DANNY & DELILAH - REVIEW OF FOSTER FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas 

The Foster Festival is up and running with the production of three plays by Norm Foster. The festival is rightly proud of the fact that it is the only Canadian theatre festival named after a living Canadian playwright. The choice of Foster is brilliant. He is prolific (according to the Foster Festival, he has written almost 80 plays) and a master of gentle comedies that are perfect for a community theatre, steps away from the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-lake.

Its first production for 2023 is Danny & Delilah, a new play by Foster that is gentle, pleasant, well done and very, very funny.

The production is done in the Festival’s new venue, the well-appointed Mandeville Theatre in the superb grounds of Ridley College, St. Catharines.

Danny & Delilah takes place in a small town where Daniel Becker (Peter Millard), a retired widower, lives with his attractive daughter Sherry (Erin MacKinnon), a guidance counsellor at the local high school. Sherry invites Delilah, (Taran Bamrah) a student from her school to spend a couple weeks with Beckers. Delilah is Pakistani and the culture shock comes quickly and, in the hands of Foster, hilariously.

The fourth character in the play is the Beckers’ neighbour, Muriel (Karen Wood) who comes fully armed to be outrageously funny.

Taran Bamrah and Peter Millard in Danny & Delilah

The humour at the beginning comes from the old attitudes of the father clashing with his daughter’s views. She is starting to date a fellow teacher and tells her father that modern

attitudes are very different from what he may recall. In fact, a man and a woman who go out on a date once, twice, may end up, to put it bluntly, having sex on the third date. Just imagine the father’s reaction to that idea.

Foster balances the comedy with reminders of human tragedy and in this play to Daniel’s private grief over the unexpected death of his best friend from a heart attack and memories of the death of his son.

Then Muriel arrives and unleashes her hilarity. Her husband left her for a redhead thirteen years and and Muriel is now, I don’t know how to put this politely, well, she arrives hormonally armed to perform coitus or just plain horny. Not just a polite desire for erotic pleasure but raging raging desire for immediate fulfilment of her desires. And no man is safe from her predatory sexual appetite. That means Daniel.

Foster is a master of double entendres and he delivers them without compunction. Muriel had Italian salami that kept her up all night. She and Daniel go for physical fitness consisting of push-ups and thrusts. And many more. Karen Wood is so hilarious as Muriel I felt that she was overdoing it but there is no doubt that she brought in the laughs. Director Marcia Kash may be allowing her to overact but the audience laughed and lapped it up.

Karen Wood and Peter Millard 

But Muriel is not all sex. She is playing in a production of Nine Angry Men. Well, things happen and jurors 10 to 12 can’t continue. Wait a minute make that Eight Angry Men. Someone else dropped out.    

Bamrah as Delilah is a nice, pretty girl and she “clashes” with Daniel and the disagreement needs to be worked out. We see an outpouring of humanity, decency and reconciliation in a delightful result.

Erin MacKinnon as Sherry is an attractive character who combines love and tolerance for her father while asserting her independence. She is sympathetic and funny.

Peter Millard is an old hand at comedy and does wonderful work as Daniel. He is very funny and his mantra when accused of making a faux pas is “I am 72, you know” and he tells us that it works. He joins in the delivery of double entendres. 

The single set by Brian Dudkiewicz consists of a nicely appointed living room with a couch, some furniture, exit doors and stairs leading to the second floor of the house.

The directing by Marcia Kash is excellent. She takes advantage of the actors’ talents for broad comedy and well developed decent people on stage and the creation of a situation in a small town that is attractive and funny.

The result is thoroughly enjoyable theatre.

