That masked man is back: a new Phantom of the Opera sings the music of the night

Posted on July 22, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Derrick Davis and Eva Tavares in The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Some of you may recall the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera, a mystery never fully explained….”

With this opening gambit, and signature organ arpeggio, a 1911 beauty-and-the-beast potboiler by an obscure Parisian hack/bon vivant named Gaston Leroux turned into one of the monster entertainment success stories of our time.

In the three decades since its 1986 London premiere, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lushly romantic 1986 pop-Puccini hybrid has phantomized the world, propelled on a jet stream of pure box-office high-test.

Thanks to Lloyd Webber and co, the subterranean vocal coach lifted from a wordy novel no one has actually read is arguably the most famous masked man in history (with the world’s best-known lighting fixture at his disposal). People around the globe flock — as  over and over, as the ranks of phantomaniac repeaters attest — to feel “the power of the music of the night” and see the guy not get the girl. “No use resisting,” as the Phantom himself advises his beautiful chorine protegé. “Abandon thought and let the dream descend.”

And talk about mysteries never fully explained, here’s one. Four years ago, with Hal Prince’s extravagantly staged Phantom of the Opera continuing to sing the music of the knight (that would be Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber to you) to sold-out houses in London and New York, producer Cameron Mackintosh launched a new version for North American touring. 

Starting Wednesday, the world’s second-most lucrative musical of all time (after The Lion King) arrives on the Jube stage in a new production directed by Broadway veteran Laurence Connor. Were Mackintosh et al taking a cue from the Phantom himself, a modernist with acidic things to say about archaic performance styles? It’s not as if fans were clamouring for change, as associate director Seth Sklar-Heyn concedes genially. As he says, that’s the catch 22 of  long-running mega-hits with fanatical followings. “How can you do a revival of something that’s never closed?” 

The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Alastair Muir.

 “On the page it’s everything people have come to know and love,” Sklar-Heyn says of the new production of The Phantom of the Opera that’s en route across the country, Vancouver to Montreal, before returning to America. It remains spectacular, as re-designed by Paul Brown. And with its cast and orchestra of 52, it’s undeniably huge, one of the largest productions currently on the road.

“Nothing has been reduced!” reassures Sklar-Heyn of a show that needs “the same number of tractor trailers (20) to transport as when it first took to the road” lo these many years. “But it’s updated; it takes advantage of new technology, new developments in (theatrical) engineering, things you couldn’t conceive of in the ‘80s when Phantom premiered….”

“The music itself, of course, is all there, the melodies, the lyrics are maintained, upheld. But it’s with new orchestrations that take into account new technology….”

The updating is “really in the direction,” says Sklar-Heyn, whose archive includes everything from Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia to Finian’s Rainbow and such widely varying tours as Frost/Nixon and Evita. “It’s in the pulse, the way it moves from location to location without black-outs.” He describes that flow as “cinematic, close-ups and wide shots…. We cut from one moment to another, or fade.”

What Sklar-Heyn is describing is an update very different from the re-designed Les Miz, which replaced its famous revolving stagecraft with sophisticated projections. “We’re not about projection or video, except in two or three little moments…. We’re all about full 3-D scenery,” says Sklar-Heyn. “We fill the stage with it! And it’s massive. And very heavy!” 

“It’s not about excess. It’s just about making it grand, operatic,” he says. After all, the story takes us to that extravagant Belle Epoque palace, the Paris Opera. “We need to capture the glamour of the period, incredibly lush, opulent. The physical (environment) of the production has to live at that level…. And it feels justified and balanced with the world of Lloyd Webber’s music. When the orchestra swells, the visuals must be there!”

Does the story have a different feel to it in this new production? Sklar-Heyn considers that it belongs in a new way to Christine, the ingenue the Phantom grooms for stardom. “She’s the focus of the tale. There’s no neon sign on Christine that says Follow Me; it’s just about perspective. Your eye follows her….It’s her story.” Director Connor “tried to come at it in a way that filled in the gaps. What are the moments I’ve always questioned? What does ‘the music of the night’ really mean?”

“We’ve tried to capitalize on the new talent,” Sklar-Heyn says of a cast led by Derrick Davis as the man trapped by his deformities, his genius, his desires, and Canadian Eva Tavares (replacing Katie Travis for the tour, starting in Edmonton) as the chorine he mesmerizes. Traditionally, the age difference between Christine and the Phantom has often meant the latter was a sort of father-replacement. “Here, instead of a man to replace Christine’s father, there’s a man to excite new emotions.”

“It has a different pulse, a narrative momentum,” Sklar-Heyn muses. “The way the world moves feels a little more contemporary; it makes Phantom feel like it belongs in the world of the modern musical theatre..…”

“We really want to give you real people, real threats, in a real working theatre…. We want it to feel tangible: the Phantom as a real man, the man, who’s an engineer, able to create the journey,” the iconic candelight cruise across a subterranean lagoon to the Phantom’s lair.

“We want to meet your expectations. And surpass them.”

PREVIEW

The Phantom of the Opera

Broadway Across Canada

Directed by: Laurence Connor

Starring: Derrick Davis, Eva Tavares

Where: Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium

Running: July 26 to August 6

Tickets: Ticketmaster (1-855-985-5000, ticketmaster.ca)

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Getting your Gasp! back. The Cirque du Soleil’s Kurios: a cabinet of the curiouser and curiouser

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Mr. Microcosmos and Mini Lili in Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities. Photo by Martin Girard.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A burnished antique music box opens, and suddenly, set in motion, is a trapeze act with no trapeze. A strong man plants his feet and flings a beautiful woman into the air again and again; she somersaults, ever more elaborately, before he catches her.

The Cirque du Soleil has always been drawn to frame its collection of improbable virtuosos in a theatre of surreal images and whimsical free-association. And you could say that of the 2014 show that’s now ensconced under the Cirque’s signature yellow and blue-striped grand chapiteau at Northlands. But you’d be missing something in your description. In the canon of Cirque shows (of which I have seen more than my share), there is nothing quite like Kurios and its wonder-full 2014 “cabinet of curiosities.” 

By opening the cabinet of the Belle Epoque imagination, Kurios and its mad inventor/scientist/Seeker character (Anton Valen) lead us into the Victorian turning-point milieu of exploration, discovery, invention that joined art to science. The steam that powered the railway (and the original steampunk), the new glow of electric light, clockwork toys, wind-up gramophones, perpetual motion machines, mechanical oddities, the deep-sea bathosphere fantasies of Jules Verne, gravity-defying hot-air balloons — they’re the motifs of a carnival that, in every detail and prop, embraces that new turn-of-the-century sense of wonder at life’s infinite oddities.

Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities. Photo by Martin Girard

It’s directed by Michel Laprise, new to Cirque creation, who has Madonna’s Super Bowl half-time show on his resumé. Stéphane Roy’s stunning design, with its glowing bell jars of strange light, is dominated by a cogged wrought-iron Gustav Eiffel-style arch through which a steam train emerges to disgorge a tumble of passengers, or a giant mechanical hand arrives, crawling with exquisitely contorting deep-sea creatures. And Philippe Guillotel’s fantastical costumes, bona fide works of art, create the Seeker’s inventions who emerge from his cabinet of curiosities and come to life before our very eyes.

Kurios: cabinet of curiosities. Photo by Martin Girard.

Mr. Microcosmos (Karl L’Ecuyer) has a huge bathosphere belly, where a tiny exquisite women Mini Lili (Rima Hadchiti) lives in a perfect little apartment with a perfect little armchair. Nico the Accordion Man stretches and compresses his pleated form into any configuration or size.

The Victorian love of exotica, curios and miniatures is everywhere, and set in motion, in Kurios. There are gramophone/typewriters, holograms, wild percussionists who play furniture and suitcases, a Darwinian gaggle (a school?) of half-men half-fish, a juggler who tosses human hands in the air.

And speaking of hands, in a 46-member cast of circus virtuosos there’s a puppetry whiz (Nico Baxais) who creates whole scenes with just his supple hands (and great lighting). They’re reproduced, in magical fashion, in a giant hot-air balloon floating above.

The towering chair balancing circus act you’ll remember from other Cirque shows is reinvented by happening at a dinner party, duplicated in exact mirror detail and upside down, hanging from the top of the tent. That was the moment, on Thursday’s opening night, when Edmonton provided a dramatic summer tempest outside, with a percussion score of thunder and pelting rain, that actually stopped the show for a time. The Cirque’s sound whizzes (here, Raphaël Beau and Bob & Bill) would never settle for such a crude sound mix.   

It is a measure of the eccentric originality of Kurios that one of its cleverest scenes is an “invisible circus” of traditional acts. You see the trapezes swing, the diving board bounce and the splash of the water in the bucket below. The spotlights move; the tiger roars. What you won’t see are the performers. 

The Cirque is all about marrying circus acts with theatre. Rarely has this aesthetic been so fulsomely and joyously realized as in Kurios. Some of the Cirque’s signatures remain. In every scene, there’s an observer, or a gaggle of them, wonderstruck by the magic around them. And well they might be, by the show’s reinventions.

Kurios: cabinet of curiosities. Photo by Martin Girard.

In one act, a cyclist on an old-fashioned bike pedals her way serenly into the air and accomplishes impossible acrobatic feats from the handlebars and wheels. The classic trampoline act explodes to a new level of thrill on a huge net; an ensemble of extremely athletic sea creatures propel their team-mates to the top of the tent, just by adjusting the angles of their bounces at the edges.

If you’ve found a certain Cirque fatigue setting in of late — making the impossible look easy in show after show flirts with the law of diminishing returns — your sense of wonder will be refreshed by a show that gives you your gasp! back (with exclamation point).

And, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll even fall in love with a clown again: Facundo Gimenez’s seduction scene is a comic gem.

REVIEW

Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities

Theatre: Cirque du Soleil

Directed by: Michel Laprise

Where: Grand Chapiteau, Northlands Park

Running: through Aug. 13

Tickets: 1-877-924-7783, cirquedusoleil.com

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A direct link between theatre and our shared history: Indecent in New York

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

 

Paula Vogel’s Indecent, at the Cort Theatre, New York City. Photo by Alan Kellogg.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“There is a story we want to tell you….”

There is no shortage, in the theatre archive, of plays about plays, the writing of them, the putting on of them, the view of them from backstage. I’ll never forget the one I saw last week in New York.

Paula Vogel’s Indecent, a luminous collaboration with Tony Award-winning director Rebecca Taichman, tells a theatre story, a real one, that connects us directly to the explosive historical and cultural currents of the last century. And to the tragic arc being forged in our own.

A row of actors sit before us in darkness, lit by footlights against a brick back wall that feels like the Kilroy Was Here of history. When they stand, ashes trail from their sleeves. It’s a startling image that will be repeated, in more ominous circumstances, later in the play.

The actor playing the tailor-turned-stage manager Lemml (Richard Topol) introduces the ghostly company of actors who brought Sholem Asch’s landmark 1907 Yiddish play God of Vengeance from the capitals of Europe to America.

The play, in which a rabbi’s daughter falls in love with one of the prostitutes in the brothel downstairs, was warmly received in the Greenwich Village of 1921, the first lesbian kiss on an American stage. But its move uptown to Broadway in 1923 was a disaster. Notwithstanding the fact that the love scene between the two women had been censored pre-emptively out of the script, it was shut down by the vice squad and prosecuted for obscenity. And the embittered playwright turned from theatre to other kinds of writing.

Later, the company would, fatally, return to Europe and perform the play in the Lodz ghetto in Poland. Ashes to ashes: the immigrant experience, homophobia, anti-Semitism, censorship, war…. 

(l-r): Richard Topol, Mimi Lieber, Tom Nelis, Adina Verson, Katrina Lenk, Steven Rattazzi and Max Gordon Moore, the company of Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichman’s Indecent, at Broadway’s Cort Theatre in New York City. Photo by Carol Rosegg

With its six-actor ensemble in a play-within-a-play, the production moves backwards and forwards, in memorable stage images, klezmer music (played live by the actors), dance, song, and a repeated projection that says “a blink in time.”

And speaking of blinks, the actor Topol playing tailor/stage manager Lemml, whose life (as he tells the playwright Sholem Asch) was changed by his play, steps forward at the final curtain call to explain a highly unusual development. Indecent closed in June. And then, occasioned by passionate letter-writing to the Broadway producer, actually opened again for six weeks. It runs through Aug. 6.    

It’s a magical connection to a time, and the sense of what live theatre can do in linking us to cultural heritage. In her program notes to Indecent, Vogel says “I believe the purpose of theatre is to wound our memory so we can remember.” 

