Review: Bliss (Wildside)

Trent Pardy, Jean-Robert Bourdage, France Rolland 

(photo credit: James Lavoie)

The Oracle of Walmart

Engaging, shocking, powerful, bliss

by David Sklar

I had the experience of seeing Bliss two years ago at the SummerWorks festival in Toronto. The story written by Olivier Choiniere, a graduate of NTS (National Theatre School of Canada) playwriting program on the French side, explores the extremities of the world as seen through a Walmart cashier/oracle. The play moves about in a quick, quirky and unpredictable way, edging on disturbing. Its director, Steven McCarthy, who also doubled as one of the actors in the summer production, believes that “Céline Dion is the goddess of the play”. (Thanks Pat Donnelly).  Having won the CanStage award for Best Direction, you should take him at his word.     

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: Queen of Hearts (Wildside)

Queen of Hearts mimes the ravages of war

Statements understated

by Sarah Deshaies

An unnamed war breaks out, with clashes and explosions ridding a city of all its people. All of them flee the destruction, except two women unwittingly clinging to one another in a small room in an abandoned asylum.

For a 55-minute play, Queen of Hearts is stylishly powerful. It expertly mines the skills of its main actresses/clowns/mimes Manon Beaudoin and Lois Anderson, who are both on point as a mad patient and wounded nurse, respectively. Both are trapped in this one, bare room, where they simultaneously anticipate their rescue and devolve into craziness. By the end, we’re not sure who’s nursing who.

Review: Bifurcate Me (Wildside)

CRUSHED BY ITS OWN AMBITIONS

That the metaphor isn’t exactly clear is part of the great struggle for anyone watching the play

joel fishbane

With a nod and wink to the work of Beckett and Sartre, Bifurcate Me opened at Centaur’s Wildside Festival to kind laughs and some bewildered applause. This probably isn’t all that surprising for a show whose title most people can’t define. For the record, bifurcate is a fancy word for the fork in the road: it can refer to the split in rivers, blood vessels or scientific systems. 

Review: Pit and the Pendulum (Wildside)

Dark Poe-try

A short story as theatre is not for the faint of heart

by Christopher Lane

Sometimes torture is violent and physical, and then sometimes it is the emotional state it induces that is the most painful. The Pit and the Pendulum allows the audience to vividly imagine both of these frightful experiences.

Review: Countries Shaped Like Stars (Wildside)

A Constellation of Cabaret

Ottawa's Mi Casa Theatre may give us cavities, but who doesn't like a good love story?

by David King

There's a saccharine charm to Countries Shaped Like Stars at this week's Wildside Festival, right down to the homemade moustache cookies served up to the audience. 

Re-inventing simple objects and flirting with traditions of cabaret, vaudeville and buffoonery, Ottawa visiting performers Nicolas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman have been touring this musical storytelling piece now for about three years, along with others in the roster of their newly formed company, Mi Casa Theatre. Part of the mandate of Mi Casa is to break the walls down between audience and performer, and with Countries Shaped Like Stars, they show us how capable they are of doing just that.

Review: Teaching Hamlet (Wildside)

l-r Watson, Cutler

A Lesson on Fixations

Shakespeare simply reveals the actor's lot

By Byron Toben

Keir Cutler, the author/performer of eight widely performed monologues, strikes again, this time with a duologue, “Teaching Hamlet”. This wildly amusing show - aided and abetted with the appearance of Brett Watson and the directoral hand of Paul Hopkins - makes a fine book end to Cutler's “Teaching” series.

Ford's Focus: Ned Cox - The Road to Duplicity

The Duplicity Girls gang: Ned Cox (centre) flanked left to right by Johanna Nutter and Paula Costain with Tanner Harvey in back

By Barbara Ford

Who is this Ned Cox with a play in the upcoming Wildside Festival? Where does he come from and why is he here? Cox’s journey to Montreal has taken a long, not to mention, circuitous route.

He and his sister were both adopted and raised in Short Hills, New Jersey, about 30 minutes outside NYC. Cox eventually found his birth mother, who now lives in Florida and is coincidentally involved in theatre, and remains in touch with her. She met Ned’s father, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, at a cast party in Boston when they were working as actors in different plays. Sparks flew and little Ned was conceived but it didn’t work out between them, so Ned was given up for adoption and the two went their separate ways. Henry Beckman continued to pursue his acting career by going out LA and for a while during the 60’s and 70’s, got a lot of TV work with a recurring role on Peyton Place and appearances on shows like The Munsters, McHale’s Navy, The Monkees and even had a line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In 1984 he passed through Montreal in A Majority of Two at Centaur. When Cox met Maurice Podbrey, he managed to glean a tiny bit more about the estranged relative he never met. “Maurice didn’t remember much but he did say that my dad was very professional.”

After Dark, January 11, 2011

WildSide, CharPo and Beyond


by Gaëtan L. Charlebois


What a week it has been!

The WildSide Festival was very, very good to CharPo. Our traffic exploded and our contributors, who were everywhere, heard lots of great reaction to this site. The comment most often made was that we offer an immediacy to the theatre dialogue - reviews come out fast and are spread quickly, shared over and over again via Twitter and Facebook. It's also great that the internet allows us to review shows which run two or three nights (as we did with Hamlet, Match Made in Hell, and Mike Birbiglia's My Girlfriend's Boyfriend) and these reviews seem to be appreciated by the readers and artists. (Birbiglia, for instance, tweeted my review of his show to his 50,000 followers and in the ten minutes following his tweet, we experienced a 500 pageview spike on the site - which normally pulls in 150-250 pageviews per day. The dialogue about the show broadened to people from the US, even after the show moved on to Oceania.) So appreciated that our site doubled it's previous record, this week (and that's even if you remove the statistical anomaly caused by the Birbiglian spike).

