THE ROYAL COMEDIANS (MOLIERE) FAILS TO IGNITE MUCH COMEDY IN SOULPEPPER PRODUCTION

Rong Fu, Sarah Koehn, Diego Matamoros & Raquel Duffy. Photos by Cylla von Tiedemann

Reviewed by James Karas
** (out of five)

The Royal Comedians (Moliere) by Mikhail Bulgakov contains a funny scene from Tartuffe. You may recall that Elmire is trying to expose the religious fraud Tartuffe to her gullible husband Orgon. She has him hide under a table while Tartuffe tries to seduce her. She sends Tartuffe out to make sure all the doors are locked and her husband comes out from under the table. She covers him with the table cloth and when Tartuffe returns, he reaches under the table cloth thinking it is Elmire and of course grabs the wrong organs. It is a hilarious moment.

Unfortunately, in the Soulpepper production of Bulgakov’s play it is just about the only funny scene. The Royal Comedians premiered in the Russia of Stalin in 1936 and although it is ostensibly about Moliere it has much more to say about artistic life in the Soviet Union.

Moliere played by Diego Matamoros is a decent human being with more than the usual allotment of troubles. He leaves his wife Madéleine (Raquel Duffy) for the younger Armande (Sarah Koehn) who may be his daughter by the former. He is accused of being sacrilegious and falls out of favour with Louis XIV. You could lose your life from any one of those “troubles”.

He runs a colourful troupe of actors and there are some theatrics including several scenes from Moliere’s plays. The problem is that the play is simply not funny.

During the first half, we are on stage, behind the scenes or before the king. In the second half, the play becomes more overtly Stalinist. We are in a dungeon where we witness torture, forced confessions and oppression. This is dark comedy both literally and metaphorically.

This is a modern dress production even though there are some costumes that refer to Moliere’s 17th century. That is fair enough because Bulgakov was illustrating life under Stalin far more than life under Louis XIV.

I cannot really fault the actors for their acting. They seemed to be doing well in what they were told to do but nothing had much of an effect on the audience. Stuart Hughes, dressed in black, wearing an eye patch and boots was a farcical and brutish Marquis D’Orsini. Michael Hanrahan was a similarly brutish Marquis de Charron. Gregory Prest as Louis XIV looked like an actor playing Louis XIV. This was no doubt intentional but it left me cold.

William Webster was genuinely good as Bouton as was Daniel Williston as The Honest Cobbler. Michael Simpson garnered sympathy from a back injury and acted well as De La Grange. But none of this was enough to lift the play past the bearable. Lorenzo Savoini provides some interesting sets – all black with lots of doors leading to cells or wherever you want them to go.

The last comment must be reserved for Director Laszlo Marton who simply did not deliver a very good production. Is it just the play? Probably not. We need a better vision and approach to make us laugh and cringe at the great artists and the closed brutal society that they lived in, in the 17th and 20th centuries.
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The Royal Comedians (Moliere) by Mikhail Bulgakov opened on August 7 and continues in repertory until September 21, 2012 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill Street, Toronto, Ontario. www.soulpepper.ca 416 866-8666.

HEDDA GABLER – SHAW FESTIVAL PRESENTS MONSTER WITH NO REDEEMING QUALITIES

Reviewed by James Karas

*** (out of five)

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is one of the plays offered at the Shaw Festival this year in Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell’s wide-ranging choice of productions. The new version of the play by Richard Eyre is staged at the Court House Theatre and directed by one of Canada’s best actresses, Martha Henry.

Hedda Gabler premiered in 1891 and the heroine is seen as a prototype of a powerful, independent woman who is trapped in a stultifying social structure. Her situation grows desperate and her only way out is to end her life with a bullet.

That may all be true but I failed to grasp it from the current production. This Hedda as played by Moya O’Connell struck me as arrantly cruel, selfish, manipulative, domineering, bored, vindictive, destructive and a plain bitch.

O’Connell brings out all those characteristics of Hedda but there is more to our heroine than that. Hedda is pursued by Judge Brack (Jim Mezon) and she is clearly a magnet for men. Brack is prepared to go to great lengths, including concealing a crime (remember, he is a judge), in order to gain sexual dominance over Hedda. In other words, Hedda is a sexual siren. O’Connell, with her high cheekbones and full mouth is a beautiful woman but her sexual attraction is almost eliminated in this production. Her hair gathered in pigtails and plastered on her head and her general demeanour emphasize Hedda’s monstrosity and minimize her sexuality.