Indecent has a connection to us, in Edmonton, too. Sholem Asch’s son, Moses ‘Moe’ Asch, was the founder, in 1948 Greenwich Village, of Folkways Records, an invaluable repository of American folk and roots music and “world” recordings before that term entered the popular lexicon. Moe’s son Michael Asch, for many years an anthropology prof at the U of A before he and his wife retired to Victoria, secured the entire Folkways archive for the university here.

His grandfather’s groundbreaking play is a living document, a testament of the “cultural diversity” that has turned out to be under attack once more in this century.

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Bringing Canada to New York: Soulpepper on 42nd Street

Posted on July 16, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Michelle Monteith, Gregory Prest in Of Human Bondage, Soulpepper Theatre. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Last week in New York I had the excitement of seeing what a top-drawer Canadian theatre company, venturing forth, can bring to the stage in a highly demanding world theatre capital.   

Coming from away for the month of July, Toronto’s Soulpepper, is making its U.S. debut ensconced at the Pershing Square Signature Centre on 42nd St. You walk west from Times Square, past blocks of tawdry retail peppered with storied theatre marquees, and, suddenly, just before 10th Avenue, there it is, the end of a glittering series of glass-encased bars and cafes. It was my first time at this stunningly impressive Frank Gehry-designed playground of theatre spaces (three) and studios (two), of varying configurations, sizes, finishes — with a vast, airy shared lobby (complete with bookshop) — where Soulpepper is hosting its summer theatre festival.

It’s four days after Canada Day. And at the top of the stairs from the street entrance is a basket of little Canadian flags.

Among the assortment of award-winning plays and musicals, along with cabarets, readings, forums, audience conversations of Soulpepper’s cross-border foray, is Ins Choi’s highly appealing comedy Kim’s Convenience (which Soulpepper brought to the Citadel in 2014). Spoon River, an original Dora Award-winning Soulpepper musical assembled from the quintessential Americana anthology by Mike Ross and Albert Schultz, is on the playbill too.

Onstage in the Signature Centre’s 294-seat Irene Diamond house, Vern Thiessen’s Of Human Bondage, his adaptation of the sprawling 1915 Somerset Maugham novel, is getting an ingenious, imaginatively theatrical production directed by Soulpepper’s Albert Schultz.

At the dark heart of the story, where Thiessen’s adaptation finds its pulse and its dramatic momentum, is a manic, irrational obsession. The self-destructive fascination of medical student Philip Carey (Gregory Prest) with a ruthlessly manipulative tea shop waitress (Michelle Monteith). Their relationship is the perfect storm of irrational need (his) and ruthless instinct for exploitation (hers).

It’s a chemistry against which Carey’s rational self seems powerless. His friendships, his career prospects, his financial security, his happiness — he places all at risk in scene after scene. And as you see in Prest’s riveting performance, it sends an eminently decent man careening towards despair, mystified by his own assault against his better judgment.

Translating a door-stopper of a novel for the stage means travelling without the baggage of narrative exposition. Carey’s back story as an orphan and art student, the club foot handicap that makes him self-conscious, filter obliquely into an adaptation that feels rich and full. Obsession gets its own vivid image in Schultz’s staging, which locates Carey in a red square centerstage — his own cage, as the director’s note explains — and never lets him leave it.

Obsession resonates in various way in the characters who surround Carey, too,  — all played by the other 11 actors, who disappear into semi-darkness outside the square and play instruments in Mike Ross’s score.

Monteith bravely steps up to the harshness of the terrible Mildred in a vivid performance. Stuart Hughes as a self-destructive artist, Sarah Wilson as a soulful divorcée discarded by Carey in a heartbreaking return to Mildred …. it’s a first-rate ensemble.

Soulpepper Theatre’s Of Human Bondage. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

The scenes flow seamlessly: a brilliant piece of stagecraft from Schultz. And in a full evening, the sense of life as a work of art assembled in dark and light, painful trials and glimmerings of happiness — strands in a complex design as the play says — emerges in a powerful way.

Incidentally, Thiessen, the artistic director of Edmonton’s Workshop West, has a distinctly complex pattern of life himself this summer, too — but all in sunny tones. His new play Pugwash opened the 2017 Ship’s Company season in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. Vimy, undertaken by this year’s ArtsTrek participants in Alberta, opened at Soulpepper’s Toronto headquarters at the end of June.

And now New York, in a festival that’s brought something Canadian to America at a propitious time, as Soulpepper artistic director Schultz referenced, lightly, in his pre-show remarks. 

People everywhere vaguely approve of Canada, generally, if they remember where it is. But for once in life — as enthusiasm for the musical Come From Away has confirmed — the word “Canadian” gets not only a reaction, but a warm one in Trump-hating New York: “You’re from Canada? Take me with you!” said the bartender dispensing little bags of popcorn.   

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I Heard About Your Murder: a new Lemoine comedy reinvents the who-dunnit

Posted on July 14, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Jenny McKillop, Garett Ross, Kendra Connor, Patricia Cerra, Vincent Forcier, Mathew Hulshot, in I Heard About Your Murder, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

An early exchange in I Heard About Your Murder, a teasing title with its own built-in line of inquiry, is a tip-off about the mystery concoction to follow. 

Irritated by efforts to smooth out the awkward wrinkles in an unwelcome encounter, one character snaps “we don’t have to make up things.” The pleasant, slightly perplexed, rejoinder is telling: “But I don’t want to tell the truth!” 

Exactly. The plot of Stewart Lemoine’s amusingly curious and original new mystery/comedy divertissement, premiering in the Teatro La Quindicina summer season, is all about that: people who have their reasons, both initial and under spontaneous readjustment, for non- or partial disclosure.

Naturally, some of these people are related; secrets in varying states of repair are, as Canadian theatre wills us to believe, the ultimate family adhesive. I Heard About Your Murder goes to family central: it’s set in a family cabin remote enough to be outside cellular range but close enough to be accessible by car. The bourgeois family getaway is conjured to a T in Chantel Fortin’s two-level design, with lighting to match by Matthew Alan Currie.

And it all begins by referencing a classic farce set-up: a man in a business suit arrives mid-week with a briefcase and a bag of booze, shortly followed by the arrival of a bright young thing in high heels.

