Where: Young Centre in the Distillery District
When: See the season calendar. Glass Menagerie plays until September 6th. Kreutzer Sonata ends August 11th.
How to get cheap tickets: See the Top 5 Summer Theatre Festivals blog post.

Ted Dykstra directs two plays for the Soulpepper Theatre company this summer: the Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie, and the one-act, one man show, The Kreutzer Sonata. The first has a great cast and very solid direction, while the second is reasonably well acted by Dykstra but is terribly directed.

The Glass Menagerie is the story of the Wingfield family in the South, struggling to make ends meet after being abandoned by the patriarch: the father to Tom and Laura, husband to Amanda. The children are grown now and so the role of breadwinner falls to Tom, who feels shackled by his family responsibilities, stuck in a low-paying job he hates, wanting desperately to escape, to have adventures, and to write. Laura is a shy cripple, who spends her days wandering the city and caring for her glass menagerie – a collection of small glass animal figurines – rather than learning a trade so that she can support herself. All of this worries their mother, Amanda, who lives in constant fear that Tom will abandon them just like his father, and that, left to fend for herself, Laura will fail, and remain always hopelessly dependent on others. The characters all speak in a Southern drawl, flawless enough that it helps give the language the right sound adding to the performances.

Dysktra’s rendition of The Glass Menagerie is done with a surprising amount of levity for a Tennessee Williams play, which is not to say it lacks Williams’s trademark bleakness. Amanda (Nancy Palk) is the real star of the play, delivering her nostalgic dialogue and complaints in a light and over-the-top fashion which is incontrovertibly funny. Palk often talks about the gentleman callers of her youth with such vanity that the tone is humourous rather than full of loss. And it works.

In the beginning of the play, Tom speaks to the audience to explain that “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.’” And yet Dykstra’s production feels very immediate. The dialogue flows impeccably to the point that I remained so utterly engaged that I would forget that this was a memory play, Tom’s memory. The only reminder that the events were supposed to be memories was the fact that the actor playing Tom, Stuart Hughes, is too old to be the Tom in the unfolding action. Part of the realism comes from the fantastic set which gives us both the interior and exterior of the apartment the family inhabits. The interior is especially good and the characters move comfortably in it, which kept me completely convinced that this was a real home. But the fact that the play feels so realistic – despite its being a memory play – is hardly something I can complain about in the production, though I worry that some of the nuance of the text may be lost because of it.

What most impressed me about the production was how radically and masterfully the tone and pacing changed through the three parts of the play. It begins with despair and little hope. The characters talk slowly and keep their distance from each other in the physical space; the action moves slowly, too. As soon as a gentleman caller for Laura becomes a real possibility – Tom asks a friend from work to dinner – the characters light up, the energy on-stage increases, the lines delivered more quickly and excitedly, and the physical distance between these unhappy characters decreases. The pacing of the action and the hopefulness in the tone wonderfully tells us just what an important symbol of hope the gentleman caller really is. And when everything blows up as it must – this is a Tennessee Williams play – the tension and the bleakness of the situation seem audible and can be physically felt: everything slows down and becomes pregnant with pauses.

While Dykstra’s direction was a triumph in The Glass Menagerie, it is a trainwreck in his one-act show, The Kreutzer Sonata. The Kreutzer Sonata is a play adapted from the short story of the same name by Leo Tolstoy, which, itself, is inspired by the Beethoven duet for piano and violin, the “Kreutzer Sonata”. It tells the story of a husband who becomes consumed with jealousy and rage when his wife plays Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” with another man that he murders her. The wife and other man play with whom she plays Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata”. Ted Dykstra plays the enraged husband, who tells us the story of the events leading up to and including the murder of his wife, of which he is ultimately acquitted, since it was provoked, supposedly, by adultery.

It’s a one-hour show during which Dykstra sits in a red armchair, sipping a glass of water throughout the entire performance. Dykstra is convincing as the husband and successfully takes us on his journey of emotional turmoil, engaging throughout. The trouble with the play is that it lacks context. In fact, it’s staged in such a way that he looks just like the host of Masterpiece Theatre. To whom is he talking to? Is this a monologue to himself, as he works through his issues? It can’t be since he seems to be talking to someone? Does he think he is in front of an audience, addressing us directly, like Richard III would do? Is he confiding in a friend from the comfort of his armchair at home? This seems unlikely given the frequency of private intimate moments that he experiences throughout the telling. The reason why he is telling his story and to whom are completely unclear, which means the production ultimately fails. And the fact that it’s full of misogyny – an insane and enraged husband gets away with murder because he is right to think that women should be assumed adulterous and evil and deserve to be beaten and die for it – only fuels my distaste for the play.

