end of the run.  And I want to post, because it’s a good show and I think lots of people should go see it.

Knowing a little bit about the milieu of gay men in New York City in 1985 and about Mormon and Jewish attitudes to family and to ethical decision-making helped me appreciate the context of the story.  But I would also have benefited from knowing more about the McCarthy era in American politics, in particular about the lawyer Roy Cohn, who was a character in the play (played by Cristian Badiu, a PhD student).

I found this character one of the most intriguing and complex in the play, although definitely not the most likeable.  Cristian Badiu didn’t attempt one of the stereotypical New York City accents, but his mannerisms and way of speaking certainly pegged him right away as an arrogant NYC lawyer.  I was particularly fascinated by the speech in which he explains to his doctor that the label “homosexual” does not fit him, because although he has sex with men, his power and prestige define him in a way that’s not compatible with being considered homosexual.  His doctor eventually gives up or accepts what he’s saying, and suggests that he can use his White House connections to get into the experimental trials of the new drug AZT for the “liver cancer” that he insists he has rather than AIDS.  I was also fascinated by Cohn’s relationship with Joe Pitt (Roland Meseck) the young law clerk he tries to mentor and manipulate.  His speeches to Joe about choosing father figures were intriguing, as neither character acknowledges a facet of sexuality in their relationship.  It remains unclear to me whether Cohn was just drawn to young men like Joe in a platonic nurturing sense, whether he’s attracted to him and not expressing that openly, or what extent of his interactions with Joe are directed at getting Joe to do favours for him in Washington.

Joe’s wife Harper Pitt (Emily Howard) was charming.  She apparently copes with her emotional troubles by taking a lot of Valium, but she is present enough to be funny and to wish for better things, and brave enough to eventually get her husband to acknowledge that he is “a homo”.

The other two main characters (a cast of 15 played about 20 characters) were Prior Walter (Gabe Richardson) and Louis Ironson (Joshua Edison), a 30ish couple who have been together several years, who are both witty and affectionate and very likeable.  In their first scene, we see Prior supporting Louis at his grandmother’s funeral, teasing him gently about acting butch around his family, but the balance shifts quickly as Prior then rolls up a shirtsleeve to show Louis what looks like a bruise, but in that context is undeniably a Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesion.  Throughout the rest of the play, the two of them go through the range of responses of a dying man and of someone who loves a dying man, together and separately, in compelling convincing anguish.

One of my favourite minor characters was Belize (Matt Ayache) a nurse of colour and sometime drag queen.  Without exaggerating the flamboyant stereotypes, he contrasts with the other characters’ gender presentation and also speaks the most directly about racism, changes in queer culture, and treatment of the dying.  Lauren Derman was also impressive in understated portrayals of a calm accepting hospital caregiver (I wasn’t clear whether she was a nurse or a doctor) and of the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.

The action took place in a simple set on a revolve.  Actors and additional crew shifted furniture quickly between the many short scenes, and sometimes two scenes would be alternating on different sides of the stage.  There were some eerie and/or amusing special effects, supernatural adventures, and dream sequences, of which my favourite was Harper’s dream of Prior in a sheer négligée and wig cap doing makeup for drag.

The original play was written as a continuous narrative running about 7 hours.  This production of Part 1 ran about 2.5 hours, and ended in a slightly disorienting way.  Wikipedia does not have a very good plot summary (it would be great if someone reading this who has access to the play text could improve it).  At least it could satisfy some of my curiosity about what would happen to these characters in Part 2.  But I wish I could see these actors finish the story.

The production continues until November 17th, Sunday night.  Ticket information is on the show’s Facebook page. 

pool (no water) at the U of A Studio Theatre

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The U of A Drama Studio Theatre season started in September with Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water).  This disturbing story of unspoken resentments within a longtime group of artistic collaborators featured Ainsley Hilliard, Vince Forcier, Brett Dahl, Kristi Hansen, and Gianna Vacirca, who I believe are all recent BFA grads of the department.