The former (Garett Ross) would be Howard Forrester, on an impromptu getaway to the Forrester cabin somewhere between Golden and Radium, B.C. Whoever she actually is, the latter (Kendra Connor) would clearly not be Mrs. Forrester. Mrs. Dodie Forrester (Jenny McKillop) will arrive soon too, on an impulse excursion of her own, accompanied by a younger woman (Patricia Cerra), who gazes around her with a mysteriously alert assessor’s eye.

But lying has to start immediately, mainly because the cabin is not, as Howard has anticipated, empty. The occupant (Mathew Hulshof) is not unknown to Howard, and just as far from delight at the reunion. “What the hell are you doing here?” demands Howard. “Do you have a key?”

Neither question, repeated with variations by assorted characters throughout the evening, is answered; oddly, answers seem not to be expected. Ah yes, there’s so much I could tell you, but you’ll get no further elucidation from me since pretty much everything I could tell you would be a spoiler and you’d be deeply resentful later.

Anyhow, what gives I Heard About Your Murder its appealingly off- centre sense of fun is the way it toys with our own assessments.  Act I gets its meandering quality, as “guests” arrive at a family cabin and scramble for conventional social plausibility, isn’t one big mystery; it’s the accumulation of little, more innocuous mysteries. What we know is that every character, at every moment, wants fewer people in every scene than there demonstrably are, for reasons that aren’t exotic and would seem to sit far from the concept “murder.”   

This escalates to include international intrigue in such a sneaky way you barely notice it’s happening. Lemoine seems to have forged his own link between the farce, the screwball, the murder mystery, and the family sitcom. The line that brings down the Act I curtain, and raises it after intermission, is a corker.

Kendra Connor, Mathew Hulshof, Garett Ross in I Heard About Your Murder, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

Indispensable to proceedings is a gallery of characters we get to know in Lemoine’s well-cast production. Ross, a veteran actor and Teatro newcomer whose eyebrows have reconfigured themselves into the international road sign for Panic Ahead, is a virtuoso on the keyboard that goes from melancholy to anxiety, with top notes of hysteria. McKillop is endearingly irritating as the dithery, endlessly voluble earth mother Dodie. As the bright, chirpy character from screwball comedies who complicates things mainly for the fun of it, Connor is a hoot.

Vincent Forcier as a passerby in an emergency, and Cerra as a cool, noncommittal professional dislodged from her usual calm into improvising lies she herself finds outlandish, turn in sharp intriguing performances.

The production’s funniest, and most mysterious, performance comes from Hulshof as the unsmiling grouch character, a Forrester relative, who says the least, answers in exasperated monosyllables if at all, and can never be backed into charm or cordiality.

It’s a ticklish business to create suspense while you’re trying to make people laugh. As its title would suggest, I Heard About Your Murder, is a playful experiment in disarming you with scenarios you feel you recognize, then escalating the stakes. What fun, of a summer night, to be tricked.

REVIEW

I Heard About Your Murder

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Jenny McKillop, Garett Ross, Patricia Cerra, Kendra Connor, Mathew Hulshof, Vincent Forcier

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 29

Tickets: 780-433-3399, teatroq.com

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Getting away with murder? Stewart Lemoine’s new mystery-comedy I Heard About Your Murder premieres at Teatro

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Cerra, Garett Ross, Jenny McKillop, Kendra Connor, Mathew Hulshof in I Heard About Your Murder by Stewart Lemoine, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Stewart Lemoine’s new murder mystery thriller comedy — a tricky theatrical category with precious few representatives — you’ll meet a married couple of Canuck urbanites with an idyllic rural retreat.

Little do Howard and Dodie Forrester know it, of course. But their spontaneous, and independent, arrivals at their B.C. cabin between Golden and Radium instigate the complications of I Heard About Your Murder, premiering Thursday in the ongoing Teatro La Quindicina summer season at the Varscona.

A proliferating nexus of unexpected guests, unravelling deceptions and scrambled secrets, orchestrated misapprehensions, and out-and-out lies ensues, says the playwright cheerfully over morning coffee. The man at the next table keeps his head down when he overhears this breezy summation.

It might explain why ‘murder mystery thriller comedies’ are not a dime a dozen in the theatrical repertoire. For starters, they require a certain fierce concentration to plot. Both in the writing and the acting, knowing how much to reveal, and when, … well, it’s intricate, to say the least. “This is not your Agatha Christie or Murder She Wrote,” says Lemoine with his misleadingly benign smile, over pre-rehearsal coffee. “Not that kind of body in the library.”

He is prepared to shed more light on the intricate byways of I Heard About Your Murder — in a mysterious sort of way. Of the drop-ins, “some (the Forresters) know, some they don’t know, some they pretend to know. Everyone there has an agenda; everybody has something to conceal.… Lies range from domestic to international. An unusual turn of events happens that needs to be investigated, but in the context of a fun trip to the cabin.”

Patricia Cerra (centre) with Jenny McKillop, Garett Ross, Kendra Connor, Vincent Forcier, Mathew Hulshof, in I Heard About Your Murder, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

In 35 seasons of comedies set in exotic locales like Venice and Zurich, Manhattan and L.A., Budapest and Buenos Aires (not to mention up the Amazon), it’s curious, and revealing, how often Lemoine has turned to apparently benign Canadian locales — for screwball escalations, comic mayhem, and even international intrigues. The national parks of Jasper and Waterton have figured prominently, for example (Mrs. Lindeman Proposes, A Rocky Night For His Nibs). So has the cafeteria in the downtown Winnipeg Eaton’s (Fever-Land). Lemoine’s 2013 comedy thriller Cause and Effect had international complications accelerating through a  remarkably unremarkable strip of Edmonton retail real estate, the stunningly undistinguished Gateway Blvd. between 34th and 51st Avenues.

When it comes to “writing something mysterious about people investigating, seeking information and not having it” in a contemporary mystery, “it’s hard to do anywhere there’s wi-fi,” as Lemoine remarks. “You need a remote location.”

Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, as he points out, is set in an isolated country house; no cell phone reception is involved. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None happens on an island, “with the remake on a mountain you can only get to by cable car.”

Neither is contemporary, of course: “isolation and what it allows dramatically” is a delicate matter in the here and now. When there’s Google, investigation is a mere fingertip distraction. Which is why “the weekend getaway of I Heard About Your Murder isn’t set in downtown New York,” grins Lemoine.