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Danny & Delilah by Norm Foster plays until March 26, 2023, at the Mandeville Theatre, Ridley College, 2 Ridley Road, St. Catharines. Fosterfestival.com/

 James Karas is the Senor Editor - Culture of The Greek Press

FAIRVIEW - REVIEW OF CANADIAN STAGE AND OBSIDIAN THEATRE PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

Fairview is a very tricky play. It was written by the brilliant Jackie Sibblies Drury and premiered in 2018 in New York and, oh yes, it won the Pulitzer Prize. It is now playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto, in a co-production by Canadian Stage and Obsidian Theatre. 

Like all great tricky tales, it starts innocuously and disarms you from any expectations of anything problematic or, well, tricky. When the lights go on, we see a well-appointed dining room and sitting room. Beverly (Ordena Stephens-Thompson), an attractive, well-dressed woman is peeling carrots, dancing and looking at herself in the mirror. A happy scene but she does reprimand her loving husband Dayton (Peter N. Bailey) for watching her without saying anything. She is a bit uptight but they are a loving couple.

Beverley is preparing a fancy dinner for her mother’s birthday and she is in fact frazzled but we enjoy the scene of what looks like a regular comedy. Her know-it-all, bitchy sister Jasmine (Sophia Walker) arrives and her teen daughter Keisha (Chelsea Russell) enters and ruffles some feathers but nothing that a comedy can’t show without raising any suspicions.

Beverley’s brother Tyrone, the lawyer, is held up and will be late. Mamma locks herself in her room and does not come down. Beverley’s tension about the dinner rises to a pitch and she faints. End of the first act of a classic family gathering comedy-drama but your eyebrows should be creeping up your forehead.

Ordena Stephens-Thompson, Peter N. Bailey,
Sophia Walker and Chelsea Russell

Second act. We see exactly what we saw in the first act, only no one speaks. We see the entire first actmimed by the actors and we listen to what sounds like a radio talk show. Within minutes, your eyebrows will become your hairline.

Four people participate in the talk show and you know from the start that the topic for discussion is race. The fist question is, if you could, what race would you choose? The race topic is discussed until the mimed first act finishes and then some. The radio talkers may be talking about something serious (they do) but the level of intelligence displayed does not grasp our attention or encourage listening. Dialogue that is peppered with the word “like” without comparing anything and “you know” thrown in regularly, a rich dose of the “f” word and other additives to conversational English, simply pushes your attention to other venues.

By now you are a long way from thinking that this is a family comedy. But there is more to come. Mamma, called Suze (Sascha Cole) comes down the stairs dressed like a queen or some other pretentious creature. The lawyer Tyrone (Colin A. Doyle)  comes in, a young man wearing a seriously colourful baseball hat sideways, a chain and looking like anything but a lawyer. He is Jimbo, Keisha’s friend Erica is Mack (Jeff Lillico) and by this time your eyebrows are at the back of your neck and you are not sure where you are.

I will almost stop here but the four voices that you heard on the radio broadcast appear on stage as characters some of whom you may be able to recognize.

No peeking into the playscript if you have it, because you will get into the depth of the play and find some information that you missed during the performance. You will still be puzzled.

The play ends with Keisha addressing the audience directly and asking those who identify as white to go on the stage. The whites in the audience are supposed to make room for the cast members. It goes on for some perplexing minutes and many people from the audience do go on stage and in fact fill the playing area. That is the trick that Drury ends the play with. 

As to the ending. you will have to see the play and figure it out for yourselves.

Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury in a production by Canadian Stage and Obsidian Theatre continues until March 26, 2023 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St, Toronto, Ontario. http://www.canadianstage.com/

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press 

MAHABHARATA - REVIEW OF EPIC DRAMA AT SHAW FESTIVAL

Reviewed by James Karas

“Do not be confused by the plot.”

That is the advice given to the audience by the Storyteller, a character in the epic, two-part drama now playing at the Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I am not sure if it is meant as a warning or as a soothing thought for us if, at the end of five hours, we are in fact confused by the plots?

The full titles of the two parts are Mahabharata: Karma. The life We Inherit for part one and Mahabharata: Dharma. The Life We Choose for part two. The two parts can be seen in one day as matinee and evening performances or on separate days.