What WildSide also caused was a lively exchange amongst the CharPo people about how shows should be handled - profiled, reviewed or both - and who CharPo is for. We decided both profiled and reviewed. Identifying who we are meant for is a bit more complex.

Review: I am I

by Elizabeth Johnston

Don’t be afraid of the press line, “I AM I is an exploration into the duality of the modern man.” Mike Czuba’s play appearing now at the Wildside Theatre Festival is not nearly as cerebral as you might think. At the heart of it, I AM I is about a guy trying to get a girl. One side of him wants to jump her bones and the other wants to take it slow, to get to know her first. 

A Woody Allenesque comedy, the actors deliver their well-written lines with passion and believability. Man 1, the sensitive one played by Canadian Idol contestant George Bekiaris is a perfect foil for lusty Man 2, played by Tristan D. Lalla, a recipient of numerous awards for acting excellence. While Man 1 and Man 2 wrestle over their object of desire, Tamara Brown’s character, Sonya, struggles to make sense of the Jekyll and Hide personality of a guy she’s sort of interested in. Having just come out of a “difficult relationship,” she’s not sure whether she just wants an ear or a grope in the dark. Her indecision makes it that much harder for Man 1 and Man 2 to come together, and Tai Timbers’ live electric guitar “sound track” just underscores their existential angst.

Review: Duplicity Girls

by Gaëtan L. Charlebois


Fifteen minutes into Ned Cox's Duplicity Girls, I realized that this was not a play as much as it was a piece of music for two voices...a kind of chamber opera, if you will. And it was not for nothing that Benjamin Britten's adaptation of Henry James' Turn of the Screw popped into my head. For Girls, as with the James, is about a household where something is not quite right.


But back to the music for a moment...Johanna Nutter and Paula Costain play two sisters who display their hatred for each other in different ways—one openly and darkly (the alto) the other brightly and with no shortage of cheerful passive aggressivity (the soprano). They talk at cross purposes, they repeat each others words (turning the tone to make the phrase mean exactly the opposite of what the other said), they have bitter little duets, quiet arias and little fugues—each note getting under each other's skin. If you are an impatient theatre-goer, this will try your patience. But if you like the ebb and flow of dialogue crisply written, expertly directed (Tanner Harvey) and sublimely performed than you will stick with this difficult work.

Video: Raoul Bhaneja talks about Hamlet (solo)

(From Repercussion Theatre's Twitter Feed)

Review: Hypnogogic Logic

By Gaëtan L. Charlebois


WildSide launched its 14th edition tonight with much noise, and the noise came in the form of the troupe, Uncalled For, and their new work, Hypnogogic Logic. The company of four played to a packed house of devotees. It was a nice, explosive start to the Festival.


However...


As I have said elsewhere, Uncalled For is one of the smartest comedy teams in the city but the problem, with their new work, is they may be too smart by half. Their energy—both intellectual and physical, is in full view from the first moment of the evening (which has, as its conceit, that state of sleep in which the weirdest things happen in your dreams; ie: the sketches). But the person most clearly missing in action is a director (the program tells us they directed themselves). As a result, the pacing is too mad, the voices loud and fairly unmodulated, and finally the show overstays its welcome (and could have handled 15 minutes cut from its 75 or so)...high energy becomes, far too soon, relentlessness.

After Dark, January 4, 2010

By Gaëtan L. Charlebois (Editor-in-Chief)


I could not think of a better time to return to reviewing theatre than right now, as the second half of the season explodes into being. I have been away from my first love of theatre for an awfully long time. I was TV and pop culture critic at the Gazette for seven years or so, then illness hit and now here I am...slowly going back in. 


Going to the theatre, for me (a hardened, though not jaded, observer and critic) is like going into battle. Ostensibly I am in the theatre to take notes, form an opinion and leave as quickly as possible to meet a deadline. But let me confess: those three minutes or so before the lights go down and the play began were (and I suspect, will be) hell for me. It is not that I anticipate there will be a couple of awful hours ahead, it is that I can feel the hysterical energy that is backstage on an opening night. I can feel it. I...am...there.  (A friend once joked that it was a damn good thing I was Gay because I could never survive watching my wife having a baby; I'd be on my back in the delivery room shrieking louder than her with the empathy pains.) 

Video: CharPo Editors' Choices, Wildside, 2011

News: Studio Six to Perform at WildSide

The arrival of ...itsy bitsy spider... at the Wildside Festival has created some media waves outside of Montreal.


Read the Broadway World article here.

Video: Keir Cutler in Rant Demon

Keir Cutler will be bringing Rant Demon to WildSide

CharPo's WildSide Photo Album

Interview: Raoul Bhaneja of Hamlet (solo)

(photo credit: Andrew Kenneth Martin)

By Estelle Rosen (CharPo Editor)

(through partnership with Upstage - Theatre on Radio)

Hamlet (solo)  being presented by Repercussion Theatre  and performed by Raoul Bhaneja will be among the plays in the Centaur Theatre WildSide Festival. First seen in Montreal in 2006 participating in The New Classical Theatre Festival, they were awarded a MECCA for Best Visiting Production.

CKUT Upstage contributor Alison Louder spoke with Raoul 

Bhaneja,  who plays 17 parts in Hamlet (solo) without costumes, props or set. Hamlet stripped down to its essence. For Raoul Bhaneja, the architecture of whatever space they’re in becomes the set.

CharPo's Picture of the Week; December 22, 2010

The Ladies of Neon Nightz - once described as "where fantasy, feminism, sexuality, art and athletics meet in the world of stripping" - are at WildSide.