I Heard About Your Murder by Stewart Lemoine, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

B.C. is the remoteness of choice, mainly because Calgary-based actor Barbara Gates Wilson, a Teatro fave, and her artist husband have a cabin midway between Golden and Radium. Lemoine and Teatro artistic director Jeff Haslam have been guests there. “I always send her a birthday message, and she gets it several days late because there’s no email there,” says Lemoine. “They’re cut off from the normal channels of information.”

Not only is isolation a dramatic practicality, but there’s also “its value to people who want it, beyond (mere) tranquillity. What kind of people that, or will fight to have it?” Hmmm. Could that be people who are, as Lemoine puts it, “concealing, avoiding, lying?”

In writing the new play, the only production in the Teatro season set in contemporary time, Lemoine, who’s written both, has been struck by the parallels in structure between mystery thrillers and farce. In both, the infrastructure of high stakes, ever more teetery, is propped up by improvised lies and concealments.

The production, which he cast before he wrote the play, has a sextet of actors, mixing Teatro stars, like Jenny McKillop, Mathew Hulshof, Vincent Forcier and Kendra Connor with newcomers like Garett Ross and Patricia Cerra,

Kendra Connor, Mathew Hulshof, Garett Ross in I Heard About Your Murder, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

“In the general landscape of theatre now,” as Lemoine puts it, “six actors is a big cast. In contrast to many of his playwright colleagues, he thinks “it’s easier to write for more people. To have a plot that reflects … life. To (create) something fun involving misunderstanding and misconceptions with three actors is, well exhausting.”

His 2005 farce A Grand Time In The Rapids, with its etiquette columnist character reduced to panic, had only three actors, but four characters since twins were involved.

Teatro’s July slot has always been one of their biggest draws for audiences. Last summer’s revival of Cocktails at Pam’s was the best attended show in Teatro history.

“My philosophy,” laughs Lemoine, “is have something fun for July, the play equivalent of the book you take to the beach. A page turner!” 

PREVIEW

I Heard About Your Murder

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Jenny McKillop, Garett Ross, Mathew Hulshof, Kendra Connor, Vincent Forcier, Patricia Cerra

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through July 29

Tickets: 780-433-3399, teatroq.com

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So…. wanna go out some time? I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, a review

Posted on June 29, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Zentilli, Robbie Towns, Jocelyn Ahlf, Scott Walters in I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The title sounds like a one-liner, I’ve always thought: a Henny Youngman reboot channelled by Jerry Seinfeld perhaps? Pause to imagine that signature tone of exasperated bemusement at work on I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.

The tag line, “everything you have ever secretly thought about dating, romance, marriage, loves, husbands, wives and in-laws, but were afraid to admit,” cuts to the chase: it’s all about the recognition factor.

That’s how Joe DiPietro’s (very) long-running 1996 Off-Broadway musical comedy, with its clever Jimmy Roberts songs, presents itself onstage: a cabaret of interconnected vignettes on a familiar arc. First, dating rituals in all their panic and assorted humiliations. Then, marriage, with the time-honoured sequels of parenthood, and reassessment. Then a coda that returns us to mating at precisely the time in life when we’re lugging around maximum baggage, a word Roberts rhymes with “saggage” and “draggage” in the opening number.

That ground has been broken many times, of course. And that’s the whole point: familiarity. It can make you wistful and nostalgic. It can make you wince a little. It can make you do one of those nostalgic wince smiles. There are songs and scenes for all of that in I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.

And you’ll see the charm and the fun of the experience in a crack Kate Ryan production at the Mayfield that demonstrates unequivocally — as if you ever doubted it — what a really expert cast of singing actors can do by way of making the recognition factor sizzle. Jocelyn Ahlf, Patricia Zentilli, Robbie Towns and Scott Walters have lustrous, malleable musical theatre voices, comic timing, and attentive relationships — with each other, the 60-odd characters they’re playing, the lyrics.

Ryan ensconces her production in a sort of high-colour bi-level Roy Lichtenstein comic cell, under the watch of two giant pairs of eyes — the male gaze furrowed, the female wide-eyed. Cabaret panels, one for each letter of LOVE, open to expel characters and set pieces onto the stage. And they disappear backwards into mists of LOVE like they were being sucked into an apocalyptic vortex. All very witty, as designed by Ivan Siemens, with lighting by Gail Ksionzyk.

In the funniest reinvention of (and homage to) the familiar, Ahlf and Walters are two busy Manhattanites on a first date. Pressed for time, she suggests they skip the preliminaries and move right along to second-date rituals. He says why not the go directly to third-date mode, and she says, how about skipping the sexual tension and cutting right to the sex. And on it goes, an entire relationship telescoped, from the first glimmer of attraction to the futile regrets, and then a chance meeting a year after break-up. “You look great….”

The fun of the show isn’t in its insights, but in the way it re-imagines, re-walks, re-dances, re-sings, the clichés of the relationship comedy repertoire. And some scenes, and songs, are more successful than others.

First-date hell, in a restaurant, made me laugh out loud, with its counterpoint of matching couples at adjoining tables. At one, the guy drones on about aeronautical engineering, at the other golf. And the smiling women are left to their own secret thoughts, and a duet lamentation to match (Single Man Drought). “Standards,” sings one. “I used to have standards.” “Lesbian,” sings the other. “I should be a lesbian!” Ahlf and Zentilli give this scenario new comic life.

Towns and Zentilli turn the hoary comedy of the awkward first date into something piquant and funny in a scene with its own rueful anthem, A Stud And A Babe, a theme song for romantic underachievers everywhere paralyzed by thoughts of their own inadequacies.

The age of the telephone, and the dating dynamics thereof, have passed into the realm of the historical, to be sure. But Ahlf puts a transforming comic spin on the old scenario of the girl waiting — and waiting — for the guy to call. When he actually, amazingly, does, her transcendental incredulity at this remarkable development is very funny.

Oddly enough, the scene in which the show gets brave and extrapolates into absurdity, is a fizzle, this despite the best efforts of the actors. A singles counsellor in a prison introduces the guest speaker, a murderer serving seven consecutive life sentences because he couldn’t get a date. Waiting, on the other hand, an ancient scenario with simultaneous examples of the chafing frustration of waiting — for a wife shopping in Macy’s, a hubby to finish watching the interminable last 32 seconds of a football game — is amusing. Go figure.