Much of the story is told by the five unnamed group members in overlapping monologues, interspersed with scenes where they interact as they re-enact the events they’re recounting.  They tell a story about their dealings with a sixth person, speaking of her as She and often having one of them play Her role in their re-enactments.  It seems that She was originally another participant in their group, but she became more distant as she got more conventionally successful.  They mimic her and make fun of her, talking about her boasts about her commissions and swimming pool, but when she invites them to her poolside home for a visit they all accept.  None of the locations are identified in the not-quite-real storytelling – I was picturing their home as the “bohemian quarter” of some big city, maybe New York or London or even Toronto or Vancouver, and the place where they visit their old friend as some island warm and full of wealthy expats, maybe in the Caribbean or somewhere like Mallorca or the Canary Islands if they’d travelled from London.  The visitors comment on the large beautiful house with several servants, and then describe how they immediately plunge into partying, which leads naturally into all of them getting naked (on stage this was represented with various white undergarments) and preparing to dive into the pool in the dark.

Here I should describe the stage.  It was mostly bare, with a cool blue light and some chrome furniture and gallery displays around the sides.  But projecting out from the apparent front of the stage were five diving boards, with the space between them and under them and out into the audience being the pool.  It was lit with that eerie blue swimming-pool-at-night colour, but when She plunges in, she lands on hard empty concrete and is badly injured.  It was one of those shocks that’s almost a relief, since it was clear from the storytelling that something horrible was going to happen.

As She lies unconscious in hospital, the group still resents her, but overlaid on that is a mix of guilt, of relief that it wasn’t them, of enjoying her beach house without her around, and of a fascination with the whole concept of being comatose, which they express freely in front of each other.  And they start taking pictures of Her when the hospital staff aren’t looking.

Eventually, she begins to recover, and when she finds out about the photos, she plans an exhibition, assuming ownership of the art.  As you can imagine, this makes the group of friends even more resentful.  The whole story is really about undercurrents of resentment in nominal friendships, and the heartless reactions and behaviours were entirely too credible for my comfort.  It was thought-provoking, disturbing in a good way, and occasionally quite funny.  Also, as one could expect from seeing Vince Forcier’s and Ainsley Hillyard’s names in the program, there was some very powerful expressive movement.  It was a good start to the Studio Theatre season that left me wondering what would come next.

“There was no white linen, for my husband.” – People Like Us

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“There was no white linen, for my husband.”

That was one of the repeated lines in People Like Us, Sandi Johnson’s new play.  Sarah Louise Turner plays Kate Rourke, wife of a 1991 Gulf War veteran, in an emotionally-evocative solo performance that had me in laughter and in tears.

I saw the first preview of the world premiere last night at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.  And if my remaining time in Vancouver wasn’t already booked up with professional commitments, I’d be tempted to see it again.

“He held his cutlery like a prince.”  In another repeated line, she shows us a glimpse of Gerry, the gallant man she married, kind, loyal, honoured to be a soldier – a man who once lifted her off her feet on the way home from a Christmas party in Petawawa to carry her across an intersection in her velvet dress in a snow storm.

Her narrative slips among times, the present (2001), the time before Gerry’s posting to Iraq, while he’s away, and how she copes after he returns home physically and mentally damaged.  But the story’s easy to follow, due to clear writing and Ms Turner’s shifts in voice and body language.  She becomes Gerry’s advocate with the military and the doctors, and gradually she starts helping other veterans conquer their own bureaucratic opponents.  “Helping military veterans apply for medical marijuana – that should be a marketable skill?”  She becomes known as the “Yarmouth (NS) Bulldog” for her tenacity.