Patrick McManus is perfect as Hedda’s pathetic husband George Tesman. Bespectacled, slightly stooped, over-eager to please, the poor man married a monster and he is thrilled when she calls him by his first name. In the end, he will find a decent woman.

Mezon is the ideal Judge Brack. A big man with a shaved head, he exudes confidence and sexual desire. He wants Hedda not just as his mistress but as his slave almost. He is indeed scary.

Brack’s counterpart is the idealist and visionary historian and recovering alcoholic, Eilert Loevborg (Gray Powell). He had a relationship with Hedda before her marriage but now she rebuffs him because of social pressure. He has found inspiration from Thea Elvsted (Claire Julien). When Loevborg loses a manuscript, i.e. everything that he has worked for and contemplates suicide, the nice Hedda tells him to do it beautifully.

Thea went to school with Hedda where our heroine basically tortured her and threatened to burn her hair. Now she pretends to befriend the decent Thea in order to get at Eilert. Julien does a fine job as the caring woman who has none of Hedda’s negative traits.

Jennifer Phipps shuffles onto the stage and off as the ancient servant Berthe. She trips during one of her exits and when a stage hand reaches to give her a hand she asks “who are you?” I am not sure how much of this is acting and how much of it an old woman being able to do no more than get her handful of lines. Let’s give her credit honoris causa and assume that all of it is a fine example of acting like a very old and infirm woman when she is in fact only almost old and spry.

The set by William Schmuck presented a reasonably well-appointed living room with a door and window stage right, leading to the garden. The door and window give the impression of a cage without overdoing it. There is a large couch for Hedda to lounge on but the limited stage area of the Court House does not permit much else.

The acting and staging were very good but my problem with the production is that it fails to explain sufficiently men’s attraction to Hedda and is not convincing in its portrayal of her as striking out for freedom as a new woman.

The thought that occurred to me was that a century or so later Hedda could easily become a CEO of a major corporation. Put her in low management and she will become such a master of company politics that she will manoeuvre herself to the top no matter how many bodies she left in her wake.
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Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen in a version by Richard Eyre runs in repertory from July 25 to September 29, 2012 at the Court House Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. www.shawfest.com.

THE CRUCIBLE – METICULOUSLY EXECUTED DRAMA FROM SOULPEPPER

The Crucible ensemble. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

Reviewed by James Karas

**** (out of five)

In 1952, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible premiered in New York. It is a play ostensibly, about the witch-hunt trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. In a hysterical search for the devil, people were arrested, tortured, convicted and hanged for practicing witchcraft or associating with Satan.

The play was written during the height of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, the witch-hunt for Communists, headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Devil of Salem had become the Communist Devil of America and countless lives were ruined because of their association, real or imagined, with “him”.

Many people may not be aware of the association between The Crucible and the political background in which it was written but that should be no bar to enjoying the superb production by Soulpepper Theatre Company.

Albert Schultz meticulously directs a fine cast and lets the drama unfold from a seemingly insignificant incident of some girls dancing in the woods to mass hysteria where good and evil clash and all the perpetrators are convinced that they are on the side of God.

The central character is John Proctor, a rough-hewn farmer with a rather cold wife. Stuart Hughes plays Proctor as a virile, pragmatic, sensible man who tows the religious line sufficiently to stay on the right side of the church but harbours some doubts about and has an antipathy to, the village pastor, the Reverend Parris (Derek Boyes).

When the young girls become hysterical and start accusing townspeople of being associated with the Devil, the frenzy infects everyone from Deputy Governor Danforth (Joseph Ziegler) to many of the local farmers. Proctor is accused of plowing on Sundays, not attending church regularly and of being “lecherous” with his former servant Abigail (Hannah Miller).

In a powerful performance, Hughes as Proctor is ready to “confess” his association with the devil until he realizes that by doing so he will be stripped of his “name”, indeed of his humanity.

The most interesting part of the play is not the existence of selfish and evil people who want to take advantage of others but he high-minded search for Justice by people of intelligence and learning. The Deputy Governor and The Reverend John Hale (Oliver Dennis) are not evil people. They genuinely believe that there is a devil who must be found and he must be driven out for the salvation of the people. No matter how many people are tortured and hanged. God’s will shall be done, according to these high-minded Christians.

Oliver Dennis as Hale is a decent man who wants to do good until he realizes that what is at work in Salem is not the search for the extirpation of Satan but the working of the worst human traits. Dennis conveys the initial enthusiasm and final realization by Hale with superb skill.

Ziegler as Danforth displays some of the same traits but he never realizes what people are capable of. He may be close to God but he has no idea of what His creatures can do to each other.

