Review: Good People

Paul Hopkins and Johanna Nutter (photo credit: lucetg.com)

Southern Comfort

by Rebecca Ugolini

@RebeccaUgolini

Good People aren’t hard to find, but it might be hard to say how they’re forged. In the hard-up neighbourhood of South Boston, a single mother, Margaret (Johanna Nutter), struggles to find work after losing her job. Left with bills to pay and a mentally-handicapped adult daughter to support, Margaret acts on her friend Jean’s advice (Catherine Lemieux) and asks an old flame for help. As the gap which has grown between Mike (Paul Hopkins), who is now a doctor, and Margie becomes apparent, Good People deftly explores issues of social class, economic disparity and personal choices.

Nutter spent some time in South Boston, simply referred to as Southie by its residents, and it shows in her performance. Her accent is spot-on, and her gait and weary mannerisms communicate a femininity that has been worn-down by years of hard work and disappointment. 

Review: Schwartz's: The Musical

Photo credit: lucetg.com

A MUSICAL IT AIN’T

Or “Schwartz’s The Musical: The Musical Review”

by Robi Halecs

The lobby of Centaur Theatre. March 31, 2011. An ensemble of Montreal’s most famous theatre-goers are waiting outside the auditorium. Suddenly the THEATRE CRITIC enters. The Ensemble surrounds him.

ENSEMBLE (singing)

DON’T SPEAK TO US OF LIBYA OR THE CRISIS IN IRAQ

DON’T SAY JAPAN’S REACTORS HAVE HAD ANOTHER CRACK

DON’T TALK ABOUT ELECTIONS OR OF HARPER IN CONTEMPT

A NEW MUSICAL HAS OPENED – AND THAT’S THE MAIN EVENT!

JEREMY HECHTMAN: (spoken)

Is it true it’s based on a book by Bill Brownstein?

PAUL VAN DYCK: (spoken)

Is it true there’s a dancing pickle on stage?

ALEX HABER: (spoken)

Is it true the show’s written by Bowser and Blue?

UNION LEADER (spoken)

Is it true the actors get minimum wage?

After Dark, March 22, 2011

One Down, Another to Go

In theatre, spring assumes various shapes

by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

While I wasn't looking (ie: reviewing TV or lying in a hospital) Centaur got itself an artistic director who has his shit together. Simply, the upcoming season at the Old Stock Exchange is pitch perfect.

Roy Surette may not have created the perfect year of theatre for everyone, but with the option to pick and choose and create mini-season subscriptions, virtually every kind of theatre-goer can find satisfaction. For instance, I appreciate the sweetness of Colleen (True Nature) Curran's writing, but otherwise it's not for me. Yazmina (God of Carnage) Reza's work is always interesting though her concerns are middle-aged and middle-class; I am at least one of those. Morris (In Absentia) Panych is one of the most lucid and exciting writers in the country and he has the edge I need in a play. If you're going to go classic, you could do worse than Marivaux (The Game of Love and Chance) and you could do far worse than a coproduction with CanadianStage. Lynn (Intimate Apparel) Nottage offers a period piece too, yes, but she's a woman of colour writing about a woman of colour—pretty exciting for a house that once did a version of Twelfth Night that posited that the culture of Gone With The Wind was a good thing. Finally, what better way to end a season than with a revival of a highly-praised, hit indie production from a company that is not up-and-coming but fully arrived: Sidemart Theatrical Grocery's Haunted Hillbilly. Add to this mix the WildSide Festival, Brave New Looks and Urban Tales and you have a reason to party!

The Upstage Interview: John C. Dinning

We can’t, as an audience, be sitting and waiting for something to change in front 

of us. We have to see it morph into something else.

The Upstage Interview, each Monday, is a result of CharPo's media partnership with Upstage: Theatre on Radio on CKUT.

Upstage and CharPo contributor Sarah Deshaies spoke with Set Designer John C. Dinning about Schwartz’s The Musical. Below is an abridged version of the interview transcribed by Estelle Rosen, CharPo Editor-in-Chief.

Deshaies began the interview by thanking Dinning for coming into studio.

Any chance I get to talk about designing for the theatre is always exciting for me because lots of people don’t know what we do.

Review: Instructions to any Future Socialist Government Wishing to Abolish Christmas

Ted Dykstra and Gemma James-Smith (photo credit: lucetg.com)

The G(r)eeks

If you needed An Idiot’s Guide to Investing for your RRSP, chances are you might be a tad lost. 

by Sarah Deshaies

It’s early, early in the morning in fall 2008, and Jason is holed away in his skyscraper office, desperately awaiting the catastrophic crash of his hedge fund. His former assistant Cass turns up with a sheath of papers, dredging up memories and uncomfortable truths. 

The Centaur presents the world premiere of Michael Mackenzie’s mouthful of a new play, Instructions to any Future Socialist Government Wishing to Abolish Christmas. The title is fitting; the two characters, a high-powered hedge fund manager and his creation/assistant, an autistic mathematical genius, motor along, spitting out lines laden with economic jargon and Hellenic philosophy. At times, you feel like you’re watching a Greek tragedy... in ancient Greek.