Credit Ryan’s inventive stagecraft, with its affection for vintage (as you’ll know from her Plain Janes productions). Credit, too, the comic fine-tuning of her cast. And every once in a while, there’s a ballad, set forth from the comic fabric of the piece and given room to shine. Zentilli nails I Will Be Loved Tonight, a lovely song of anticipation from a woman who’s been single and made the best of things.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis

I still find the dating scenes of Act I more entertaining, in the end, than the wedding and harried parent scenes of Act II. I guess some clichés are more clichéd than others. But the Marriage Tango between a husband (Towns) and wife (Ahlf) determined to defeat every obstacle en route to the holy grail, is amusingly fierce in execution, not least because of Cindy Kerr’s ever-clever choreography: “I’m married and I’m gonna have sex….”   

The classic musical theatre score is delivered with gusto and style by Cathy Derkach, at a white grand piano on the upper level, along with violinist Shannon Johnson. And they have a wordless relationship comedy of their own to play after intermission. 

This is a show to remind you of the easy-going enjoyment of laughing the laughter of recognition, and Ryan’s production is a charmer. As the finale title number has it, “I keep coming back to this whirlwind tour/ Of loving, and leaving, and wanting more.”

REVIEW

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Jocelyn Ahlf, Robbie Towns, Scott Walters, Patricia Zentilli

Running: through July 30

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

    

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The women run the show: The Merry Wives of Windsor are having a blast in the park

Posted on June 27, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Robert Benz as Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Photo by Lucas Boutilier.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Dance party! You will never get a more spirited welcome into a play than you do at the start of the Tudor screwball currently hustling across the stage in the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s summer season in the park.

Resistance is futile, people. C’mon. Even those of you who don’t move to the metre of the iamb for some weird reason can’t resist … disco! Not for long. Welcome to Ashley Wright’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the second of the alternating Freewill offerings this summer (with The Merchant of Venice). 

The party-hearty Host of the Garter Inn (Jesse Gervais), who’s wearing plaid bellbottoms so shriek-y they could probably dance by themselves, is spinning the tunes. And, hey, everybody in Windsor is there — including the big guy himself.

That would be Sir John Falstaff (Robert Benz), the randy overripe boozehound and ladies’ man, back from his ignominious rejection by Prince Hal in the Henry IV plays. There’s an apocryphal but persistent story that Queen Elizabeth I was so taken with the fat knight that she passed along her desire to see “Sir John in love.”

Shakespeare could take a hint from a big sponsor (a practice unheard of in the modern theatre as we know). And, as the completely unsubstantiated legend has it, voilà! Just 14 days later there he was: the dissolute knight had landed on his feet in a bustling market town just outside London, rubbing shoulders (and other body parts) with the middle-classes, in Shakespeare’s only suburban comedy.

Falstaff’s misadventures in Windsor, as the (ample) butt of a series of prankish set-ups, are powered by venality (he’s strapped for cash) and by his bloated certainty, backed up by absolutely nothing, that two well-do-to wives are smitten with him.

Mistresses Ford (Belinda Cornish) and Page (Nadien Chu) compare notes: “why this is the very same! the very hand! the very words!”. And, in true screwball fashion, they amuse themselves (and us) by egging him on. In the process, they score the bonus fun of enraging Mistress Ford’s insanely jealous hubby (John Ullyatt), who pops his cork every time.

Director Ashley Wright, a note-worthy Falstaff in his time, has entered the ‘70s disco era (password: polyester) for his rambunctious, very funny production. It’s a perfect playground for the gallery of comic grotesques, manic loons, buffoons, and zanies who revolve through the oddball collection of subplots in this kooky one-off of a play.

And it’s a field day for designer Megan Koshka who decks them out in a giddy collection of ruffled shirts, harvest gold pants hiked up well past the point of no return, a nonpareil collection of acid-hued party plaid. Falstaff’s suit is a punch-line show-stopper.

The main plot, to speak gravely of something as light as air, is a series of schemes to lure Falstaff into farcically compromising positions so the wives can send him careening off in a panic, in ever more undignified circumstances. And the complicity between Mistresses Ford and Page, who dissolve into laughter at every triumph, is one of the delights of the production. The two wives have a nice edge of contrast, too: the breezier elegance of Cornish’s Mrs. Ford to the perkier bustle of Chu’s Mrs. Page.

As Falstaff, the man of the hour, Benz conveys an unassailable, unsquelchable confidence that makes him irresistible to pranksters like the wives, and the pert chatterbox housekeeper Mistress Quickly (the charmer Stephanie Wolfe). Even when he gets the heave-ho into the Thames in a laundry basket, his wording remains lofty: “You will know by my size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.”

John Ullyatt as Mr. Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Lucas Boutilier

His nemesis, or vice versa, is the raging Mr. Ford. In Ullyatt’s very funny performance he’s in a constant state of red-alert, ready to burst into flame at every moment. Most amusing of all are his fuming attempts to control his temper long enough to acquire vital information about his wife’s assignations.

Around these principals orbit a whole collection of nutty characters. Ron Pederson is hilarious as the dim and whiney Slender, an adenoidal silly named for the size of his brain, and a distant progenitor of Mrs. Malaprop. Black-eyed from an encounter with Falstaff and co, he actually flinches whenever anyone says anything to him. He’s been badgered by his uncle, Justice Shallow (Julien Arnold in amusing curmudgeon mode), into joining the queue of suitors for the Pages’ captivating daughter Anne (Cayley Thomas). It’s a situation that strikes Slender with terror whenever he comprehends he’s in it.

Another Anne suitor is the preposterous French doctor Caius, played as a preening gallic ninny by Troy O’Donnell. How Dr. Caius ends up in a duel with the Welsh curate (Alex Cherovsky) is something I couldn’t begin to explain.

But then, if it occurs to you to ask yourself something about the narrative complications, there’s Gervais as Host, who is (and has) a hoot, instigating dance interludes so you don’t have to think too much.

REVIEW

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Directed by: Ashley Wright

Starring: Robert Benz, Belinda Cornish, Nadien Chu, John Ullyatt, Ron Pederson, Julien Arnold, Jesse Gervais

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Running: through July 16, even dates and all matinees (The Merchant of Venice is on odd dates

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

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Celebrating the Edmonton theatre season: Irma Voth, Crazy For You, Stupid Fucking Bird lead the 30th annual Sterling Awards

Posted on June 26, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andréa Jorawsky as Irma in Irma Voth, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson/ EPIC Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Art and life got down, mixed it up, and partied together at the 30th anniversary Sterling Awards gala Monday night, celebrating the best of the Edmonton theatre season.