Notably good acting is displayed by Derek Boyes as the small-minded, nasty Reverend Parris, William Webster as the decent farmer and especially by Nancy Palk as Rebecca Nurse, an extraordinarily humane and courageous old woman in a society that is tragically short of both virtues.

The individual performances deserve praise but the real applause belongs to them for their ensemble acting. The Crucible has a large cast and it must be shepherded scrupulously towards the dramatic climax. The effect is electrifying.

The costumes by Lorenzo Savoini are adequate and the set is minimalist, to put it politely. Once the drama starts building up, you forget about sets and costumes but at the beginning it looked as if the play was happening inside or outside of a barn.

A couple more facts. In 1956, Arthur Miller was summoned before HUAC and asked to snitch on his friends and acquaintances who may had had Communist associations. He refused and was sentenced to one month in jail and fined $500.00. Had the Committee seen the play?

The judges of the Massachusetts General Court seem to have been better read or more humane. In 1957, they passed a resolution that many of those executed for witchcraft in 1692 may have been tried and executed illegally. Finally, in 2001, the Governor of Massachusetts declared that all victims of the witchcraft trials were innocent!
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The Crucible by Arthur Miller opened on August 9 and will continue in repertory until September 22, 2012 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill Street, Toronto, Ontario. www.soulpepper.ca 416 866-8666.

COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA - SEARING DRAMA ABOUT MIDDLE AMERICA AT SHAW FESTIVAL

Reviewed by James Karas

**** (out of five)

The Shaw Festival scores another signal success with its production of William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba. This is the Festival’s third production of a play by the American playwright who made his name during the 1950’s with plays like Picnic and Bus Stop. Come Back, Little Sheba was his first hit and it opened on Broadway in 1950.

Jackie Maxwell, the Shaw’s Artistic Director, directs a sensitive, highly detailed production that builds from the run-of-the-mill of everyday life to an overwhelmingly dramatic climax.

The strength of the production lies in the extraordinary performances of Corrine Koslo and Ric Reid, ably assisted by Julia Course, Sharry Flett and Kevin McGarry.

Koslo plays Lola Delaney, a middle-aged woman who is described as old, fat and ugly. Her husband Doc (Reid) is a chiropractor and a reformed alcoholic who is helping others stay on the wagon.

The play presents the pathetic, empty lives of this sad couple by simply showing us what they do and how they live. From making breakfast, to cleaning the house, to preparing a dinner for their lodger and her visitor, we see the humdrum routine not as a part of life but as the only existence that these people have.

They lost a child and a puppy named Sheba. The child will never come back but the cute puppy might return. Waiting and calling out for the puppy is an important part of Lola’s life. For the rest, they live vicariously through the life of their lodger Marie (Julia Course). Marie dates Turk (Kevin McGarry) a muscle-bound hunk while waiting for her boyfriend Bruce (Andrew Bunker) to arrive.

Koslo has the awkward moves of the fat woman, the pitiful voice, and the fussing of someone who wants to please but simply cannot. Doc married her because she became pregnant. She tries to establish some human contact with the Postman (Lorne Kennedy), the Milkman (James Pendarves) and her neighbour (Sharry Flett) but they are all passersby except perhaps the neighbour. Koslo’s performance captures all the pathos and vacuity of Lola’s life. The nearest she comes to reality is watching Marie “making out” with Turk.

Reid’s Doc is equally pathetic. He is quiet, docile, eager to please, especially Marie with whom he is subconsciously in love. He is pathetically jealous of her relationship with Turk and goes crazy when he realizes that she has spent the night with him. He reaches for the bottle and, of course, goes into an alcoholic stupor that eventually requires hospitalization.

Drunk, the gentle Doc becomes a monster and, hatchet in hand, blurts out all the truths about his life that he has kept buried under a veneer of civility and politeness. In the end, he gives out a piercing cry that reverberates throughout the theatre in sharp contrast to the usual nothings of his life. An outstanding performance by Reid.

The supporting cast is good. Course is the manipulative blonde who will land a husband while sleeping with Turk, a more athletic and presumably better lover than Bruce (Andrew Bunker) the salesman.

The set by Christina Poddubiuk representing an old house somewhere in Middle America is excellent. The front represents the sitting room with the kitchen behind it on the side with an invisible wall separating the two. We find out that the house is a pigsty but that is not very visible.

The production has original music composed for it by Zachary Florence. Background music in movies is so endemic, that one is pleased to watch and listen to the words of a play in silence without it. Not so in this case. Florence’s music, slow and expressive, added significantly to the quality of the production.

