Theatre 2023: Fringe Festival

My husband Rich and I watched four performances at the Toronto Fringe Festival this year and enjoyed three of them.  This is an acceptable success rate given the adhoc, open-access nature of the selection process for Fringe shows and the lack of reviews for the most part when we choose which ones to watch.  It has always been hit and miss what we end up with.

Our first show was a relatively safe magic act called “Absolute Magic With Keith Brown”.  This was Rich’s pick since he likes magic shows.  The magician performed the typical slight-of-hand card tricks and telepathy/mind-reading routines. Rich participated in one of the mindreading tricks where he was one of four people who secretly drew a picture and Brown guessed which one Rich drew (a wristwatch .. I could have figured that out!).  In the finale of that trick, the magician actually reproduced what the last person had drawn.  None of this was particularly novel for a magic show.  But what made the act interesting was the running story-telling narrative that Brown gave with his smooth, hypnotic (and distracting?) voice while performing his tricks, which actually resulted in a life lesson.  Through hutzpah and sheer determination, when he was able to wrangle a visit from the wife of the President of Iceland when he did a show in that country.  The lesson was that you will never succeed if you don’t at least try.

Next we watched a musical comedy called Choir by Barbara Johnston and Anika Johnson (sister of Britta Johnson who wrote Kelly vs Kelly).  This team wrote the musical Blood Ties, another Fringe show that then had a snippet featured in an episode of the SciFi drama Orphan Black. Through small vignettes, Choir follows a year in the lives of a group of teenagers who are part of the “Tierce de Picardie Children's Chorus".  This is not a pop music or show choir like Glee, but rather a youth choir that sings Classical music by composers such as Bach, Handel and Mozart. They are led by conductor Mary Dean, played hilariously and with the utmost camp by actor Dean Deffet.  The cast is comprised of over 30+ singers ranging from ages 11-18 and their voices blend in beautiful harmony although the singing abilities of the individual soloists are not quite as strong and belie their young ages. The short scenes range from funny to touching as the youngsters deal with cliques and social status (being choir cool vs school cool), singing exercises and performances as they prepare for a big competition in Sudbury, and of course peer pressure, crushes and dating.  This was our favourite of the four shows that we watched.

Our third show was a one-man puppet show called The Family Crow: A Murder Mystery where all the characters are crows including the detective Horatio P.Corvus who shows up at the Crow family mansion to investigate the murder of the eldest son “Russell Crow”.  Puppeteer extraordinaire Adam Francis Proulx provides the voices of the detective, who is also the narrator of the story, as well as each of the suspects within the Crow family including daughter “Sheryl Crow”.  Before the actual mystery part of the show starts, Proulx walks around the stage and explains that we are about to endure an hour of really bad puns and invites anyone who wants to leave to do so now.  We can’t say that we were not warned as the puns come fast and furious and are mostly groaners, starting with the play on the word murder which is also the term for a group of crows. Proulx spins an exciting tale as his detective prances across the stage interviewing each suspect who one by one also are found dead.  He has 5 lamps pointed inwards that illuminate the stage which he turns on and off with foot switches as he traverses back and forth.  This was an extremely entertaining play to watch.

Unfortunately, our last play Killing Time: A Game Show Musical was the one that Rich and I did not like.  Surprisingly we are in the minority since the rest of the audience seemed to love it.  This show was actually selected Patron’s Pick over all the other shows playing at its theatre and got rave reviews. The plot was straightforward with a smarmy game show host being murdered and the police arrive to question the suspects including a producer, stagehand, Vanna White-esque show girl and two contestants. Loving musicals, we did enjoy all the songs but found the acting to be so hammy and overwrought that it was cringeworthy for us as opposed to humorous.  The rest of the audience obviously disagreed based on all the laughter around us.  Maybe we just didn’t have the right sense of humour for the show and its intentional overacting. Too bad this was not a sung-through musical with all songs and no dialogue because the musical numbers were quite good.

Theatre 2023: Good, Hadestown, Prairie Nurses, The Chinese Lady, Kelly vs Kelly

I had been so behind in writing about my 2022 vacation to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton that I decided to devote all of my time to my travel blog until I caught up.  As a result, I then fell behind on writing about all the theatre that my husband Rich and I watched over the past few months.  This is a catch-all blog of some of the shows that we watched between May and July 2023.

