Archives for March 2023

Hedda Gabler: Makes you watch

March 31, 2023 by Colin Thomas Leave a Comment

Publicity photo for Hedda Gabler, United Players

Powerhouse actors: Lola Clair as Thea and Hayley Sullivan as Hedda
(Photo: Nancy Caldwell)

Hedda Gabler rides the tension between realism and melodrama. This United Players production gets that combo right enough of the time to provide a consistently intriguing, often impressive evening.

Playwright Henrik Ibsen is known as the father of theatrical realism and, to a degree, that makes sense when you look at Hedda Gabler: the title character’s psychology is complex and her story is firmly rooted in the social realities of her time and place (late nineteenth-century Norway). But Hedda Gabler is driven by so many plot twists and so much high-stakes scheming and shock that it’s also a potboiler. (Think Succession but with more taffeta.)

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Filed Under: Theatre Picks Tagged With: #heddagabler, #unitedplayers, #Vancouvertheatre

Oz: Not so wonderful or wizardly

March 12, 2023 by Colin Thomas Leave a Comment

publicity photo for Oz, Carousel Theatre

Megan Zong and Stephen Thakkar (Photo by Sarah Race)

“Is it going to be over soon?” is not what you want to hear when you take a kid to the theatre, but that’s what my partner was getting from his eight-year-old grandson during this production of Oz. I don’t blame the boy. I was wondering the same thing.

Patrick Shanahan’s script is basically an excuse to do a three-person version of the best-known Wizard of Oz story. L. Frank Baum, who wrote the series, is struggling with his manuscript for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz when a sooty urchin named Dot breaks into his study. Soon, Dot, Baum, and Baum’s housekeeper Bridgey are acting out the incomplete novel, filling in its holes and inventing an ending.

But why? In the press release for this production, director Jennica Grienke says, “Oz transports us to a new place – not just a magical land with witches and wizards and talking scarecrows, but to a place of endless possibility – our own imaginations.”

Well … sometimes it does. To tell their story, the narrators must use found objects in Baum’s study, so a mop (predictably) becomes the Cowardly Lion’s mane, and, more engagingly, flapping umbrellas turn into flying monkeys and the gramophone’s horn supplies the Wicked Witch of the West with a fantastical hat.

But the talkiness of Shanahan’s script defeats it. The framing story about Dot is laboured and its resolution unsatisfying. And there’s way too much description. I was interested in the Tin Man’s backstory from the vantage point of literary study, for instance, but theatrically it slowed things right down.

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Filed Under: Theatre Picks Tagged With: #CarouselTheatre, #KaleidscopeTheatre, #Oz, #review, #Vancouvertheatre

My Little Tomato: Tasty until it’s not

March 11, 2023 by Colin Thomas Leave a Comment

Taylor Kare and Nelson Wong on Sophie Tang’s excellent set.
(Photo by Sarah Race)

I really enjoyed My Little Tomato — until I started to get tired of it.

It’s audacious, that’s for damn sure. In Rick Tae’s new script, Keaton Chu inherits his parents’ produce farm when they’re killed in a freak accident. Produce wholesaler Joe McKinley interrupts Keaton’s grief to insist that he honour his delivery obligations.

Keaton’s family is Chinese Canadian. Joe’s Irish on one side and Japanese on the other. Keaton and Joe are both gay and, when they figure out they’re attracted to one another, things quickly get complicated. Joe reminds Keaton of his white “best friend” from university, who coerced him into sex then ignored him. Keaton is still carrying a torch for white guys and feels like he’s never been enough. Joe, who is a bit of a bar star, is sexually confident, but emotionally he’s just as lost as Keaton is — never white or Japanese enough.

Right off the top, director Cameron Mackenzie serves notice that he’s going to deliver a slammer of an interpretation. When the lights come up, the first thing we see is Keaton lying in a circular pool — it looks like concrete — neck deep in brightly coloured plastic balls, an agonized look on his face. (Sophie Tang’s set is terrific.) More balls rain down on Keaton from high in the proscenium and right away we know two things: this character is awash in grief and the storytelling is going to be surreal. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Theatre Picks Tagged With: #, #MLT, #MyLittleTomato, #review, #VACT, #ZeeZeeTheatre

Sense and Sensibility: How about some respect?

March 10, 2023 by Colin Thomas 2 Comments

publicity photo for Sense and Sensibility

Nyiri Karakas, Amanda Sum, and Janet Gigliotti
(Photo by Moonrider Productions)

There might be a satisfying production to be had based on Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility but I haven’t seen it yet.

The script itself is problematic. In the story, when Henry Dashwood dies, the law says his estate, including his palatial country home Norland Park, must go to John, his son by his first marriage. That means his second wife and their three daughters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, must vacate the premises and live on a limited stipend in a cottage.

Sense and Sensibility, which Austen wrote in 1811, is about the financial vulnerability of women, for whom well-being depends upon negotiating a good — meaning a financially secure — marriage. In this setting, Elinor embodies sense (clear-headedness) and Marianne sensibility (emotionality).

The novel recognizes both the serious impact and comic absurdity of the period’s still-relevant gender norms. The novel’s comedy is restrained. For instance, when John’s awful wife Fanny is convincing him to give his half-sisters and their mother nothing more than the bare minimum, she says, “People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid to them.”

Hamill’s adaptation retains that line, but not the style in which it was originally couched. The play is broad — sometimes almost slapstick, condescending to both its characters and its audience. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Theatre Picks Tagged With: #review, #SenseAndSensibility, #Vancouvertheatre

The Wrong Bashir: The Right Stuff

March 4, 2023 by Colin Thomas Leave a Comment

A study in contrasts: Hussein Janmohamed’s Al-Nashir Manji and Parm Sour’s Mansour
(Photo: Matt Reznek)

This style is so hard to pull off. But this creative team is mostly doing it very well — sometimes astonishingly so.

Zahida Rahemtulla’s The Wrong Bashir is a farce. An Ismaili farce.

In the story, a nominating committee selects Bashir Ladha, a philosophy student who can’t decide what to do with his life, to become the next student Mukhisahib, or spiritual leader of the Ismaili population at his university. Bashir’s parents are thrilled; Bashir, who produces a podcast called The Happy Nihilist and can’t remember the last time he attended a religious service, has zero interest in the role — and nobody can figure out how he got nominated in the first place. But, when two members of the nominating committee show up at his mom and dad’s house (where Bashir is living) along with several members of his ecstatic extended family, Bashir gets cornered: he doesn’t want the gig, but he doesn’t want to hurt his folks either. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Theatre Picks Tagged With: #review, #TheWrongBashir, #Vancouvertheatre