The puppy does not return, of course, but Inge does give a resolution to the miserable lives of Lola and Doc Delaney and the Shaw Festival gives us an outstanding night at the theatre.
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Come Back, Little Sheba by William Inge runs in repertory from June 28 to October 19, 2012 at the Royal George Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. www.shawfest.com.

GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL – SINEWY AND MUSCULAR LOST IN THE STARS

L to R: Brandy Lynn Hawkins as Irina, Eric Owens as Stephen Kumalo and Makudupanyane Senaoana as Absalom. Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

Reviewed by James Karas

****  (out of five)

The Glimmerglass Festival has chosen Lost in the Stars as one of its “Broadway” musicals. The work is in fact a hybrid and can qualify as an opera and be at home on Broadway as well. Kurt Weill composed the music to Maxwell Anderson’s libretto based on Alan Paton’s novel Cry, The Beloved Country.

It is a sinewy and muscular work with some beautiful melodies. It is set in South Africa and deals with racism, murder, love and reconciliation.

The Glimmerglass presentation is a coproduction with Cape Town Opera and a number of the performers are South African. It is an outstanding production, beautifully and powerfully sung and dramatically moving in the highest degree.

The central character of the musical is Stephen Kumalo (Eric Owens), a deeply humane pastor in a poor, black district of South Africa. He goes to Johannesburg looking for his son, Absalom (Makudupanyane Senaooana), and finds out that he has murdered a white man during a botched robbery.

Owens, an American bass-baritone, is simply outstanding in the role. Kumalo is a large man, deeply religious, who believes in the truth. He is caught in a situation where he has to beg the father of his son’s victim for mercy and compassion in order to save Absalom from the death penalty. With his resonant voice, his moving performance, Owens gives a defining portrait of Kumalo.

American tenor Sean Panikkar is simply superb as The Leader, a type of Chorus who appears regularly and sings with astonishing authority and sonority.

Absalom’s wife Irina is played by mezzo-soprano Brandy Lynn Hawkins. She is pregnant but not married to Absalom and his father convinces her to marry him after his conviction for murder and certain execution. She is terrific. She sings with deep emotion and pathos.

One of the main strengths of the opera is its numerous ensemble pieces. The Glimmerglass Festival Chorus not only sings well but it is used judiciously to bring out the racial divide of South Africa at the tine. In one sequence, the white members of the chorus appear standing and self-satisfied while the black members are on their knees, subservient to the “ruling race”.

The set consists largely of plain panels that are moved when necessary. It is Spartan and stark but effective.

Director Tazewell Thompson has gathered an outstanding cast for this production.

John DeMain conducted The Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra and Chorus in this memorable production of an opera that is good enough for Broadway or is it the other way around?
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Lost in the Stars by Kurt Weill (music) and Maxwell Anderson (book and lyrics) opened on July 22 and will be performed nine times until August 25, 2012 at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Cooperstown, New York. Tickets and information (607) 547-0700 or www.glimmerglass.org

HIRSCH - A MANY-LAYERED TRIBUTE TO DIRECTOR AND CANADIAN THEATRE

AlonNashman as John Hirsch in Hirsch. Photography by Cylla von Tiedemann.

Reviewed by James Karas
*** (out of five)

Hirsch is a one-man show now playing at the Studio Theatre in Stratford. It is, of course, about director John Hirsch (1930-1989) who, in addition to being a major presence in Canadian theatre, was also the Artistic Director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival from 1981 to 1985.

I think it is significant and very praise-worthy that a play about a Canadian director has in fact been produced. For many reasons, there is very little written about Canadian theatre history and directors are generally ignored. A celebration of the life and work of a dead director is infrequent if not unique.

Hirsch has been created and conceived by Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson. Thompson directs and Nashman performs the piece that lasts about one and a half hours. It gives some biographical information about Hirsch and some scenes of him directing several of his major productions.

Hirsch’s background could hardly be more tragic and dramatic. He was born in 1930 in Hungary and lost his entire family in the Holocaust at age 13. He ended up in a refugee camp and eventually came to Winnipeg in 1947 to live with an adoptive family.

The play jumps back and forth in time as it relates scenes from Hirsch’s childhood in Hungary, to his experience in post-war Europe and then as a director in Winnipeg, Toronto, Stratford and elsewhere.

Nashman and Thompson strive to illustrate as much as to tell Hirsch’s life. He seems to have been a hard task-master, a visionary and man who loved the theatre. There are a few memorable lines but this is hardly a play replete with anecdotes from the life of Hirsch. At one time someone commented that Hirsch was his own worst enemy and the lead actor in the play that he was directing topped it with “Not while I am alive.” 

