Oz: Not so wonderful or wizardly

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.

[Read more…]

Sense and Sensibility: How about some respect?

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…]

The Wrong Bashir: The Right Stuff

publicity photo for The Wrong Bashire

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…]

The Woman in Black: Entertainment with goosebumps!

publicity still for The Woman in Black

Bernard Cuffling in a publicity still for The Woman in Black
(Photo by Bill Allman)

The Woman in Black is a good ol’ yarn and I am for that.

On one level, Stephen Mallatratt’s script, which he adapted from Dame Susan Hill’s novel, is a straight-up ghost story — and it scared the bejeezus out of me a couple of times. (Fellow critic Jo Ledingham, who was sitting beside me, said she felt my chair lurch.) [Read more…]

Teenage Dick: Everything I try sounds like a double entendre, so you fill in this headline

publicity photo for Teenage Dick

Cadence Rush Quibell, Christopher Imbrosciano, Jennifer Lines, and Marco Walker-Ng in Teenage Dick
(Photo by Moonrider Productions)

Although it contains things to admire, this production of Teenage Dick feels too much like an afterschool special or not great theatre for young people.

Teenage Dick is playwright Mike Lew’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s Richard III as a high school drama. Shakespeare’s Richard is a murderously ambitious “bunch-backed toad.” (The historical figure’s recently discovered bones testify he probably had scoliosis.) In Lew’s retelling, the junior class secretary, seventeen-year-old Richard Gloucester, who has cerebral palsy, has his eye on the “throne” of the school presidency. A hated outcast by his own account, Richard sets out to improve his social standing — and chances of election — by dating Anne Margaret, who used to go out with Eddie, the stereotypically dim-witted football player and current president, who bullies Richard. [Read more…]

Starwalker: Less than starry

Publicity photo for Starwalker

Dillon Meighan Chiblow and Jeffrey Michael Follis in Starwalker
(Photo by David Cooper)

Corey Payette’s new musical Starwalker is going to be meaningful to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. And there’s significant talent on the stage. I don’t mean to deny any of that when I say that, from a craft perspective, especially the craft of storytelling, it fails big time.

As well as directing Starwalker, Payette wrote the book, music, and lyrics. In his book, a drag performer named Levi picks up Star, an Indigenous sex worker, on Lee’s Trail in Stanley Park. And that sets up a story that is predictable on virtually every level. Within seconds of their meeting, we know Levi and Star are destined for lasting romance. Star has never done drag, but they’re interested, so we we’ve got a pretty good idea what the Act 1 finale is going to look like. And when Mother Borealis, who heads Levi’s drag family, the House of Borealis, coughed in the first act, I felt like calling a hearse just to have one on standby for the end of Act 2.

[Read more…]

Flowers of the Rarest: More thematic development would make it rarer

publicity photo for Flowers of the Rarest

Gabrielle Rose as Biddy in Flowers of the Rarest

On one level, I was seduced by the understatement of this production and the fine acting it contains. But, about halfway through watching Flowers of the Rarest, I wrote in my notebook, “I’m ready for some plot development” and, a bit later: “Besides plot, what is there to think about?”

Gerrard Plunkett’s new script is set in a Magdalene laundry in Ireland in 1923, the last year of the Irish Civil War. The Magdalen laundries were vicious institutions that imprisoned first prostitutes, then unwed mothers, and even women and girls who had never had sex — under the guise of reforming them. Incarceration could go on for life. These women and girls were abused and exploited for their labour by both Protestant and Catholic churches.

In the small group of women we meet in Flowers of the Rarest, Biddy is determined to help young Rose escape. Mother Anne, the mother superior, is sexually assaulting Rose.

[Read more…]

Me Love Bingo!: Best in Snow — Save your money. Don’t waste your time.

publicity photo for Me Love Bingo!: Best in Snow

Leslie Dos Remedios and Kyle Loven (Photo by Moonrider Productions)

How did this show ever get programmed into the Arts Club’s season? The Arts Club is a professional company. Me Love Bingo!: Best in Snow is not of a professional standard.

For Best in Snow, set designer Ted Roberts has turned the Newmont Stage into a bingo hall, so most of the audience sits at long, bingo-style tables. The best thing about the evening is that it provides an opportunity to chat with your table mates. I want to thank the single gay man, the four female friends, and the handsome straight couple for being fun. I also want to thank my companion, who left at intermission and sent me a text saying, “I just couldn’t take anymore. I hope it’s over now.” [Read more…]

The Messiah: The silliest story ever told (That’s a compliment.)

publicity photo for Pacific Theatre's The Messiah

The happy couple: Peter Carlone as Mary and John Voth as Joseph
(Chelsey Stuyt Photography)

You have to be smart to be dumb. Or wily. Or at least have good instincts. Okay, I don’t really know how they do it, but, playing a couple of goofballs in Pacific Theatre’s production of The Messiah, Peter Carlone and John Voth are very funny and very engaging. [Read more…]

Mom’s the Word: Talkin’ Turkey is not a turkey

publicity photo for Mom's the Word: Talkin' Turkey

I didn’t enjoy the number, but Barbara Clayden’s costumes are pretty great in this riff on The Nutcracker.
That’s Deborah Williams, Alison Kelly, Barbara Pollard, Robin Nichol, and Jill Daum.
They are on Pam Johnson’s set.
(Photo: Moonrider Productions)

I cried. I was bored. I laughed. Mom’s the Word: Talkin’ Turkey, the latest in the Mom’s the Word series, is inconsistent but, when it lands, you feel it.

The Mom’s the Word shows date way back to 1993, when a group of theatre professionals, who were all raising young kids, got together to create a performance about motherhood for the Women in View festival. Hilarious and moving, the first Mom’s the Word became an international hit, and five of the six original creators have kept pumping out sequels since then. This one is about the challenges of the Christmas holidays — and the specific stresses of sharing them with your adult kids, aging parents, and in one instance, a dead spouse.

All of the stories are personal to the women who perform them, and they’re presented in a revue format that includes heartfelt sharing, outrageous anecdotes, and occasional songs.

I’m a fan of the heartfelt sharing and the lashings of wit. In a prime example, Alison Kelly remembers a Christmas when she hung a thousand origami cranes over the crib of her tiny, premature son, who was in the neonatal intensive care unit, willing him to survive. Then Deb Williams cuts in with, “He lived. He’s 34. You’ve got to find a better story.” [Read more…]

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