Ford's Focus: Ted Dykstra

Classic Renaissance Man

"...every time is your first time and you've got to break through all over again."

by Barbara Ford

This week’s feature presented a bit of a dilemma: what could I possibly write about Ted Dykstra that hasn’t already been covered, with all the ink he’s received since making his professional debut at 15? How about starting with the years leading up to his stage launch in Frank Moher’s The Broken Globe?

Born in Chatham Ontario in 1961, Ted moved with his Dutch immigrant parents (who grew up under the Nazi occupation) to St. Albert, Alberta while still very young.  His dad was a telephone repairman and his mom took on various jobs, full or part-time, to scrape enough money together to provide piano lessons and regular trips to the symphony for Ted and his 3 siblings. Not surprisingly, all but one of the Dykstra children migrated into artistic livelihoods, with the fourth, “the black sheep of the family” becoming an engineer, though he now admits that he wished his parents hadn’t let him quit his musical pursuits.  Kids … as a parent you just can’t win!  

Review: Neon Nightz

The Importance of Being Intimate
by David Allan King

I get pumped when shows from Toronto's Buddies In Bad Times visit Montreal. While they've only been imported more recently (i.e. Clean Irene and Dirty Maxine, The Silicone Diaries and this week's Neon Nightz at Centaur's WildSide Fest), Buddies has always been queer enough to give us sophisticated Montrealers a taste of theatre we haven't yet experienced. After decades of launching the careers of some of Canada's top artists, the company currently boasts more Montreal alumni in the Buddies "family"  than ever before, and run by Brendan Healey (who trained in Montreal) there's strong potential for a continued 401-connection that could truly benefit both cities.

Neon Nightz, making its Montreal debut this week at Wildside, is (ironically) inspired by Montreal life, as writer/performer Sasha Von Bon Von (syndicated sex columnist, sex trade advocate and established burlesque performer) recounts her experiences as a Montreal stripper back in the 1990s. Von Bon Bon and dancer/choreographer Kitty Neptune have a chemistry on stage that comes from years of working together in both Toronto and Montreal, and their company The Scandelles,  a hybrid borne from that chemistry, stems from a love of the classic burlesque form that they have already harnessed in the company's earlier works. While burlesque is nothing retro to us anymore (Von Bon Bon's been doing it for years in Montreal at Le Boudoir among other events), the Scandelles have really got it buzzing in Toronto as mainstage fun recently, thanks in part to Buddies' commitment to professionally workshopping and developing all that naughtiness when former A.D. (and Neon Nightz director) David Oiye was at the helm.

Ford's Focus: Holly Gauthier-Frankel

(photo credit: Andrea Hausmann)

Life Lesson from Holly Gauthier-Frankel

by Barbara Ford

I first met Holly Gauthier-Frankel in the fall of 2008 when I was the publicist for a small indie production in which she played the elusive moon. As I walked into the rehearsal between scenes, I heard an angelic voice singing show tunes.  Could this be the very same Queen of the Montreal Burlesque scene who seems to have been born in the wrong decade, her voluptuous figure and come-hither doe eyes reminiscent of the most deadly femme fatale from any 1950 film noir? As we spoke by phone on New Year’s Eve, I got a fascinating glimpse  of this very bright, insightful and articulate artist whose one-woman Fringe Fest hit, Miss Sugarpuss Must Die, will be remounted in the upcoming Wildside Festival at Centaur Theatre.

Growing up in a musical home, (Frankel’s mom is a singer and her step-dad, father and brother are all drummers) by the time she was 7 years old she was singing advertising jingles and dubbing movies.   At 10, she saw her first musical (Les Miserables) and knew she wanted to pursue a career in musical theatre.  She attended Roslyn Elementary and Westmount High School but had a hard time fitting in: at age 12 her peers were more likely to be artists in their 30’s and 40’s.  She wasn’t really into pop culture either, favouring Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and shamefully admits she had to dumb-down to get by.  Frankel’s own mom coined the pet name “my little anachronism”!

Frankel attended Marianopolis CEGEP, studying theatre with Victor Garaway, whose creativity and progressive approach (using Yoga, Butoh and percussion as theatre training techniques) appealed to her.  She continued her education at McGill, studying English Literature and Women’s Studies, leaving with a Bachelor of Arts Degree and a hefty dose of disdain for what she refers to as a “bastion of non-creativity” that had all but stomped out her originality.

First Person: Towards a Rock & Roll Theatre: I AM I… Redux.

The Cast of I am I

By Mike Czuba

When Dancing Monkey Theatre produced I AM I in 2009 at the Players’ Theatre, we wanted to push the ideas of what independent, contemporary, new works could be. We also understood we weren’t attempting anything new. We were simply creating a new Mash-Up. We took some of the tastier bits of theory from Brecht, Artaud and Brook, the slickness of film and the sonic boom of a live concert. We didn’t turn our back on our old friend Aristotle and his elements of Tragedy (Story, Character, Thought, Diction, Music and Spectacle), but ignored his descending order of importance, flattened it all out and let them exist in the same time and space. So in the end, Spectacle becomes just as important as Story. We also gave ourselves an internal code of conduct which explicitly stated that ‘good-enough’ is not good enough and in fact is unacceptable.