Having watched several other National Theatre plays that were filmed and then screened at Cineplex movie theatres including Life of Pi, The Crucible, and Jack Absolute Flies Again, our next one was the 1982 drama “Good” starring David Tennant, known for playing Doctor Who. It tells the fictional story of John Halder, a German literary professor who is initially forced to join the Nazi party, but eventually ends up embracing fascist beliefs as a high-ranking officer in the SS, Hitler’s paramilitary group. The play acts as a cautionary tale of how an intelligent and basically moral family man can end up rationalizing and fostering acts of pure evil. In effect, it uses Halder’s arc as an example of how Nazism was able to spread through Germany and illustrate how easy it is to be led astray by the seduction of power.  It is horrific to watch through the course of the play as Halder systematically betrays his Jewish best friend, his depressed wife and his mother who is suffering from dementia, justifying his changes in stance along the way as he participates in book burnings, experiments in euthanasia and finally the genocide in Auschwitz.  While this was not the most enjoyable play to watch, its themes were definitely profound and all the more important and relevant today when radicalization and far-right extremism is on the rise around the world.

As much as we enjoy watching these filmed versions of National Theatre plays on the big screen, they get to be expensive for a movie experience at $19+tax per person, (although a bargain in live-theatre-going terms). However, a much better deal is to get a subscription to National Theatre At Home which costs just $18 per month or $180 per year and will give both Rich and I unlimited access to an archive of past plays.  I think we will try this for a month and see how it goes.

We watched the Tony award winning musical Hadestown for a second time as a road show production that is part of our 2022/23 Mirvish Subscription Series.  Rich and I watched this show for the first time on Broadway in 2019 on our last trip to New York City, just before COVID hit.  We loved the jazzy songs, innovative sets and staging, and great choreography.  I won’t describe the show again since I wrote about it the first time, but it is always interesting to see how a road show adapts the original production, often with a new cast and a scaled down version of the set. I always think back to the first production of Les Miserables where the barricade was so enormous that when revolution leader Enjolras is shot, his entire body hangs upside down from the top of the barricade. On the road show version, the barricade was merely chest height and Enjolras just slumped over it.

The set for the Hadestown Toronto road show differed from the Broadway version in a major way.  On Broadway, the stage had a circular lift that lowered down to reveal a large hole, signifying the descent into the Underworld. Eurydice first descends when she accepts Hades offer of food and shelter, and then is tragically sucked down again for the last time when Orpheus fails the test set out for him as he tries to lead her back to Earth.  Since the stage of the Royal Alexandra Theatre could not accommodate such a contraption, the path to Hell became a big metal gate at the back of the stage that opened and closed like the “Jaws of Hell”.  This did not have the same dramatic effect as the Broadway version but was still a good interpretation.

The other major difference was the appearances and performances of the casts from the two productions.  Having seen the Broadway one first, that is the lasting impression for me of what the characters should look like. On Broadway, Hades and Persephone were both tall and slender while Eurydice was petite compared to Orpheus, making her seem more vulnerable. The statures of the female leads were reversed in the Toronto version with Eurydice being tall and lean and just about the same height as Orpheus, while the actress playing Persephone was much shorter and curvier.  None of that mattered in the context of the musical but because I had such a vivid image in my mind of the original cast, the differences felt jolting to me.

The more significant difference in my mind was the performances by a few key roles. On Broadway, Patrick Page who played Hades is an accomplished baritone who was able to sustain the extremely low notes required for the role throughout the performance.  In Toronto, Matthew Patrick Quinn only seemed to sing in the really low notes for short periods of time and therefore felt much less menacing.  Comparing the two actors who played Hermes, André de Shields (who won a Tony award for his performance) played the role with more gravitas while Toronto’s Nathan Lee Graham played it with more camp. I also found the actor who portrayed Broadway’s Orpheus exuded more of the required innocence, earnestness and naivety than Toronto’s version.  All this might be a bit biased only because I saw the Broadway version first.  Judged on its own merit, the Toronto production was very good, and the musical was just as entertaining as the first time.   In fact, Maria-Christina Oliveras who played Persephone had a voice that blew the roof off of the theatre!

