Picture of the Week, October 11, 2012

Keir Cutler will be delivering a talk at the Segal (St. James Literary Society), October 16, on the Shakespeare authorship controversy. As the picture suggests, it is called "Why am I a 'crackpot'"

Review: Private View

(photo credit: Victor Tangermann of Victor Tangermann Photography)

The Good Life
by Caitlin Murphy

Vaclav Havel died last year.  I don’t remember hearing anything about it.  Not that I would have noticed, as I had no idea who he was until last night.  And I’ve been feeling a little ashamed.  After all, few CVs likely boast the credits of poet, essayist, playwright, AND President of Czechoslovakia. Add to these the fact that his life inspired the creation of an Award for Creative Dissent, and you get something of the man’s eclectic legacy.  It’s a legacy that’s being very well served by Tuesday Night Café Theatre’s production of Havel’s one-act play, Private View.

Set in Czechoslovakia in 1975, Private View features Fred and Vera, a married couple who welcome Michael (whom they repeatedly insist is their best friend) over to admire their newly renovated and garishly outfitted home – choice objects on display include a scimitar, a Madonna and a re-purposed confessional.  We quickly discover that our hosts are fetishists:  they are obsessed with collecting and showing off symbols of the (ill-defined) “good life.”  Beyond this though, they are bent on skewering ‘best friend’ Michael for his wrong-headed choices (working at a brewery, not having a child, or frequent enough sex even!), imploring him to be more like them.  For his own sake, of course.

Review: Les Femmes Savantes

(photo credit: Yves Renaud)

Two Sides of Love

by Élaine Charlebois

Les Femmes Savantes, brilliantly directed by Denis Marleau at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, tells the story of a family divided by the marriage choice of youngest daughter Henriette, played by Muriel Legrand with great energy and emotion. 

On one side of the debate we find Philaminte, the matriarch of the family (played by Christiane Pasquier with authority and spot-on severity), Armande, the eldest daughter (Noémie Godin-Vigneau), and Bélise, sister-in-law of Philaminte, a character brought to life with great humour by Sylvie Léonard. They all promote female intellectual emancipation over physical and emotional love. On the other side of the family feud with Henriette stands Chrysale, the passive father figure (played by a charismatic Henri Chassé), Clitandre, Henriette's fiancé (François-Xavier Dufour), and Ariste, Chrysale’s brother (played with subtle yet effective comedy by Bruno Marcil). This group values the simple satisfaction of romantic love. 

Beyond Our Fourth Wall, October 10, 2012

The brilliant It's Not You It's Me, part of MPROV

Montreal Improv Festival

Oct. 10-14

Shows of interest this week
by Estelle Rosen

Dom Juan – Uncensored
La Chapelle
Oct. 23  - Nov. 10

Festival Phénomena

Divan Orange
Oct 19-26

Four Palestinian and Israeli dancers and actors free their demons.

Quiet
MAI
Oct. 12-13

Flopsweat, October 9, 2012 MPROV Preview

The Festival of Scriptlessness
by Kyle Allatt

Well, it’s happening again.  Get ready to shout out non-geographical locations and debate whether or not any of this crap was written ahead of time because this week MPROV: The 7th Annual Montreal Improv Festivals returns to... er... well, Montreal, I suppose.

Where has it been all this time?  I’ll hazard a guess and say the ether.  That mystical, intangible place where all improv ideas come from.  That’s right, none of these performers are actually thinking any of these things off the top of their heads, they’re all just witches.  Thankfully, we’ve called an amnesty on burning them for the time being, and instead will just sit in the audience and laugh at their antics.  For now.

Blog: Donald Rees on The Laramie Project - Ten Years Later Part III

COME SO FAR (GOT SO FAR TO GO)

by Donald Rees

If you were asking me if I felt discriminated against in my day to day life, I would answer no. The truth (much like recipes in cookbooks) is much more complicated. The truth is I live my life in such a way as to avoid situations that could provoke discrimination. I don't hide who I am, but I don't live my life without being aware of my surroundings and how I should act in them. But really, is that so different from anyone else? And is that fair? 

A popular quote says that anti-gay bigotry is the last acceptable form of discrimination. While that's true, I would also argue that racism is also quite common in today's society. Sure, it doesn't take the form it used to - but it's still there, in the language people use and the tendencies many of us share.

