Review: Robin Hood

Eric Davis, Matthew Kabwe and Tamara Brown

Sherwood Forest 2.0
by Nanette Soucy

Legends and folklore are manna for tellers of children’s tales. Since we understand that any facts in their narratives and characters are stretched at best, at worst, entirely made-up, and often appropriated from whatever influences were blowing in the wind through which the last teller told them, the stories that are passed to us through books, place names and ballads continue to resonate with us throughout the centuries precisely because of, and not despite, the circuitous telephone game involved in their relaying.

There are lots of bits to Robin Hood. Since this is not a story that is passed down to us with a clear beginning, middle, and end, but more in bits and pieces gathered from rituals, songs and tradition, like a Pantomime, there are a couple of basic elements necessary to make it recognizable: We’ll need bows and arrows, trees, a merry band of misfits, a puckish rogue, and an evil sheriff bent on ruthlessly suppressing the peasantry. That’s it. The rest is just detail, bits and pieces added on and altered over the course of the near millenia that this hero has been a part of western consciousness. The moor, the maid, the King, the Friar, the Crusades, the details of Robin’s noble bloodline,  are all elements that have been woven into the tale at different times in order to make it appeal to the audience to which it was presented. It is in these details that director Dean Fleming and playwright Paula Wing bring the tale of this Prince of Thieves, this Man in Tights, to the urban, 21st century stage.

Opinion: On The Training Ground and Hamlet

The Folly in Youth
by Nanette Soucy
@NetSoucy

Montreal is home to at least half a dozen theatre programs. Consequently, its relatively small Anglo theatre scene is inundated with recent grads in search of challenging work to build up their résumés and hopefully pay the rent. With an arguably educational mandate, several local companies have elected to meet this demand for work by choosing to work almost exclusively with erstwhile students, offering them opportunities to perform roles they wouldn’t otherwise have been cast in.

I must confess, I am past the point in my career when I could reasonably refer to myself as a “recent graduate” of my Alma matter. But I am only so far along that the bulk of my working experience is with companies that value employing emerging artists as a matter of mission and method. As young artists, we are all grateful for the existence of these companies to a point. Yes, we can say we held a major role in a classic piece of theatre, that we might not have otherwise been cast in for lack of experience, or because we simply weren’t right for it. Yes, we can say we’ve gotten paid work, but at what cost? Let’s be frank. Companies who choose to employ recent grads, however altruistic their intentions, do so in large part because they are willing to work for cheap, and are invigorated by youth to work hard.

Review: Trench Patterns

Much, but not enough
by Nanette Soucy
@NetSoucy

You've gotta keep your humour, if you're going to keep your wits. When IEDs are exploding all around and you're at the antipodes of home, with the lives of others in your hands, being able to make a crack gets you through the day, and, hopefully, back home, alive. 

Captain Jacqueline, a wounded veteran in Alyson Grant's Trench Patterns, is an expert at the healing powers of sardonicism. We meet Patricia Summersett's healing officer shortly upon her return from Afghanistan, in hospital, where she is slowly learning to walk and talk again after the loss of her leg and her men. Jaqueline is at once tough and supremely vulnerable, a situation that both her mother and her visitations take ruthless advantage of. Her vulnerability is poked at by her psychiatrist, who asks corny questions as though he received his degree from the Wikipedia School of Psychology. What her psychiatrist lacks in skill, Summersett more than makes up for in performance. 

Review: The Bacchae

Alex McCooeye

Sons and Songs of God
by Nanette Soucy

There is no better known tale in the Western world. A man is born, supposedly the son of a God. His arrival flanked with revellers and worshippers brings forth a wave of religious fervor, song, and adulation to the city that threatens its ruler and to spread chaos, blood, and barbarism throughout the land. The God-Man is persecuted, his following ruthlessly suppressed. The story ends with the sacrifice of a son and the ultimate suffering of his mother.

Taking a page from the Coen brothers playbook, Scapegoat Carnivale’s presentation of Euripides’s final work, The Bacchae, is set in a nostalgic era of the deep south of the United States remembered most fondly for its music. Venturing a few decades past O Brother Where Art Thou’s Blues roots, we find ourselves in the early 19th century in the decades preceding the American Civil War, when expansion into the promised land of the American West unleashed a wave of missionaries and their choruses of call-and-answer gospel choirs in a religious revival that could be thought of as the seeds of the Evangelical America we know today. The similarities between the figure of Dionysus and that of Christ, the former myth, according to scholars, and likely a source of the latter, makes the setting all the more appropriate.

Review: Les Dishwasheurs

Steaming Panych
by Nanette Soucy

A path through St. Henri is not unlike the trip to the bathroom in a Montreal restaurant. Walking by dark alleys between oxidizing industry, covered in graffiti - like going down the steep stairs into the damp basements of eateries and hearing the dishwashers curse - gives the sense of catching a glimpse at the back end of things; of having gone behind a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” At Atelier Jean-Brillant, Théâtre Momentum sets its translation of Morris Panych’s Dishwashers in precisely the type of damp, poorly ventilated, concrete and steel room that makes up the engines of the neighbourhood’s fancy restaurants.