She also maintains her love of belly dance, and a few times during the play she puts on scarves, coin belt, and zils to show how the dancing helps her maintain her power and sensuality during difficult times.  The connection between “the Middle East” of the belly-dance culture, and her second-hand experience of Iraq through television and phone calls and Gerry’s flashbacks, is not spelled out at all.  The story unfolds in a subtle way not often seen in short theatre pieces.  A few times I thought I guessed at a disaster to come, and I was always wrong.   The performer carries out various stage business during the narrative (folding laundry, packing a suitcase, making tea and drinking it), but this never distracted me from what she was saying.  Instead it just emphasized her get-on-with-things attitude as a determined mother and military wife.

Firehall Arts Centre is an effective medium-size black box performance space.  The set (designed by Amanda Larder) was fascinating – at first I saw the re-creation of a clean cozy family living room, with flowered upholstery, baskets of laundry, cups of tea, and wide worn floorboards, but gradually I took in the backdrop and ceiling from a different world.  You see, above the white wainscoting, the room had been covered by a military-style canvas tent, only instead of conventional green camouflage or desert camouflage, the dirty stained fabrics included some Laura Ashley style flowered brocades or wallpapers.  And partway through the show, I realised that along the walls of the room were little piles of sand, as if the tent/walls were insufficient to keep out the encroaching desert, just as Kate’s attempts to make a safe familiar home for her husband and children were not sufficient to keep the effects of war away from them.

This production continues at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver until November 16th.  I don’t know if there are any plans for it to travel.  There should be.

2 Pianos, 4 Hands, lots of characters

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A trombonist friend told us that anyone who’d ever taken music lessons should try to see 2 Pianos 4 Hands in its run at the Citadel.  I saw it in the first preview Saturday night, and I agree.  Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt wrote the play and perform in it.  This is their last tour with the show.

The stage is empty except for two shiny Yamaha grand pianos, two coatracks, and two large picture frames in which are projected occasional stylized images indicating changes of scene.

The show starts with the two pianists entering in tailcoats, saluting the audience, then sitting down to play a duet.  Then follows a hilarious set of disagreements and negotiations about who gets which piano, who gets which piano bench, and when they start, all conducted completely in silence.

The tailcoats then come off as the performance moves forward in a series of vignettes about the characters growing up playing the piano.  Each actor played the other’s parents and piano teachers, and in a particularly funny scene they addressed the audience as the session chair and adjudicator for a Kiwanis Music Festival session.  The two boys also interacted as duet partners and as competitors in some scenes.  I particularly enjoyed recognising many of the specifics they referred to – Royal Conservatory exams, Kiwanis festival – and even recognised at least two of the lesson books they were using as props.  Illustrations of general music-lesson memories about parents prodding the child to practice and about teachers’ contradictory advice were also amusing.

I admired the way they showed similarities in the two characters’ alternating scenes, but still made them distinctive people.  The characters and the performers had the same names, so one might imagine strong threads of autobiography.  When Richard Greenblatt’s character was being taught by a nun, who used “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” as a mnemonic for three notes, he corrected her under his breath with a three-word Hebrew phrase.  When the two boys were teenagers, each of them had a teacher who motivated him by telling him that girls would be attracted to a certain style of playing arpeggios (two opposite styles).

The vignettes continue as the two young men explore various ways of using their musicianship, and ends with them putting the tailcoats back on and finishing the duet they started the show with.

At intermission of the performance I saw, theatregoers all around us were talking about their own memories of musical childhoods, and we were too.  Friends who hadn’t taken music lessons as children said that they’d enjoyed the performance but knew they’d missed some of the inside jokes.  2 Pianos 4 Hands plays at the Citadel until November 17th.

Meanwhile, Back on the Couch – enjoyable community theatre comedy with one glaring flaw

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The Camrose Morning News is a small printed folder of announcements, ads, and pastimes.  Something interesting caught my eye as I leafed through it at work, an invitation to a play.  The Beaverhill Players, based in Holden AB, were putting on Meanwhile, Back on the Couch, by Jack Sharkey, and touring to Ryley and to the Bailey Theatre in Camrose (Nov 16th) as well as playing in Holden (Nov 2-3).