The play is based on an Indian epic that may be some 4000 years old. It started as an oral poem and various versions have survived in the original Sanskrit. It was fully translated into English in the 19^th century and published in 5000 pages. That is nothing compared to the current Critical Edition of 13,000 pages in 19 volumes. In the 21^st century, Carol Satyamurty has provided us with a “Modern Retelling” of the epic in 843 pages of blank verse. It is this version that Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes have used to adapt and write  for this production.

There are 24 characters of various significance played by 15 actors. The plot takes us over a number of generations of kings, queens, princes and princesses, lesser mortals, gods, and an opera singer dealing mostly through the wars of two closely feuding families, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. The Storyteller (Miriam Fernandes) narrates much of the tale as we meet the ambitious cousins, the fights for kingship, the marriages, the offspring and much more.

 

The cast of Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata (Shaw
Festival, 2023). Photo by David Cooper.

The epic has serious philosophical underpinnings dealing with war, peace, honesty, avarice, ambition, power and, finally, gaining of a place in heaven. The grand themes are interwoven with the human virtues and vices of the characters. There is a band on the stage in Part I and the Storyteller’s narrative is frequently accompanied by the playing, in the background, of original music and sound designed by John Gzowski and Suba Sankaran as well as traditional music, Hasheel Lodhia, consultant.

There is a fascinating game of dice with Yudhishthira (Shawn Ahmed) and Shakuni (Sakuntala Ramanee) in which the latter plays with loaded dice and wins everything that Yudhishthira has including himself, his brothers and his wife. Yudhishthira and his clan are condemned to exile for a term of 12 years with  further condition that they may not be found anywhere during the thirteenth year. If they are, it is back to exile.

The War results in death and destruction of mythical proportions and the production did not fail to remind us of the effects of war in our time and more specifically what is happening in Ukraine. 

The two parts of Mahabharata tell many grand stories and if there is a problem, it is neither in the grand myth nor its adaptation for the stage: it is us. Make that, me. I knew almost nothing about the Indian myths and most of the names were unknown to me. If the play had been based on Biblical stories or Homer’s epics, familiarity would have kicked in immediately and the plot would have been easy to follow.

Meher Pavri as the Opera Singer, with Neil D'Souza as Krishna and 

Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu as Arjuna in Why Not Theatre’s 

Mahabharata (Shaw Festival, 2023). Photo by David Cooper.

Shive (Jay Emmanuel) preforms a lengthy dance routine with some familiar poses but aside from that, I understood very little of the purpose of the segment.

In part 2, there is an extended opera aria sung by Meher Pavri. It contains moral and philosophical wisdom. The program tells us that this is a 15-minute Sanskrit opera adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God), which is the most sacred and famous chapter of the Mahabharata epic. The Bhagavad Gita tells of a conversation between the God Krishna and the great warrior Arjuna.  This assuages my ignorance a little but does not give me enough context to understand the segment.

The opera is written by Fernandes and Jain with a score by John Gzowski and Suba Sankaran. A work in progress, no doubt, but what is the Bhagavad Gita Opera doing in this production?

My reaction to the two-part production of Mahabharata is one of admiration and perplexity. The production is by Why Not Theatre and London’s Barbican. It was commissioned by the Shaw Festival. It looks like a significant leap up and forward for the Shaw and it should be staged in London.

With any luck, I may see the London production and not be confused by the plots, or the names or the other perplexing details of the plays.  

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Mahabharata: Karma. The life We Inherit, Part I and Mahabharata: Dharma. The Life We Choose Mahabharata, Part II written and by Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes from Carole Satyamurti’s retelling of the myth opened on March 9, 2023, at the Shaw Festival’s Festival Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. www.shawfest.com.

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press.

