Theatre: Next Stage Theatre Festival 2017

The Next Stage Theatre Festival (NSTF) is an annual curated event that provides a platform for selected participants of the summer Toronto Fringe Festival to further develop their works and perform them in front of a wider audience.  While the summer festival in July is selected by lottery and hosts over 150 shows at 30+ venues, the NSTF jury selects 10 shows to be performed at the Factory Theatre over a 12-day period at the beginning of January.  We skipped the NSTF  in 2016 because the shows were mostly dance performances which we are not fond of.  This year, the lineup was much more to our liking and we chose three shows to watch-- a musical, a comedy and a puppet show.  Since the 60-90 minute shows were all performed in different parts of the Factory Theatre (Mainspace, Studio, Antechamber), we were able to find a day where we could see all three shows back to back.

The musical Blood Ties has a very interesting provenance.  The main plot of the musical involves three childhood friends (Franny, Paul and Larry) who reunite for a fourth friend (Sheila)'s wedding, only to find that her uncle has committed suicide in the bathroom and she needs help in cleaning up the mess.  Surprisingly, the premise of cleaning up after a suicide is based on true events that happened to the parents of one of the playwrights. The show starts with a mysterious song involving the five cast members (including the uncle) dressed in dark raincoats and umbrellas, singing about things that shouldn't be mentioned, foreshadowing events to follow.

Once the suicide is discovered, comically macabre scenes depict the friends taking turns (off-stage) at sopping up blood and scrapping guts off the walls and ceiling.  Each person comes out covered in blood and gore, and slowly the palette of their black and white toned wardrobe turn to red as a visual reminder of their ordeal. While each one is in the bathroom cleaning, the remaining friends converse and we find out more about the characters.  Sheila's parents were killed in a car accident years ago and she has since become estranged from her friends.  Paul, the doctor, has harbored a long-time crush on Franny but is afraid to tell her.  Franny is jaded and afraid of relationships, claiming to prefer numerous, meaningless relationships.  Larry is the squeamish gay friend who gets sick at the sight of blood.  As the night progresses, complications arise, issues are hashed out and secrets are revealed.  The action is riveting as you try to figure out the mystery of what is really going on.  The songs are haunting and impactful, often sung in a minor key with intentionally jarring notes and musical dissonance that channel Stephen Sondheim's scores.

In another crazy twist, a short excerpt of Blood Ties was actually featured on the Science Fiction TV show Orphan Black which features Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany playing a set of clones. In season 2 of the series, the suburban mom clone Alison joins a community theatre musical, taking over the role from the woman that she had mistakenly allowed to be killed in a previous episode.  Wracked with guilt, the bloody premise of the musical parallels Alison's personal circumstances.  The creators of Orphan Black were prepared to write their own "musical" when they were made aware of Blood Ties.  They were amazed at how perfectly the plot of Blood Ties fit into the Orphan Black story line.  As an added bonus, the playwrights Barbara Johnston (Franny) and Anika Johnson (Sheila) were given roles as other cast members of the community theatre musical.  Orphan Black is one of my favourite TV shows and I loved the hilarious scenes of Alison taking part in the musical.  So it was with extra anticipation that I watched the actual source musical in its entirety.

This is a wonderful musical with a great plot, catchy songs, choreography, wardrobe, lighting and excellent acting and singing performances all around.  I hope that the extra exposure of being featured on Orphan Black will help this show get a professional release in one Toronto's mainstream theatres and beyond.

The next show that we watched was My Big Fat German Puppet Show and we really did not know what to expect, especially when a flamboyantly dressed man in a fat suit, top hat and tails came waddling out onto the stage, with no puppets in sight.  For the first few minutes, he addressed the audience, told some jokes and performed what was more like a circus clown act.  I started to wonder whether the actor considered himself a "human puppet" or if the show was just misleadingly named?  But as it turns out, this is Frank Meschkuleit, a master puppeteer who worked for years with Jim Henson's Muppets.  Interspersed with more jokes, Meschkuleit proceeds to expertly manipulate various puppets in song and dance numbers.  There is the German, leiderhosen-wearing tuba player singing "I'm German" to the tune of Bob Marley's "Jammin'", the zombie puppet howling to Dan Hill's "Sometimes When We Touch", a Stephen Hawking wheelchair rap and a sketch with a Muppet, just to name a few of the skits.  Some of the skits are performed on a stage hidden behind his big belly costume while others make use of the theatre stage.

The show was performed in the Factory Theatre Studio space which is a narrow but deep space.  Luckily we lined up early and had our choice of seats, scoring the optimum view for this show.  We were fourth row centre, which put us close enough to see the intricate movements of the puppets, but far enough away so that we were at the exact eye-level when looking at the stage.  If we were much further back, we would have missed much of the magic.  The skits were fun but the best ones were performed at the start of the 60 minute performance, while the latter ones flagged a bit and were lacking in the energy and humour of the earlier ones.

I was a bit skeptical about watching our last show, Clique Claque, since I had not liked the playwright's previous work, Three Men in a Boat, which played in the 2014 Fringe Festival. Set in the late 1800s Paris, Clique Claque is a satirical melodrama about a practice in 19th Century France where people were hired by theatres and opera houses to clap, laugh, cry, gasp or boo at appropriate moments in a show, thus influencing the reactions of the real audience.  This organized body of professional applauders were called "the Claque".  The manipulative practice was also used to discredit a rival show, or to blackmail a show into paying the "claquers" in order not to be booed.  Clique Claque presents Madame Clothilde and her husband Yannick, the dastardly, manipulative pair who control the Claque and their battle with the leader of "the Clique", a fictional counter-group who want to stop the Claquers.  The show had an interesting premise, but as I feared, I did not really enjoy watching it.  It might be because I found the story and acting to be over-wrought, or because I just didn't care for or relate to any of the characters.  The show has received much acclaim, so it is clearly just a matter of personal taste.  I think I will avoid any future shows by this playwright and conclude that they are just not for me.  One thing that has me confused is why the picture depicted on the playbill has no correlation to any of the characters or costumes in the play?