October, 2016
Southern Dis-Comfort: An evening of fun
Reviewed by Iris Winston. (more…)
October 31, 2016 Monday at 9:15 pm
‘da Kink is powerful as ever, but keeps the present at arms length
Reviewed by Kat Fournier…. (more…)
October 26, 2016 Wednesday at 2:52
Novel House:
Reviewed by Iris Winston
Novel House
By Jayson McDonald
Blacksheep Theatre
Director: Dave Dawson
In Novel House, a family named Novel lives through the highs and lows of daily life, while family patriarch James Novel, a former greeting-card writer, attempts to write the great Canadian novel with a quill pen. The subject matter of said novel is his family. Therefore, James periodically steps out of the action to address the audience. Meanwhile, his ditzy wife, Mary, floats back and forth, incompetent but full of love for her family, and James’ crazy father, Geoffrey, lives through his memories and the ghosts of his past, personified in small appliances and lamps. (Don’t ask.)
Meanwhile, the relatively normal daughter of the house, Rebecca, introduces Thomas, the love of her life, to her parents and grandfather. Closest to a through line in Novel House is the course of the young couple’s romance and future, which follows their engagement, marriage, loss of their first child, separation and reconciliation. And the most — actually, the only — moving moments of this Blacksheep Theatre production are during the well-executed reconciliation between Rebecca (Whitney Richards) and Thomas (Tony Adams). (more…)
October 23, 2016 Sunday at 6:53
Dial M for Murder: Dialing A for show Murder
Reviewed by Iris Winston
Dial M for Murder
By Frederick Knott
Ottawa Little Theatre
Director: Margaret Harvey O’Kelly
When amateur theatre becomes amateurish, even a carefully constructed play suffers under the strain. Sadly, this is precisely what happens with Ottawa Little Theatre’s production of Frederick Knott’s 1952 drama Dial M for Murder.
Among the clues that this thriller is unlikely to thrill are the numerous lighting miscues that frequently draw laughter from the audience, awkward pauses and embarrassing silences that are the result of one of the actors forgetting his lines and the slow set changes. Further clues that the production is not working are a lack of apparent chemistry between the heroine and her erstwhile lover and the declamatory style of the villain of the piece.
All this is particularly depressing in the light of the obvious effort that is behind ensuring the accuracy of the period costuming by Gillian Siddiqui and the set design by Robin Riddihough.
More of a will-he-get-away-with-it than a traditional whodunit, Knott’s script is probably best remembered as the 1954 movie starring Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. And more than 60 years later, it can still work on stage as a recent production by the Perth Classic Theatre Festival demonstrated. (more…)
October 21, 2016 Friday at 7:12
Capital Critics Circle Announces 2016 Theatre Award Nominees
News from Capital Critics Circle
OTTAWA, October 12, 2015 – The Capital Critics Circle announced the nominees for the seventeenth annual English-language theatre awards for plays presented in the National Capital Region during the 2015-2016 season.
The nominees are: (more…)
October 13, 2016 Thursday at 8:04 am
Romeo and Juliet REDUX: Classic play best left in original
Reviewed by Patrick Langston
Passion is all well and good, but too much of it wears pretty thin pretty fast. And too much is the central problem with David Whiteley’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s much-loved Romeo and Juliet.
Taking a cue from Peter Sellars’s chamber play version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream mounted at Stratford in 2014, Whiteley, who also directs, has boiled the tragic tale of young love and feuding families down to 80 minutes. For the most part, he’s cherry picked the play’s most intense moments – for example, falling in love, dust ups, and death scenes – and further distilled the play by using only four actors. The action takes place on a bare stage surrounded by white fabric, the stark minimalism of the set presumably meant to further focus our attention on the play’s emotional high points (Whiteley credits much of the set design to The Night Room by Winnipeg’s now-defunct Primus Theatre).
The problem is, with the connecting tissue between all those intense moments largely stripped out, the show feels like a synopsis set at a high boil. The storyline is well enough known that one can follow along, but what we see and hear are parts of a whole which signal too clearly that they are just parts.
There are other issues. (more…)
October 11, 2016 Tuesday at 12:11 pm