The tour opened in Ryley last night, as part of a celebration of local businesses.  Nearly 200 people attended and enjoyed a delicious overflowing buffet provided by local caterer Grethe’s Kitchen.  I don’t usually attend dinner theatre by myself (still haven’t made it to the Mayfield) but I enjoyed sitting at a table full of friendly people from all over the region, and I took moderate advantage of the cheapest theatre bar in Central Alberta.  Door prizes, an ice-breaking game, and various business awards added to the fun.

Director Julianne Foster introduced the play, and the traditional stage drapes drew apart to reveal an art-deco-styled office suite with a cleverly-lit New York City skyline out the window.  The skyline art was credited to Inez White.  The main character, psychoanalyst Victor Karleen (Ernie Rudy) wants to publish a memoir of his cases so he can afford a Caribbean honeymoon with his fiancée (Debbie Perkins).  But we soon see that he also wants to be a more successful author than his rival colleague (Ray Leiren).  Add in a sassy nurse-receptionist (Laura Rudy), two quirky patients (Dave Maruszeczka and Inez White), a pompous publisher (Gary Kelly), and a college student neighbour on a scavenger hunt (Crystal Hedeman), and madcap hijinks begin to follow, because it’s that kind of farce.  Hijinks include an eavesdropper falling into the room, someone undressing while someone else is turned away pouring drinks, and an awful lot of kissing.  Jokes about predictable psychotherapists, single people, married people, and Reader’s Digest might have worked a bit better when the play was first performed in the early 1970s, but the audience still enjoyed them.  I laughed a lot, as did the people around me.

Dave Maruszeczka was especially good, portraying Albert with an endearing consistent mixture of bewilderment and insistence.  The pacing was good except for a few places where the script belabours things a bit.  The blocking worked well for the small proscenium stage and everyone was easy to hear.  There were three acts (two intermissions), and there was too much information about the plot in the act synopses in the program.

I would be recommending this whole-heartedly to anyone who likes community theatre and comedy, except for one jarring directorial choice.  Laura Rudy’s nurse-receptionist character Miss Charlotte Hennebon was played in blackface makeup, with red lips, Afro wig, and eye-rolling, and with the exaggerated gestures of a stereotyped sassy African-American woman over 30.  The actor’s impeccable delivery and timing would have made her scenes a lot of fun to watch, except that I was figuratively wincing in embarrassment every time I saw her.  The Samuel French website listing casting requirements for each play they own says that this one has colourblind casting, and there is nothing in the text suggesting that a character of unmarked ethnicity or different ethnicity wouldn’t work.  I believe that gratuitous blackface is inappropriate in 21st century Canada.  The director and actor should rethink this choice before the remainder of the run.

After that warning and disclaimer, I will tell you that more information about acquiring tickets is at the Beaverhill Players website.

Brad Fraser’s Kill Me Now, at Workshop West

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KILL ME NOW is the kind of play that wins awards.  The kind of play that deserves to win awards.  I’ve seen it twice so far, because after the first time I saw it I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  It’s written and directed by Brad Fraser (5@50, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love / Love and Human Remains, some episodes of Queer as Folk/North America, etc).  If you’ve ever seen or read anything of his, you know to expect blunt, funny, tough, affectionate portrayals of people dealing with hard issues, and possibly naked men.

The Workshop West production of Kill Me Now is the world premiere of the play.  It’s playing until September 22nd at L’UniThéâtre in La Cité Francophone, which is becoming one of my favorite venues in town, with a large flat stage, good acoustics, and comfortable seats on risers and wrap-around balconies.