Three productions that, in dramatically different ways, spoke to the life-changing possibilities of art, and the windows it opens on the world, proved, overwhelmingly, the choice of jurors at the theatre bash hosted, in droll fashion by actors Mark Meer and Nadine Chu. 

In the Outstanding Production category top Sterling honours went to Irma Voth,Theatre Network’s premiere of the new Chris Craddock five-actor multi-character play ingeniously spun from Miriam Toews’s swirling novel about two sisters escaping the brutal paternal oppression of a narrow-sided ultra-conservative Mennonite colony in Mexico. Their window of possibility, with its view of the chaotic, inspiring world of art and artists is pried open by the arrival of a film crew.

Craddock’s stage storytelling garnered him the Outstanding New Play award, with leading actress honours as well for Andréa Jorawsky’s luminous performance as the plucky, open-hearted title heroine, and for Ian Jackson’s ingenious (and indispensable) multi-media design.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Crazy For You, at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper

In the outstanding musical category, top honours went to the Citadel’s huge, irresistibly zestful production of Crazy For You. The musical, with its vintage songfest of Gershwin hits, chronicles the resurrection of a deadbeat Nevada mining town courtesy of … yes, theatre! 

Of its eight nominations, the most of any show, three other Sterlings arrived — in the hands of musical director Don Horsburgh, of choreographer Dayna Tekatch (also the director of the show), and of designer Cory Sincennes, whose riotous array of costumes chronicled the arrival of New York showbiz in the derelict Old West.

Robert Benz in Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

For the second year in a row, the biggest Sterling magnet of the night proved to be an indie production from Edmonton Actors Theatre. Six Sterlings, including the director’s trophy and outstanding independent production went to Dave Horak’s production of Stupid Fucking Bird. Life and art have a more fractious relationship in this irreverent reboot of Chekhov’s The Seagull by the American playwright Aaron Posner, set in the world of artists who have a sneaking and unwelcome suspicion they might just be  spectators, and not real participants, in their own lives.

Mat Simpson and Melissa Thingelstad in Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Three of the four actor Sterlings Monday night went to the cast of Horak’s production, including Mat Simpson’s starring performance as the struggling playwright Con, and the supporting work of Melissa Thingelstad as the play’s imperious grande dame actress and Robert Benz as the doctor who muses on time and disappointment. Stephanie Bahniuk’s witty set design, domestic cubbyholes at one end of a gangway and a stage at the other, with the requisite Chekhov birch trees, garnered her a Sterling, too. 

Beyond the focus of those three productions, Sterling jurors noted only T. Erin Gruber’s lighting for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production, and the score, by Jenny Boutros and Etelka Nyilasi, of The Maggie Tree’s 9 Parts of Desire.

The theatre for young audience Sterlings were divvied up between Punctuate! Theatre’s Bone Wars and Concrete/L’UniThéâtre’s Bello, a new Vern Thiessen play.

The Fringe Sterlings were dominated by The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Song, the three-actor comic extravaganza Jessy Ardern fashioned from the Greek tragedy, and its ingenious high-speed Corben Kushneryk production. That irreverent bunch went home with three awards. The Fringe acting Sterlings went to Jayce Mackenzie (Salt Water Moon) and Robert Benz, his second of the night, for Scaramouche Jones, a veritable theatre history for one sad clown.

Sterling honours in administration, named for the legendary producer/administrator Margaret Mooney, went to the Citadel’s veteran Cheryl Hoover. It was presented by the Citadel’s new artistic director Daryl Cloran, who’s poised to be a considerable beneficiary of her multi-faceted expertise.The Ross Hill career achievement in production Sterling went home with Betty Hushlak whose work has enhanced every theatre in town. 

This was the year a new theatre opened from the bricks of an old; there was a slide show salute to the Varscona. There was a  tributes to Edmonton’s multi-faceted community theatre scene, hatchery for many of our working artists.

And speaking as we are of art and life, the Sterling for most valuable contribution to Edmonton theatre went to an artist who has understood, in every way in an exceptional 40-year (and counting) career, that theatre gets inspired, works, and proliferates by mentorship: actor/director/playwright/founder of theatres Maralyn Ryan. 

The explosive theatrical chemistry of talent, originality, passion, and discipline is built into the Ryan career every step of the way. And Edmonton has been the beneficiary.

The 2017 Sterling Awards

Outstanding Production of a Play: Irma Voth (Theatre Network)

Timothy Ryan Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical: Crazy for You (Citadel Theatre/Theatre Calgary)

Outstanding New Play: Irma Voth by Chris Craddock (Theatre Network)

Outstanding Director: Dave Horak, Stupid Fucking Bird  (Edmonton Actors Theatre)

Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Mat Simpson, Stupid Fucking Bird (Edmonton Actors Theatre)

Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: Andréa Jorawsky, Irma Voth (Theatre Network)

Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role: Robert Benz, Stupid Fucking Bird  (Edmonton Actors Theatre)

Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role: Melissa Thingelstad, Stupid Fucking Bird (Edmonton Actors Theatre)

Outstanding Independent Production: Stupid Fucking Bird (Edmonton Actors Theatre)

Outstanding Set Design: Stephanie Bahniuk, Stupid Fucking Bird (Edmonton Actors Theatre)

Outstanding Costume Design: Cory Sincennes, Crazy for You (Citadel Theatre / Theatre Calgary)

Outstanding Lighting Design: T. Erin Gruber, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Multi-Media Design: Ian Jackson, Irma Voth (Theatre Network) 

Outstanding Score of a Play or Musical: Jenny Boutros & Etelka Nyilasi, 9 Parts of Desire (The Maggie Tree in association with Theatre of the New Heart)

Outstanding Musical Director: Don Horsburgh, Crazy for You (Citadel Theatre / Theatre Calgary)

Outstanding Choreography or Fight Direction: Dayna Tekatch, Crazy for You (Citadel Theatre / Theatre Calgary)

Outstanding Production for Young Audiences: Bone Wars (Punctuate! Theatre 

Outstanding Artistic Achievement, Theatre for Young Audiences: Vern Thiessen & Brian Dooley, Writing and Translation, Bello (Concrete Theatre / L’UniThéâtre)