After Dark, October 9, 2012

Joiners
The strength is there...if we can get past the laziness
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

It's easy - if you're willing to go beyond signing petitions and saying you'll boycott and bewailing - after the fact - the injustice of it all. It is the use of the power of groups to change things. It's why ACTRA, CAEA, PACT and other groups representing an active mass, work, and groups representing non-joiners - the lazy mass - do not work.

There are two issues in the news, lately, that require theatre artists to do more than shriek an (ever-tedious) outrage on Facebook. They require people going beyond saying they are in a boycott (or not).

The Question, October 8, 2012

Anna Fuerstenberg, playwright, director, performer, critic, and educator
by Estelle Rosen

Anna Fuerstenberg was one of the founding members of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She is currenty working on a film script, A SHIP IN THE ANDES, and a play, THE GUERRILLA CAREGIVER.

Do women over 40 have increasingly less opportunities to work in theatre?

When I started my studies in directing at Sir George Williams University, Norma Springford told me that in spite of a decade of training as an actor, I was actually a director and should pursue my education in her department. At that time I had met only one woman director on a kibbutz in Israel. (I had also met a woman general… ) but the main theatre production on that Marxist collective was directed by a man who was brought from the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv and I was outraged. 

That was a pattern… It never mattered that there were competent and talented women around; in the 1960’s we were invisible. For a time in the U.S.A., I was hired to run a theatre in Chicago, was the first graduate student to be allowed to direct professionally in Boulder Colorado, and directed and performed in Nashville Tennessee. All this was in the era of affirmative action. When I came back to Canada in the mid 1970’s I went into a kind of time warp. In Quebec French Canadian women were making enormous strides as directors, playwrights and performers. In Toronto where I had to move if I wanted to eat, not so much.

The artistic directors, who had begun to shape the new Canadian theatre world, were almost exclusively men and the plays they chose spoke to them of manly issues. In the 1980’s Rina Fratecelli asked me to gather a few professional women in Toronto where she was passing through to add to her study on The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre. Instead of the 40 or 50 I had been expecting when I got the Tarragon to give us the theatre for our meeting, there were over 300. Can you say “grass roots”?

Interview: Alison Darcy on Scapegoat Carnivale's The Bacchae

intense, dramatic, harsh and notoriously hard to stage

Alison Darcy is a living legacy. She has gone far beyond being the daughter of directors Maurice Podbrey (Centaur founder) and Elsa Bolam (Geordie founder) to becoming one of the finest director/artistic director/actors in the country. Her company, Scapegoat Carnivale, scored huge with their production of Medea, and is once again tackling the Greeks with The Bacchae.

CHARPO: What is your role for this production?

DARCY: My role this time around is solely as producer. It is my first time stepping out of a Scapegoat production creatively. It's a super odd feeling for me. I haven't even been to the rehearsals yet.

CHARPO: The Greeks again...why?

DARCY: We're not done with them. There's too much good stuff there. Andreas and Joe [Shragge, co-translator and co-director for the production] felt compelled to do the script and eager to do another translation of Euripides because he was such a master of pure theatre. Also I think their idea to set it during the Great Awakening is inspired. And we had such a great reception to Medea, I think Montreal audiences are excited to see new interpretations of classics, especially ones not often done. The Greeks are the originators of Western theatre, these are our fairy tales, the founding of the Judeo-Christian theology and our society. What better well to pull from? Maybe a trilogy could be in the making.

Theatre For Thought, October 7, 2012

(photo credit: Ashton Doudelet)

BLOOD AND BELIEF

joel fishbane

The first thing composer / lyricist Joseph Aragon thought after hearing about 19th century serial killers William Burke and William Hare was “that would make an awesome musical!”. Infamous in their own time, Burke and Hare were a pair of Irish immigrants who supposedly sold the bodies of their victims to medical schools who used them as cadavers. “The story had large emotions and large stakes,” said Aragon. “At the same time [it had] sophisticated themes, like class struggles, medical ethics and the value of human life.”

And so Bloodless was born. A new musical that isn’t based on a popular movie or book is a rare thing today. Rarer still is a new Canadian musical being given a plum spot in the Mirvish’s new season: Bloodless will appear in Toronto’s Panasonic Theatre throughout October.  “It's more than a little overwhelming,” admitted Aragon. “This production represents a lot of firsts for me: my first fully professional production, my first major production outside of Winnipeg."