The main characters are a father and son, played by Dave Horak and Mat Hulshof.  I don’t think I’ve seen Dave Horak on stage before, but I’ve seen plays he directed, including Fatboy (the Ubu Roi-inspired farce at Fringe 2012) and Bombitty of Errors (the rap version of Comedy of Errors  at Fringe 2013).  I saw Mathew Hulshof most recently in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.  Jake, the dad, seems like an ordinary likeable middle-aged guy, coping as a widowed single parent to Joey, a disabled 17 year old.   The other characters are Twyla, Jake’s younger sister (Melissa Thingelstad, who I remember from An Accident and Fatboy), Joey’s school friend Rowdy (Patrick Lundeen), and Robyn (“with a Y”) (Linda Grass) a long-time lover who meets Jake once a week but isn’t otherwise involved with his life.

At the start of the play, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to understand Joey’s slurred speech and I was uncomfortable looking at the actor’s portrayal of his limited mobility and awkward posture.  But I don’t know how much of this was very clever acting and directing, and how much of it was that he really wasn’t hard to understand once I got more used to him.  I wasn’t even aware of the gradual change until we saw Robyn meeting him for the first time, being embarrassed by failing to understand him.  Robyn is so obviously trying to gamely continue the conversation while hiding that she has no idea what he said, and at the same time talking to him like he’s deaf, stupid, and childish.  In both performances that I saw, the audience gasped in exasperation with her and sympathy with Joey at that point, so I guess that like me, they were all understanding him just fine and appreciating him too.

I thought that Dave Horak and Mathew Hulshof were both amazing in their roles.  Mat Hulshof readily expresses the wide range of a 17-year-old’s emotions within the limited palette of his character’s physical limitations.  Dave Horak’s character starts out settled within the fragile balance of the life he’s built for himself and Joey, but unprepared for Joey’s growing need for independence and autonomy, and then everything goes wrong and he has to change his plans and ask for more help.

The two women’s roles were more straightforward, but still not obvious.  I didn’t like Robyn at the beginning, but the way she worked to overcome her initial discomfort with Joey and the whole messy house and uncomfortable situation won me over.  And I liked Melissa Thingelstad in this play more than I liked her in An Accident, as the young aunt who has always helped out and who is frustrated with her own life and who doesn’t always agree with her brother’s decisions.

Patrick Lundeen’s Rowdy was a charmingly earnest young adult who is “mildly retarded, but I’m not stupid, it’s mostly Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, eh?”  He was a valuable comic relief, but I did not feel like his portrayal was mean-spirited or stereotypical.

Parts of the story were excruciatingly intimate.  And while they made me squirm, I did not feel like any of them were gratuitous.  They brought the audience into acknowledging that people who love each other can do awkward and hard things when they need to take care of each other, which is probably the theme of the play.

In the writer’s notes in the program, Brad Fraser explains that he has a family member who is severely disabled, and that he wanted to portray the complexities of everyday life and emotional response for a disabled person.  As far as I can tell, the actors Mathew Hulshof and Patrick Lundeen are not disabled themselves.  And I think I should leave it to people with personal experience of living with disability to comment on whether their portrayals are appropriate and respectful.

In his opening-night welcome words, Workshop West artistic director Michael Clark encouraged people to tweet about the show and tell their friends about it, but not to give away any plot points in their tweets, because the show is better when encountered without expectations.  I’m not sure that’s completely true because I still found it provocative, moving, amusing, and fascinating the second time through, but I’ve tried to respect the spirit of that request in this post anyway.  I liked it as much as I liked Let the Light of Day Through last year, and that one won the 2013 Stirling Award for Outstanding Production of a Play.  Tickets for the remainder of the run are available through Tix on the Square and at the door.  And you might see me there again.

Shows I forgot to tell you about!

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Last spring I missed writing up several theatre excursions.  The programs were piling up on my table making me feel guilty, but the backlog didn’t stop me from going to more shows.

Since I’m going to count the Edmonton Fringe as the start of a new year of stage entertainment, I’m going to get caught up here, with a brief list of all the shows I didn’t tell you about earlier, and then I can start over.