Nashman and Thompson highlight Hirsch’s productions of King Lear, The Cherry Orchard, The Tempest and Mother Courage.  We do get some insight into bits of the plays and the director.

The approach taken by the two creators is not entirely successful. There are times when it is not entirely clear where we are and whose voice we are hearing. They are too intent on Nashman acting everything out where a more sedate approach may have been more informative and enjoyable. I am not sure if a strictly chronological narrative would have been more appropriate but the jumping back and forth in time certainly did not add anything.

Nashman manages to bear a good resemblance to Hirsch and he does give us a sense of the complex man. Hirsch was Hungarian, Jewish and gay with a nightmarish  background to boot. He became a significant Canadian director who has merited a biography (A Fiery Soul: The Life and Theatrical Times of John Hirsch by Fraidie Martz and Andrew Wilson. Véhicule Press, 2011).

The play and the biography are just as much a tribute to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and Canadian theatre as they are to that immigrant from Hungary that made such a significant contribution to both. 

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Hirsch, created and conceived by Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson, opened on July 12 and will run until September 14, 2012 at the Studio Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. www.stratfordfestival.ca

THE MILLIONAIRESS – SHAW FESTIVAL CREATES GREAT FUN WITH SHAVIAN COMEDY

Reviewed by James Karas
**** (out of five)

For those who found the production of Misalliance at the Royal George Theatre less than amenable to their theatrical senses, the Shaw Festival has a perfect antidote in its staging of The Millionairess. It is well-paced, well-acted and just plain funny.

Bennard Shaw wrote The Millionairess in 1935 for the formidable and inimitable Edith Evans who turned the play down. It has had a chequered history since then but the Shaw Festival has been quite willing to produce it every decade or so.

The Millionairess of the title is the supremely wealthy Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga who goes to the office of her solicitor, Julius Sagamore to make her will and then commit suicide. He is prepared to draft her will and gives her a recipe and detailed instructions on how to end her life. Death is good business for lawyers.

Epifania’s husband Alastair and his hapless mistress Polly arrive at the solicitor’s office to be followed by Adrian, Epifania’s lover. We will soon meet an Egyptian Doctor and a couple that run a sweatshop.

Where is the fun? First, it is in Nicole Underhay’s performance as Epifania. Wearing a bright red dress and shoes to match, a mink stole slung around her neck, she is assertive, irreverent, exuberant, violent (when necessary) - all of which is wrapped up in a bravura performance by Underhay.

Epifania is not happy because she married the “inadequate” Alistair, a boxer, and he knocked her out on their wedding night and not by his sexual prowess. Epifania’s father instructed her to marry the man who can turn £150 into £50,000 in six months. Alistair is so stupid and foolish that he actually succeeds. Portia’s suitors in The Merchant of Venice only had to choose one of three caskets!

She has good help. Kevin Bundy as the somewhat straight-laced solicitor is given a few good lines but he does well as a straight man to Epifania’s extravagances.

Everyone is the punch bag to Epifania’s blows but no one as much as Polly, beautifully played as the dumb blonde by Robin Evan Willis. Turns out she is not all that dumb because she knows how to get her way.

Martin Happer as Alastair is stuck between his mistress and his wife with nowhere to go but up in laughter. But he is better off than Steve Sutcliffe’s Adrian who is beaten up and seriously injured by Epifania and stands no chance of getting any compensation or justice.

Michael Ball as Joe and Wendy Thatcher as his wife remove the play from its posh surroundings to a basement sweatshop where Epifania gives them a quick lesson on the workings of cutthroat capitalism. Ball and Thatcher are quite good in the relatively small roles.

Kevin Hanchard plays the Egyptian Doctor who is poor, Muslim and a Bolshevik. With credentials like that, he is a perfect foil for Epifania. Well done by Henchard.

Shaw manages to tackle social and financial issues, of course, and to satirize bankers and capitalism but he does it with a light touch and much less verbosity than in some of his other plays.

Blair Williams gets full marks for directorial finesse. He manages fine control of the action with very good pacing and plenty of fun. Designer Cameron Porteous draws more attention than usual to his art by providing some coups de théâtre in the scene changes. The designs are excellent within the severe limitations of the Court House Theatre. The first scene is dominated by bright red colours, including Epifania’s attire. The lawyer’s office would normally be decorated with law books and heavy furniture but that may have made scene changes more difficult. Porteous avoids all that and makes the scene changes a brief show in themselves.

An excellent night at the theatre.
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The Millionairess by Bernard Shaw runs in repertory from June 20 to October 6, 2012 at the Court House Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. www.shawfest.com