This quick fire comedy from playwright Liz Duffy Adams and presented by Seventh Stage Productions as part of the SummerWorks Festival manages to be an utter crowd pleaser without resorting to any broad strokes. A wonderfully neat plot about Aphra Behn, an aspiring female playwright with a 9-5 job as a war time spy for King Charles of England, is both a delightful and bawdy comedy of errors and a surprisingly open and insightful examination of issues of gender, sexual politics, and equality. Duffy populates her work with cheeky and likable characters, making for a very welcome break...
With The Small Ones (on as part of SummerWorks), creator/performer Shannon Roszell is really trying something. It’s evident in her intensity. In the stillness and silence captured onstage. In the starkness and precision of the text. I’m just not yet sure what it is.
“I am an atypical child,” Nicholas, our protagonist, tells us. And yet there’s something deeply familiar about him. In this young and somewhat skeletal production (currently on at SummerWorks), creator/performer Johnnie Walker introduces us to the titular young redhead discovering his budding homosexuality while navigating otherness. And he demonstrates sizeable talent in the process. Walker’s physical awkwardness works wonderfully for the misfit Nicholas, though with less success as his alterego Rufus Vermilion, who could use more precision and a physical status to match his suave flamboyance. Maryanne, Nicholas’ new stepmom is simply delicious under the direction of Morgan Norwich....
Dave: Despite our industry being constantly underfunded and in many cases struggling to find audience amid all of the summer options this city has to offer, every so often a show manages to get mainstream media attention. The scale of that attention for Catherine Frid’s Homegrown (on as part of SummerWorks) is almost unfathomable.
Director Alistair Newton and his company Ecce Homo have become Summerworks regulars, first bursting onto the scene with attention grabbing The Pastor Phelps Project, a delightful and scathing cabaret deconstruction of ultra-controversial (99% percent of people would say ultra-hateful) American religious leader Fred Phelps, and then a surprising if not unreasonable dissection of humanitarian icon Mother Teresa.
Despite the title, there are no ghosts in The Haunted Hillbilly (currently on at SummerWorks); however, there are plenty of hillbillies, along with a three-piece band, dazzling outfits, bits of stage magic, a rhinestone-studded prosthetic leg, and at least one paraplegic vampire. Montreal’s Sidemart Theatrical Grocery may have gone a bit over the top in their adaptation of Derek McCormack’s novel, but boy howdy, they had themselves a rootin’ tootin’ good time doing it.
Theatre festivals in the last few years have been somewhat glutted on plays tacking the nouveau topic of the quarter-life crisis, approaching it through every means from musical to monologue. This thematic suffusion, along with the tendency to get mired in self-referential irony, have resulted in this reviewer becoming pretty ambivalent on new projects about the dubious difficulties of twentysomething life.
Whimsical. It’s the word that kept pervading every thought I had while playing with the impressive cast of Countries Shaped Like Stars (which is on as part of SummerWorks). I say play because each audience member serves purposes well beyond spectator in this gem of a piece, we all become part of this intimate and quirky love story – we’re even given roles (mine was Ursa Major).
This quasi-thriller (produced by Public Radio and Camera Assembly and part of this year's SummerWorks) about Isabelle, a film studies professor whose progressive and open minded nature inadvertently invites an anonymous student to psychologically harass her digitally sounds good in summary but unfortunately falls flat on stage. This is despite capable performances, clear and elegant direction by Joanne Williams, and an above average set and production design; most of the blame falls on playwright Norman Yeung who appears to be reaching for a ‘big idea’ play without actually making many compelling arguments.
There is something charming and heartwarming about the fact that the quirky tight-knit family of artists and performers of modern lore still do exist. In the case of Molotov Circus (currently on as part of SummerWorks), Winnipeggers Arne Macpherson and Debbie Patterson are joined by their offspring, budding teenager Gislina, and youngster Solmund in the telling of a tale about a travelling family of Russian circus performers who struggle to keep a modicum of normalcy about their lives despite their unusual lifestyle. This proves to be most challenging for rebellious Albina (Gislina) who yearns to plant roots and seems...