  • The Penelopiad – Citadel Theatre – This show was done with an all-female cast.  I was particularly impressed by the performer who was playing Odysseus as well as her other roles, because her body language and voice transformed her instantly into a convincingly arrogant man.
  • Spamalot – Citadel Theatre – this musical was just fun, as a mix of the Monty Python source material and a send-up of Broadway-musical tropes.
  • Escape from Happiness – Citadel Theatre Young Acting Company – I remember being fascinated by how much darker this kind of story is nowadays than a generation ago.
  • Winter’s Tale Project – Citadel Theatre Young Musical Company
  • Strike! A Musical – This was a full production with a large company, including nine junior-high-age performers.  Apparently it’s going to be a movie soon.  A few of the songs are still occasionally stuck in my head a few months later.
  • An Accident – this Northern Light Theatre show with Michael Peng and Melissa Thingelstad, directed by Trevor Schmidt, was provocative and interesting.  Something about it didn’t quite work for me, but I didn’t figure out why.
  • The Last Days of Judas Iscariot – this was a U of A Department of Drama show.  I enjoyed it.  It was a great mix of original and canon-consistent.

According to my datebook, starting with Fringe 2012 I saw

  • One orchestra performance
  • One band concert
  • One rock-band show (I used to see a lot of live rock music, but this year I’ve been focusing on theatre and I only have so much time and money, unfortunately)
  • One opera
  • Lots of music at Edmonton Folkfest 2013
  • One night of circus acrobatics
  • One open-mic night and one variety show at camp
  • At least five first-run movies, mostly with superheroes
  • Two story slams (but I was in one of them)
  • 35 Fringe shows counting holdovers and one show that I saw twice
  • 24 nights of improv with Rapid Fire Theatre, most of them as a volunteer and many of them with two shows in the evening
  • 40 non-Fringe theatrical performances, in Edmonton, Red Deer, Toronto, and Vancouver.

So I guess missing out on reviewing seven plays is not so bad.  I’d hoped to do a Sterling-awards post with my picks and the winners, but it’s almost time for the Fringe to start and I’m in an excited mood rather than a retrospective one.  The best play I saw all year was Collin Doyle’s Let the Light of Day Through.  The show I went to the biggest expense and effort to see was Book of Mormon in Toronto, and it was worth it.  It was all worth it.  And I can’t wait to see what’s coming in the next year of live entertainment in Edmonton and elsewhere!

Salute to The Full Monty

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It’s a “Let’s put on a show!” show.

It’s a group-of-unlikely-friends ensemble piece.

It’s a divorced-parent story.

It’s a familiar tale about what happens to the workers after the plant shuts down.

It’s about societal expectations for men, and about how men and women deal when the men can’t live up to them.

It’s a show about the problems of sexually objectifying ideal bodies, but it provides generous opportunities for the audience to appreciate the physicality of the performers on stage, particularly if their inclinations include appreciating men.

It is, of course, The Full Monty. The musical version, created by Terence McNally and David Yazbek for Broadway, and produced in Edmonton by Two ONE-WAY Tickets to Broadway, directed by Adam Mazerolle-Kuss.

Six unemployed male steelworkers, each with his own insecurities, decide to make money by performing a stripdance show. Through several challenges (trouble recruiting, trouble learning to dance, trouble coming up with the deposit for the venue, being arrested for indecent exposure or something) and personal troubles (pressure to get a conventional job, child-support dispute, repossession of property, bereavement), they come to support each other and appreciate each other, and the happy ending is the successful performance. The story follows the movie version fairly closely, and adds singing, dancing, and two delightful new characters, Jeanette (Francie Goodwin-Davies), a retired show-biz piano player, and Keno (Adam Sanders), one of the Chippendales dancers mentioned off-stage in the movie.