Review: Grain(s)

Guy Thauvette (photo credit: Maxime Coté)

Grain(s) is Verbatim (through filters)
by Nanette Soucy

As no one can live without it, everybody gets to be an expert about food. Whether you’re choosing all kale and brown rice all the time, or larding up your trucker’s breakfast three times a day, with the variety available to the average North-American, the media obsession with dieting and obesity - by sheer necessity we have to form an opinion about what we put in our mouths.

The environment of Porte Parole’s Grain(s) is unusual. There are cameras and cables and shelving and neon lights and things growing. Upon entry, there are smiling people in lab coats mingling around, alternately engaging in deep discussion with the audience and reassuring its terrified looking members. As the show begins, members of the audience are interviewed and projected on a screen above. The polled audience has well thought-out opinions on GMOs, which is, by some cultural osmosis, actually informed by the story of Percy Schmeiser and Monsanto that they’re about to hear verbatim. Not from the mouths of those involved directly, but through filter upon filter of translation, accents, and interpretations.

Review: Vigil

Marcel Jeannin and Kim Yaroshevskaya (photo: Andrée Lanthier)

Are you dead yet?

Darkness and Lite at The Segal

by Nanette Soucy

In Morris Panych’s Vigil, at the Segal Centre, in co-production with Rideau Vert, we meet Grace, a bed-ridden, silent crone who is besought by a houseguest come to watch over her and tend to her affairs as her life draws to a close.  Kempt, has dropped everything to travel a thousand miles to care for the auntie he spent his tortured childhood wishing he were.  Impatient for his host to kick the bucket, he spends the rest of her life unloading the rage and brimstone of his traumatic childhood in the care of an alcoholic father and a mother who desperately wanted a girl. Before Kempt pesters Grace to death, we encounter a dramatic plot twist.

Review: I, Claudia

Would you be 12 years old again?

Geordie brings Claudia to Montreal

by Nanette Soucy

Can parents of 12-year olds, besought by the stuff of parenthood, have an accurate idea of what it’s like to be one of these “tweens” we hear about now? If they have a memory of being a “pre-teen”, in today’s reality it’s completely irrelevant.  While you’re struggling with the new Facebook layout, their entire emotional landscape is being shaped by the compelling exhibitionism and creative self design that the Internet is made from. When they feel like escaping, they disappear into their screens.

Review: A Thousand Paper Cranes (Wildside)

Why Sadako Sasaki?

The Bomb's impact and metaphors continue

by Nanette Soucy

Geordie Productions made a brief stop at the Centaur for the last weekend of the 15th Annual Wildside Festival to present A Thousand Paper Cranes, The Weapons of Peace, the high school version of their annual school tour.  Created by Paula Wing and Micheline Chevrier, A Thousand Paper Cranes tells the story of an ambitious 11-year-old runner named Sadako, growing up in the years following the attacks on Hiroshima, and the impact of the catastrophe on her family.

Review: Dick Powell's In the Mood For Jazz (Wildside)

In The Mood For Satire

Sidemart and their wash-ups

by Nanette Soucy

SideMart Theatrical Grocery’s contribution to the 15th annual Wildside Festival, Dick Powell’s In The Mood For Jazz is intended to be a spoof on 1950’s lounge acts and the characters in them. Dick Powell, as played by Graham Cuthbertson’s skeezy moustache, is the entitled alcoholic crooning front man to the 5-tux strong Buck Wheaton Trio, brought together at the whim of an obscurely famous Jazz critic to sing a series of duets with his trite and gay as a daisy in May, living cliché of an ex-wife, Laura Thornton for whom he’s been carrying a torch for 22 years plus a day.

Review: blink blink blink (Wildside)

Let Sarah Tonin grab your fears by the balls.
It displays the aplomb that Fringe-style performances can develop with time and repetition. 
by Nanette Soucy

The plucky motivational speaker's book, Skin the Bunny: An Aggressive Approach to Reclaiming Your Life is condensed for your edification into an animated workshop, presented in an exceptionally catered Hotel Conference Room near you, on the occasion of the Centaur's 15th annual WildSide Festival.

Review: Everything in The Garden

(photo credit: Maxime Coté)

How does Jenny’s Garden Grow? 

The Golden Age...that never existed

by Nanette Soucy

Richard is a man with an idea of manhood that dates from a golden-age that had become mythical, even by the 1960’s where his story takes place, and when Edward Albee adapted Everything in the Garden for an American audience.  A man has a good job, a nice life, a kept wife who keeps house and up with the Joneses. A real man commands respect from his wife, his son, his neighbours.