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Necessary Angel's Hamlet

Catherine Kustanczy & Rachel Rain Packota — 2009-11-25T06:29:00+00:00

“To be, or not to be – that is the question.”

Most people, if they have seen a production of Hamlet, have witnessed this soliloquy.
Here is one they likely have not witnessed: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, pulls a plastic bag over his tousled black hair, binds it tight with duct tape, and for the next 60 seconds sits still as a statue, no attempts made to remove the obstruction. Being witness to an onstage suicide attempt is a very intense and disturbing experience.

Cabaret series salutes poet and poetry through song

Catherine Kustanczy — 2009-10-31T03:36:00+00:00

In choosing to adapt the works of poets for the stage, ee cummings isn’t the first name that comes to mind. In fact, the American poet’s work, considered impenetrable and outright weird by many, is one of the writers whose work might be avoided. And yet Toronto-based actor/musician Mike Ross is diving headlong into the challenge, presenting an evening of works inspired by cummings’ canon.

The Young Centre Rocks With Andrew and Stevie

Catherine Kustanczy — 2009-10-31T03:28:00+00:00

The hardest thing for Andrew Craig was choosing. “That alone caused sleepless nights,” he admits.

The Canadian musician and host of CBC Radio’s Canada Live is referring to the job of putting together a tribute to R&B legend Stevie Wonder. Featured as part of the Canwest Cabaret series happening at the Young Centre October 29th through November 1st, Craig says “ultimately taking on the catalogue of someone as prolific as Stevie Wonder begins with the decision about what approach to take.”

Lepage Flies with The Nightingale

Catherine Kustanczy — 2009-10-21T03:15:00+00:00

The musical rebel of his day, Igor Stravinsky has never endeared those who crave traditional melodic lines. His music is raucous, rough, and challenging –not the kind of thing you can hum or whistle to. His 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its premiere, and when his adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fable The Nightingale premiered in 1908, he placed the singers down in the orchestra pit and put an assortment of tumblers and dancers onstage instead. His infamous statement, that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all” has been assessed and analyzed, criticized and derided, and yet the influence of Stravinsky’s modern, complex music, cannot be over-emphasized. But he isn’t exactly the guy you turn on when you want some comforting sounds.

Stratford Festival - Ever Yours, Oscar

Sebastian Frye — 2009-09-30T04:13:00+00:00

In the hands of both the greatest authors and the most stylistically impoverished layman, letter writing can prove more revealing of one's personality than everyday conversation. A reader of letters has the opportunity to ponder the intricacies of a subtle turn of phrase, or the opportunity to fall asleep at a meandering bunch of words without a point. To read Oscar Wilde's letters is to not only be smitten by the command of his wit and his effortlessness of tone, but to glimpse the unpolished human being Wilde was. Humane, amorous and humble was Wilde torn away from the flamboyant character he is commonly portrayed as.

Stratford Review - Bartholomew Fair

Catherine Kustanczy — 2009-09-30T03:58:00+00:00

Bartholomew Fair is a sprawling work with a multitude of characters, situations, and scenes that defy accurate description. Firmly tied to its London roots, this 1614 play by Ben Jonson isn’t the strongest display of the power of community, nor does it hold the appeal of Jonson’s more widely-produced work Volpone. So why did the Stratford Shakespeare Festival decide to stage it? In the words of its director (and Festival co-director) Antoni Cimolino, the work is “a very warm and deliciously funny argument for tolerance.” But it plays much more like an extended Jacobean sitcom, with multiple plots, a myriad of characters, and the kind of bawdy, puerile humour that relies on fat suits and fart jokes for laughs.

Stratford Review - The Trespassers

Catherine Kustanczy — 2009-09-17T01:32:00+00:00

It’s late August, and the signs are everywhere: peach pie, peach cobbler, peach chutney, peach salsa. Peaches are at their luscious, sweet, seasonal best right now. Perhaps it’s fitting then that the Stratford Shakespeare festival has recently opened a work in which the favoured fruit figures so prominently. Morris Panych’s The Trespassers features a litany of peaches scattered across its mental and emotional territory. Though it’s a challenging piece of work, it’s also easily the best show on at the Stratford Festival this year.

Stratford Festival - West Side Story

John Gould — 2009-09-17T01:24:00+00:00

Playing to capacity audiences, Broadway’s now classic 1957 musical is proving to be a hit for the 2009 season at Stratford’s Festival Theatre. The production staff has ably navigated through the minefield that a project like West Side Story presents: complicated dance sequences, memorable and sophisticated musical numbers that create audience expectations as to how they should sound; a dark plot based on the Shakespearean tragedy Romeo and Juliet transported to New York City in the mid-1950s; the temptation to morph the Jets into a version of “The Fonz” in television’s Happy Days; and the use of a stage which is configured differently from the one for which the play was originally written.

Stratford Review - Julius Caesar

Catherine Kustanczy — 2009-09-17T01:08:00+00:00

The imperious head of Julius Caesar looks out over the audience of the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, as they assemble to watch Shakespeare’s play named after him. It isn’t the real Caesar’s head, of course, but a bust of it –a likeness representing the man –but the same metaphor could be said of James MacDonald’s curiously bloodless tale of a bloody deed: the murder of the commander-in-chief for the ostensible greater good.

Shaw Review - In Good King Charles’ Golden Days

John Gould — 2009-09-15T22:56:00+00:00

Shaw’s 1938 talky parlour drama is based on the what-if possibility that King Charles II (a loose liver who uses his proclivities to mask his political quest to do the right thing), Isaac Newton (philosopher scientist), George Fox (the rather mad founder of the Society of Friends), The Duke of York (the military man who later became James II), Godfrey Kneller (Royal painter) and Charles’ assorted mistresses discussed the issues of their day in religion, science, power and politics.