Snack Music is SNAFU throwing a curious sort of house party. Grab a snack, tell a story — your first kiss? your first night away from home? your first time doin’ it? — and then watch co-creators Ingrid Hansen and Andrew Young act it out through off-the-wall puppets. It’s an acting exercise on steroids, and it’s a ton of fun.
Continue reading 2015 Next Stage Review: Snack Music (SNAFU)
Rope is a murder mystery which skips a few steps. We already know whodunnit: two overgrown schoolboys who’ve read a little too much Nietzsche and decided to attempt the perfect murder.
Having done the deed, they throw a small dinner party, with unwitting guests — including the victim’s father — nibbling on canapés served atop the makeshift casket. The sheer decadence thrills Brandon (Leete Stetson) to no end; his conspirator, James (Nicholas Arnold), has long since lost his nerve, and cannot cope with the consequence of his actions, nor the macabre party.
The mystery, then, isn’t “who did it”, but “will they get away with it”. Have Brandon and James committed the perfect murder, or are we watching it all slowly unravel?
Morris Panych’s Sextet (at the Tarragon Theatre) starts as a love letter to the Awful British Sex Farce — the kind of play where half-naked women run in and out of hotel rooms and everyone has sex with everyone else’s wives — but that’s just the playwright luring you in. His story of a string sextet trapped in a suburban motel by a blizzard runs much deeper, exploring identity, repression and neurosis, and how all three interact with relationships, both romantic and sexual. Over the course of a night and a day, conversations lead to confessions, confidences lead to doubts, frictions lead to orgasms — and it’s not entirely clear that every member of the sextet will survive to see the concert.
The 39 Steps was a novel, then a Hitchcock thriller, and is now — nearly a century after it appeared — presented in Real-Life-O-Vision at the Papermill Playhouse. The modern staging was pioneered on a barnstorming tour of British town halls and corn exchanges: four actors play all the roles, using only a few crates, hats, set pieces and pairs of stockings between them.
This kooky melodrama is very much set in a specific time and place: England, during the interwar years, when mentalists still played the music halls and a weekend in Scotland was an exotic vacation. As the characters travel up and down the country hunting the Great MacGuffin, they encounter great complications and smaller dramas: sheep on the road, romantic entangelements, a Scottish pipe band, and fear and danger around every corner. Will our hero succeed?
Of course he will. It’s an interwar melodrama; it wouldn’t do to have a sad ending. So let’s stop talking about the plot and move onto the meat.
In his curtain speech before (re)Birth: E. E. Cummings in Song, artistic director Albert Schultz welcomed us home. On his account, (re)Birth represents one of Soulpepper‘s great successes. Not just a marvelous piece of theatre on its own merits, and not just a testament to the strength of their Academy program — perhaps the best early-career program for theatre workers in English Canada — (re)Birth is a tiny glimpse at the beating heart of Soulpepper: musical, lively, accessible, unpredictable, polished and — above all — playful. Its initial run did do so well that it was brought back, extended, remounted, and here it is, alive once more, to open their 7th annual Global Cabaret Festival.
The hour-long show presents somewhere between 12 and 15 of Cummings’ poems in varied musical styles: “goodbye Betty, don’t remember me” as dixieland jazz; “maggie and milly and molly and may” as heavy metal; “i like my body when it is with your” as a sultry Parisian waltz. The company of 10, dressed in utilitarian Edwardian costumes — all tweeds and browns, accessorized with oversized gumboots, images of sparrows, and newspaper pirate hats — play their own instruments and do their own stagecraft. The whole thing is sweet and innocent, like a school play or a community pantomime.
Continue reading Review: (re)Birth: E. E. Cummings in Song (Soulpepper / Global Cabaret Series)