The singing and stage presence of Brian Christensen (Jerry) and Ariana Whitlow (Georgie) were particularly impressive. The choreography was fun to watch and all the main characters were good dancers who seemed to be enjoying themselves. Carter Hockley, playing Jerry’s young son Nathan, was noticeably more impressive in the third performance than in the first. (Yes, I have seen this show twice, it’s a reviewer thing, hmph.) Like the other performers in the show, it’s worth keeping an eye out for Carter Hockley in future years. His flirtatious routine handing out flyers was especially fun. Dave, the soft-hearted character (“You cry at Wheel of Fortune,” Jerry points out) who thinks he is too fat to be attractive, was played with touchingly humorous understatement by Jordan Ward. David Johnson (Malcolm) manages the Sandra-Bulloch feat of starting out with such uncomfortably-awkward postures, ill-fitting clothes, and avoidance of eye contact that one does not notice until partway through the show that the performer is actually attractive. The other three dance-troupe members, Harold (James Toupin), Horse (Orville Charles Cameron), and Ethan (Greg Caswell), are all played by actors with lots of experience, and their comic delivery is as good as their dance timing.

I was pleased at the way the script dealt with homosexuality. Although some of the steelworkers display casually-homophobic attitudes in the abstract ( “those Chippendale dancers must all be fairies, because real men wouldn’t go to the trouble of looking like that”) and make various pro-forma jokes, the new romance between two members of the ensemble is completely a non-issue: “Good for them” says Jerry. Also, compared to the movie, there’s a little more set-up foreshadowing this development – in a first viewing of the movie it might seem to come completely out of the blue.

My one complaint – and I don’t know if it’s just about this production or about the musical in general – is that I found it a bit too long, with some of the talking-only scenes too long for what is needed to develop characters and mood or advance the plot. Georgie and Pam (Joy Quilala)’s conversation in the men’s bathroom, the vignette about neighbours moving out, even the conversation to recruit Harold while the ballroom dancing is going on – I thought all of them could have been shorter. (Well, I didn’t actually mind the recruiting-Harold thing, because I mostly just watched the ballroom dancers.)

The music was good. There was a nine-piece orchestra with a conductor who was not also playing the piano, and the sound was very well balanced. The songs that stick in my head include “It’s a Woman’s World” and the finale “Let it Go”. The opening song “Scrap” had an odd melody reminiscent of a Joe Jackson song (I can’t remember which one), but was not as good a showcase of the singers’ talents as “Man” (Brian Christensen and Jordan Ward) or “You Walk With Me” (David Johnston and Greg Caswell).

The sets changed among many locations (mostly only used once each), with complicated bits like a whole public bathroom, a car, and a fussily-decorated living room. But the rotating bits moved smoothly and everything looked sturdy enough not to distract. Each of the performances I saw probably had one minor wardrobe malfunction, managed with poise by the performer affected.

The final dance number set during the strip show performance met my expectations, and illustrated the main theme of the show about how sincerity and self-confidence make anyone hot.

Two ONE-WAY Tickets to Broadway’s production of The Full Monty is playing at Unithéâtre/La Cité Francophone until June 30th, except for Mondays. Tickets are, as usual, available at Tix on the Square, or at the door.

Spelling Bee

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The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is an unwieldy name for a musical, but everything else about this Elope production went smoothly.   Kristen Finlay was the director.  The names and faces of the cast were mostly unfamiliar to me, but I haven’t been around the Edmonton musical-theatre scene very long so that isn’t a negative sign.

The story involves six junior-high-school-age children (played by adult actors Mark Sinongeo, Kristin Johnston, Curtis Knecht, Meredith Honda, Nadine Veroba, and John Evans) competing on stage in a spelling bee, their families, and the people managing the spelling bee.  For extra fun, four adult audience members were recruited in the lobby beforehand to be extra competitors.  The treatment was generally lighthearted, but there was also a consistent message about the difference between young people following their own passions and eccentric interests, and children being pushed or promoted by their families.   At the end of the show, each character tells the audience where his or her life has taken him or her since the time of the spelling bee, and each of them has a satisfying outcome.