We went to Port Hope’s Capitol Theatre to watch a delightful comedy written in 2013 called Prairie Nurses about two nurses named Penny and Puring who arrive from the Philippines to work in a community hospital in small town in Saskatchewan.  Hilarious misunderstandings ensue when most of the employees at the hospital including the Scottish doctor Miles, hot-tempered head nurse Marie-Anne and hockey-playing lab technician Wilf cannot tell the two young women apart.  Wilf falls in love at first sight with Puring, then inadvertently proceeds to woo both nurses thinking they are the same person because he never sees them at the same time until the end of the play.  Only candy-stripper Patsy can tell the difference but makes things worse as she tries to play matchmaker for Wilf and Puring, since her efforts get directed towards the wrong nurse.

The action takes place in the common room of the hospital which has a door centre stage leading to the rest of the hospital and one stage left that leads outside the building. The play includes elements of farce as the two nurses alternately enter and exit through the doors, causing confusion when they are mistaken for one another.  There are also tropes found in Restoration comedies with the plot devices of misdirected letters and mistaken identities. One may almost consider this a variation on “Comedy of Manners”, but gently lampooning race and cultural differences instead of the usual target of the upper class.  Although they could not visually tell the two nurses apart, Marie-Anne and Miles would deliberately curse, knowing that the more religious Puring would react to this while Penny would not care.

In today’s overly politically correct landscape, Prairie Nurses could have been considered racist if it were not so charming and inoffensive.  This is probably because the play is written by Toronto-based Filipino playwright Marie Beath Badian who based the plot of this fictional story on  real-life experiences. Her mother worked as a nurse in a small hospital in Arborfield, Saskatchewan (population 300) and was frequently mistaken for “the other one”—another Filipino nurse named Penny.  In fact, the most racist thought conveyed in the play is spoken by Penny (short for Indepencia) when she was appalled by the news that another Filipino nurse had married a white man, commenting that “their poor children .. will be sadly unattractive.. giants with enormous feet and mismatched eyes”. Badian occasionally tosses in Tagalog (Filipino) dialect when the nurses speak to one another, which adds to the authenticity but makes it more a bit more difficult to follow the dialogue, especially when they are engaged in a heated argument.  I’m not sure if the casting was intentional to add to the humour, but the two actresses who played Puring and Penny looked nothing alike (even from a distance) and one was noticeably talker than the other, making the confusion all the more ridiculous and funnier.

While Prairie Nurses was really more about culture clash, the show that we watched at Crows Theatre definitely dealt with themes of racism against the Chinese population in the early part of the 19th Century. The Chinese Lady, a play by Lloyd Suh, is based on the true story of Afong Moy, who was brought into the United States from Guangzhou, China and is supposedly the first Chinese woman to set foot on American soil in 1834.  Based on sketchy records, she was somewhere between 14-19 years old and was probably sold by her family to American traders who wanted to use her to promote interest in and help sell their Chinese furniture and wares.  This play imagines what her life might have been like as she spent decades on display like a circus attraction, feeding Western desire for glimpses of the “exotic East”.  Tickets were sold (25 cents for adults, 10 cents for children) for people to watch Afong as she poured tea, ate with chopsticks and walked around on her 4-inch feet that were a result of having them repeatedly broken and bound when she was a child as per the Chinese customs of the time.

As we entered the theatre, the actress playing Afong Moy was already seated silent and motionless in her chair, allowing herself to be gawked at by the audience in the matter that Afong would be watched during her “performances”. This stagecraft device has been frequently used in recent plays.  In The Dollhouse, Jessica Chastain’s Nora sits quietly spinning her chair for twenty minutes before the play starts, signifying how she feels trapped in her life and is spinning out of control.  In the musical Parade, Ben Platt stays silently on stage during the 15-minute intermission as his character Frank is isolated and trapped in his prison cell awaiting his fate.