HAMILTON – REVIEW OF ENTERTAINMENT ON A GRAND SCALE IN TORONTO

Reviewed by James Karas

Hamilton, the musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, represents entertainment on a grand scale. It is back on tour in Toronto at The Princess of Wales Theatre and it is scheduled to stay there until August unless, of course, its stay is extended again. 

I say on a grand scale not because it has the largest cast, though it is big enough, or the most spectacular dancing and singing. They are indeed spectacular but the adjective grand refers to the excitement the opening night performance at The Princess of Wales generated and the thrill and anticipation it has created world-wide. Hamilton has become a legendary musical before it has run its current performance history.

Why? Well, it has a grand if unlikely story to tell about the American revolution in general and Alexander Hamilton in particular. Alexander who? Miranda does not mince words about our hero. The opening line of the musical describes him as a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and that’s just the beginning of the description of his lowly beginnings.

Jumping ahead, Alexander Hamilton became one of The Fathers of the United States, the first Secretary of the Treasury and the man who structured the American financial system. It would be boring to list all his accomplishments but that did not hinder Miranda from doing a musical about him and one of the most successful ones at that. 

HAMILTON And Peggy National Tour – Company – © Joan Marcus

The music is written through with considerable variations in musical style and genres but at the core it is a hip-hop affair.

I confess my lack of enthusiasm for the hip-hop genre but Miranda did not consult me on that point. Nevertheless, the music and songs tell a story and generate and provide thrilling singing. The thirty-four numbers cover a large musical and emotional canvas. There are heroic, argumentative and frequently stentorian pieces as well as comic ones and scenes of pathos and tenderness.

The almost historically based lyrics cover a swath of early American history with luminaries like Hamilton (DeAundre’ Woods), George Washington (Darnell Abraham), Thomas Jefferson (Paris Nix), Aaron Burr (Donald Webber, Jr.), Eliza Hamilton (Morgan Anita Wood) Angelica Schuyler (Maria Harmon), King George (Manuel Stark Santos) and other recognizable figures. Santos as King George is quite hilarious when he presents the doltish King dreaming of getting the United States back.

The relentlessly charged music and lyrics, with appropriate variations, carry the plot forward without ever letting the audience’s enthusiasm linger. That is what I call entertainment on a grand scale.  

No musical can survive without dancing and Andy Blankenbuehler’s chorography is a model of energy, erotic attraction and simple joy. Kudos to the dancers.

HAMILTON And Peggy National Tour – Company – © Joan Marcus

The problem I had was that the thickly laid lyrics were not always understandable and some of the humour escaped me and I assume it was because I simply did not hear it in the avalanche of words coming from the stage from single actors or several singing together as well as the ensemble that made up a chorus.

After we get some background about  the life of Hamilton, we see him rising through the ranks in New York in revolutionary America. Woods is a wiry and and almost ethereal actor and we never wonder at the success of “the son of a whore”. The ambitious and brilliant Hamilton meets the. equally ambitious but patrician Aaron Burr, the constitutional expert James Madison (Brandon Louis Armstrong), Thomas Jefferson and the strategist George Washington as well as the aristocratic Schuyler girls and marries the beautiful Eliza.

Hamilton is greatly attracted to Eliza’s sister Angelica (Maria Harmon) and has a ruinous affair with Maria Reynolds (Malika Cheree).

Thomas Kail directs what is a complex and obviously difficult production and judging by what we see on stage he does not miss a beat.

Alexander Hamilton, the highly accomplished writer and political commentator from a lowly beginning who made an immense contribution to early America is probably more famous for the way he died in 1804 at the age of 47 or perhaps 49 (date of birth uncertain). He fought a duel with Aaron Burr, the Vice President of the USA and was killed.

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Hamilton by Lin-Manual Miranda, book music and lyrics, inspired by the book Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow continues until August 10 , 2023 (at least) at the Princess of Wales Theatre, 300 King St. West, Toronto, Ontario. www.mirvish.com