Individual Achievement in Production: Chris Kavanagh, Technical Director

Outstanding Fringe Production: The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Song (Troglodyte Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe New Work (award to playwright): The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Song by Jessy Ardern (Troglodyte Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Director: Corben Kushneryk, The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Song (Troglodyte Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an Actor: Robert Benz, Scaramouche Jones (Blarney Productions)

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an Actress: Jayce Mackenzie, Salt Water Moon (Whizgiggling Productions)

The Margaret Mooney Award for Outstanding Achievement in Administration: Cheryl Hoover

The Ross Hill Award for Career Achievement in Production: Betty Hushlak

Most Valuable Contribution to Theatre in Edmonton: Maralyn Ryan


 

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A world of casual bigotry darkens: Freewill Shakespeare Festival revisits The Merchant of Venice. A review

Posted on June 26, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Belinda Cornish as Portia, John Wright as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Photo by Lucas Boutilier

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Vivacious women, high-spirited men, spontaneous dancing, drinks and keep ‘em coming…. Venetian cafe society is in a festive mood at the start of the absorbing production currently bringing one of Shakespeare’s most troubling plays outdoors into an Edmonton summer dusk.

A stooped, black-clad figure passes through; gaiety (along with Matthew Skopyk’s cleverly jazzy soundscore) suddenly stops in its tracks. We hold our breath. In a moment of startling ugliness, the old man will be spat at. And racial slurs that in the play are reported by their victim a couple of scenes later will actually be hurled at him, on the spot: “misbeliever!” “cut-throat dog!”

In that opening moment, Marianne Copithorne’s production of The Merchant of Venice steps up to the implications of its chosen setting, the gathering darkness of 1939 Europe. The outsider is Shylock, the Jewish money-lender. And as he triggers in his world a disturbing mixture of vicious racial hatred, casual bigotry, deep urges for vengeance and competing pleas for mercy, it’s clear that resolution won’t be within the compass of this four-century-old play as it surges forward. Not then. Not now. Not any time soon. 

Maybe it never was, in any setting. But it’s a measure of maturity and confidence that the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, now in its 29th summer in the park, would return to the challenges of The Merchant of Venice with such a thoughtful and probing production.

Director Copithorne not only shows us what Shylock is up against routinely in a society where anti-Semitism is endemic, but there’s this: it’s Antonio, the Merchant capitalist himself (Nathan Cuckow in a brave performance), who’s the most aggressive and brutal of Shylock’s abusers at the outset. In that opening burst of racist vitriol, even Antonio’s friends seem taken aback, at least by the social awkwardness of his vehemence.

Later, their repeated testimonials to Antonio’s kindnesses and generosity — he’s a stand-up friend — are poisoned by our memory of that moment. Even the horrifying developments in court are coloured by it. Under the circumstances, when Antonio comes to borrow money to finance his friend Bassanio’s courtship of a wealthy heiress, the acid of Shylock’s rejoinder — “hath a dog money? is it possible a cur can lend 3,000 — seems almost mild, a sort of sardonic resignation. 

As John Wright’s moving performance makes clear, Shylock has survived a thousand such blows. The “ancient grudge,” like the deck that’s been stacked against him, has been constructed moment by moment, plank by plank.

A dozen years ago when Wright played Shylock, he had a pulsing subterranean rage to him. This time, it’s more like embittered restraint, born of endurance; Shylock seems battered, more forlorn. There’s a catch in his voice. His insistence, beyond every practical consideration, on the terms of his bond — a pound of Antonio’s flesh upon default of a loan — has the ring of a last stand by the time the case comes to court.

Shylock is, finally, after revenge, but it’s after a lifetime of persecution and only as a last resort. And he seems bowed down with the weight of knowing what’s to come in the world. 

Troy O’Donnell, Nathan Cuckow, Julien Arnold, John Ullyatt, in The Merchant of Venice, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Lucas Boutilier

In view of this sad portrait, Copithorne’s compelling production has evidently thought about the tricky contradictions of the play, the problem of Shylock’s tormenters, the fact that his persecutors are the very characters whose romantic fortunes we’re meant to care about. In this, it has the huge advantage of two appealing, highly intelligent performances from Belinda Cornish as Portia and John Ullyatt as Bassanio.

Both characters have a certain rueful tone. . There are top-notes of self-deprecation in the wit they present to the world. Cornish’s Portia is a genuinely witty, animated heroine; her jocular comradely relationship with her staff, especially Nadien Chu’s Nerissa, is one of the delights of the play. Their joint mockery of the accents and attire of Portia’s series of foreign suitors come to test their luck with the three caskets — Portia’s late father’s condition for marriage — is tempered with an indulgent sense of amusement.

And those casket scenes are unusually funny in this production;. I can’t remember the last time I got a kick out of them. Here I laughed out loud to see Alex Cherovsky’s delightful turns as the preposterously self-regarding Princes of Morocco and Arragon. 

Despite the oddly spread-out staging of the courtroom scene, where Portia has arrived in lawyer disguise to argue the case against exacting the bonded pound of flesh, you feel she’s troubled, thinking on the spot, improvising desperately to save Antonio, but reluctant to corner Shylock past recovery.

Ullyatt’s urbane, breezy, accommodating Bassanio, is naturally conciliatory, which sets him apart a little from the nasty-ness of his set. When Launcelot (Ryan Parker) joins his staff, he refuses to accept a servant’s bow from the cowed newcomer, opting instead to shake hands. It’s an impulsive gesture that speaks volumes.

Apart from this natural pairing, though, Copithorne’s production resists the impulse to celebrate romantic comedy resolutions. Nerissa and the amusing but vicious Gratiano (Jesse Gervais) are at odds; in the end she rejects him. Shylock’s conflicted daughter Jessica (Cayley Thomas), who’s fled her father’s household bearing his casket of loot, can find no respite from her dilemma, impaled between love and loyalty. 

Haunted by the ominous diaspora image of Shylock who exits, suitcase in hand from the upper level of Jim Guedo’s classic staircase design, she sends away her beau Lorenzo (Ron Pederson),  to sing the saddest of songs, alone.

There’s a price to be paid for a society whose sense of humanity is selective; this fine production balks at the thought it can all be smoothed over.

REVIEW

The Merchant of Venice

Theatre: Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Directed by: Marianne Copithorne

Starring: John Wright, Belinda Cornish, John Ullyatt, Cayley Thomas, Nadien Chu, Jesse Gervais

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Running: through July 16, on odd dates, alternating with The Merry Wives of Windsor (on even dates and all matinees)

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com 

 

 

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