When The Chinese Lady finally starts, Afong Moy introduces herself in a perky, cheerful manner and explains that she is in the United States as an ambassador to promote relationships between America and China.  It is 1834, she is 14-years old and will only be here for two years before her father comes to bring her home.  She proceeds to pour the tea, eat a bowl of rice and gingerly walk on her tiny feet around the boxed enclosure that is her stage.  This scene repeats with time jumps every few years and it eventually becomes apparent to her that no one is coming to retrieve her.  The year and her age increases, the rituals remain the same, but Afong gets more jaded and it becomes harder and harder for her to maintain the façade of happiness.  As her fame and notoriety grows, she is taken to tour other cities and even gets to meet President Andrew Jackson.  The most heartbreaking scene occurs when she visits a Zoo and while looking at the animals in captivity, finally fully grasps the reality of her own situation.

Throughout the play, Afong is accompanied by the manservant Atung who acts as her translator, brings out her tea and food and sweeps up after each show.  Atung has a more skeptical view of the world and has no illusions about his role as a slave to the masters who brought him from China when he was a boy. He acts as Afong’s confidant but cannot save her from her fate, anymore than he can save himself.  On top of the historical aspects of the story, this play asks us to look beyond the cultural curiosities to see the human behind the performance.  Afong Moy’s final lines are “Are you looking at me?  Can you see me?”.  Just like the play Good, The Chinese Lady has become more relevant since its first performance in 2018 given the rise of xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiments brought on by the pandemic and a demented American president who deemed it “The Asian Flu”.

Kelly vs Kelly is also based on a true story.  In 1915, Eugenia Kelly, a 19-year-old wealthy socialite was sued by her mother Helen Kelly and threatened with jail for being “incorrigible”, which apparently was a crime back then?  Chafing under her strict and proper mother’s smothering rules, Eugenia rebelled by visiting tango bars to pay suave, charming professional dancers known as “tango pirates” to dance with her.  She fell in love with dancer Al Davis, who was already married.  When she refused to end the affair, her mother took her to court in a case that scandalized the nation.

This story is the basis for a new Canadian musical by composer and lyricist Britta Johnson, the first winner of a 3-year residency with the charitable musical theatre group Musical Stage Company (MSC), whose mission is to help develop and produce new Canadian musicals. Johnson has been dubbed “Canadian musical theatre’s next great hope”. Being a huge supporter of MSC’s mission, we watched Johnson’s other two productions written during her residency with MSC—Life After and the immersive musical Dr. Silver: A Celebration of Life, about a cult where the audience literally got to “drink the Kool-Aid”.

Performed at Canstage’s Berkley Theatre, Kelly vs Kelly starts in the court room where the infamous trial takes place. As the court waits for Eugenie’s arrival, Helen explains her case. Approaching belated while flocked by reporters, Eugenia is flighty and defiant and dressed relatively flamboyantly with her flowing hair and lacy dress, in contrast to the tight bun and prim gown wore by Helen. Through flashback scenes, we see Eugenia's sheltered childhood spent playing cards with her mother in the garden and her desire to break free from the safe, comfortable but passionless life that her mother led and now wants her to lead. Further flashbacks show Helen as a young woman, entered into a disappointing loveless marriage of political convenience.  

Some of Johnson’s songs are hauntingly beautiful and lamenting, while songs sung during the tango scenes are sensual and seductive.  One hilarious number highlights the misogyny of the times as the male members of the court including the lawyers and the judge despair about the irreverent “New Woman”.  The book for this musical is by Johnson’s frequent collaborator Sara Farb, who we know more for her acting roles in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the musical Fun Home.  While the plot does a good job of showing Helen’s youth and why Eugenie wants to escape from repeating it, in general it felt a bit rushed and could have provided more depth into the back stories of the dancer Al or Helen’s husband Edward.  The costumes are sumptuous and accentuated by the lighting.  The choreography is superb and makes good use of the two tiers including the catwalk on the Berkley stage.  Overall this has the makings of a great new musical that could use a few more songs and a bit more plot.

After watching this play, I googled to find out more about the original history of the Kelly vs. Kelly case and came across New York Times archival articles from 1915 about it, with headlines such as “Eugenia Kelly is a Victim of a Plot” and “Eugenia Kelly Says She Will Marry Davis”.  How cool is that?