My favourite character was Mitch (Kate Wylie), a contest support worker with a fairly small role.   The most impressive portrayals, In my opinion, were by John Evans (Leaf) and Nadine Veroba (Olive).  The choreography (Jake Hastey) was fun to watch and the live music  (musical director Sally Hunt and three additional musicians) was catchy, although not sufficiently so for me to be humming it two weeks later.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee continues tonight (Thursday), tomorrow (Friday), and Saturday.  Tickets are available at the door and at Tix on the Square.

From Cradle to Stage: new short works at the Walterdale

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Meeting up with an actor friend and going to an evening of short theatre at the Walterdale Playhouse on a warm spring evening reminded me of the Fringe festival.  Except for a few details like the parking lot being nearly empty, and  there being no food vendors or crowds or street performers.  Oh, and in August I love the air conditioning in the Walterdale, but in May I ended up a bit underdressed, just too involved in the story in front of me to fish out my jacket from under my seat.

From Cradle to Stage is a festival of new short plays, a tradition at the Walterdale.  Playwrights make submissions earlier in the season, and the winners then work with dramaturges (is that the plural?) to develop the scripts for production in May.  This year’s event had two plays, “The Ugly Spot” by Lisa Lorentz-Gilroy and “Exposure” by Stephen Allred, Bethany Hughes, and Jessie McPhee.

“The Ugly Spot” showed a brief encounter between two young strangers who had both come to the same isolated place (the Ugly Spot of the title) for solitude.  As you might expect, they are both indignant and defensive about having to share the bit of public land that they’d thought of as private.  But because this is a play rather than real life, they don’t both get up and leave; they stay and communicate enough that we find out interesting things about both of them.  Chance Heck and Cayley McConaghy both portray unhappy lonely twitchy young people.  There was one apparent inconsistency in the related backstory that distracted me disproportionately, but I won’t write it here since it might not bother you the same way.  On the other hand, the ending was done in a more subtle way than I had expected, leaving some things for the audience to know and a character left not knowing.  I thought that was the strongest thing about the writing.

“Exposure” was a more complex portrayal, as you would expect from the longer running time (55 minutes vs 25 minutes).  There was some similarity in plot device with “The Ugly Spot”.  One or two of the people tweeting about the shows thought this juxtaposition was effective; I thought it was unfortunate.  It made the second one easier to guess and it stretched my tolerance for coincidence a bit past credulity.  The premise of this show was three different characters, each struggling with a debilitating fear, encountering each other in an inpatient treatment program and moving towards healing in their interactions with each other.  There were no counsellors or other staff members of the facility shown on stage, although there were a couple of voiceover announcements and the characters referred to their assignments and therapy-group exercises.  As the program blurb said, “sometimes it’s the people you meet there, not the program, that allows you to move forward”.  I might quibble with the grammar, but the story was effective in demonstrating how troubled people who are motivated to change can help each other.

Early on, the characters are not yet interacting with each other – we learn about their thoughts through alternating monologues with each sitting on a straight chair facing forwards.  Each of the three characters has a different set of body language for portraying his or her state of fear and avoidance – Eric (Morgan D. D. Refshauge)’s twitchiness, Anna (Sarah Culkin)’s continual chatter, and most compellingly Will (Sam Banagan)’s demeanour of completely avoiding eye contact with anyone while actually sitting front and centre facing the audience.  As the story progresses and the characters begin to reach out to each other, we see each of them begin to drop these mechanisms, relaxing a bit and then retreating a bit when challenged.  Eric seemed to recover a bit too easily for me to believe, but I found all of them likeable intelligent people and I wanted them to succeed.  There were glimpses of affectionate humour all through what was in some ways a disturbing story.  As a long-time digital immigrant, I was pleased to see Internet-friendship not being portrayed as pathological in itself, although it had been part of at least one character’s coping tools.

The plays run every night until Saturday, with tickets at Tix on the Square or at the door.  And I’d love to know what you thought of them too.