Where: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (at Osgoode Subway)
When: Tuesday-Saturday (26-30) at 7:30PM
Tickets: $35 if you’re under 30 and join <30 DanCap; $40-65 regular admission.
More information: See the Next to Normal website

The best show in town this week, and possibly even this summer, is the 2009 Tony award-winning musical, Next to Normal, playing at the Four Seasons Centre, the last stop on its North American tour. Next to Normal tells the story of Diana Goodman (played by Alice Ripley in a Tony award-winning performance), a woman with bipolar disorder, and her family as they struggle to cope with the strains from her condition. Diana’s husband, Dan (Asa Somers), sticks with her, trying his best to help her cope with her condition, still clinging to the image of the woman he first met in his early twenties but that may no longer exist, deluding himself that everything is fine. Their daughter, Natalie (Emma Hunton), is a straight-A straight-edged student, who eventually hits breaking point, after starting up a sweet and optimistic romance with her supportive stoner classmate.

On Wednesday night, Branford Marsalis, on soprano and tenor sax, and Joey Calderazzo, on piano, took the stage at Koerner Hall for the world premiere of their duo collaboration, Songs of Mirth and Melancholy. They did a fantastic preview of this at last year’s Jazz Lives, which you can download (in part) and listen to here. At the Jazz Lives performance, Marsalis explained that when the two of them started this duo project, they sat down and talked about everything they hate about jazz duos. One thing that stood out to them as particularly distasteful was when the piano walks the bass line in the left hand: “If we wanted someone to walk the bass line, we would have hired a bassist”, said Marsalis.

Wednesday’s concert featured a mix of great standards and original compositions both old and new. The highlights included a wonderful rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” and Marsalis’s “Eternal”, the title track of his record. Marsalis and Calderzzo are incredibly in tune with one another. Marsalis is, no doubt, the resident master. He seems to effortlessly and intuitively produce fantastic musical solos while Calderazzo works to keep up with his part, much of which is scripted in music he is reading; Marsalis didn’t have any music on stage.

This is not to say that Calderazzo didn’t hold his own; he played quite a lot and very well and many of his compositions were a joy to hear. Perhaps Calderazzo said it best: he doesn’t know how Branford Marsalis does it, but if he hears something once, he has it committed to memory. The one thing he doesn’t know, as Calderazzo pointed out, is the key that any song is in, though he can play them perfectly in any key. Marsalis explained that, as a child, he and his brother would ask their dad to play a song for them. Branford would ask his dad what key the piece was in, before they started, and his father Ellis would respond, ‘son, there are no keys. There are only notes.’’ Eventually Branford stopped asking and just learned to figure it out as they went along.   (more…)

Where: Toronto Centre for the Arts
When: June 29-July 10; 7:30 pm Tuesday through Sunday with 2:00 pm matinee performances on Sunday, Wednesday & Saturday
Tickets: $40-65  Here , which is pretty cheap for a Broadway show!

Dancap productions brings 9 to 5: The Musical, with songs and scores by Dolly Parton to the North York Centre for the Arts for a short run from June 29 to July 10. This touring Broadway stage production of the 1980 film, Nine to Five, is a solid production of a mediocre play. The target audience for the show is, no doubt, the same crowd that enjoyed the Jersey Boys production that played in Toronto in 2009. I’ll warn you upfront that I don’t belong to that group; I had free tickets to Jersey Boys and just barely managed to sit through the bad music and the horribly sexist plot. 9 to 5: The Musical is orders of magnitude better, with phenomenal sets, great staging and lighting, good acting and singing and music that’s great – if you like that sort of thing – and still fun if you don’t (and I don’t) though ultimately dated.

9 to 5: The Musical is about three feisty secretaries who turn their fantasy of killing their “sexist, egotistical, lying hypocritical bigot” of a boss (Joseph Mahowald) into an almost-reality: they decide to kidnap him instead and reform the office while holding him hostage in his own house for a month. The women, all quite likeable, are Violet (Dee Hoty), the head secretary with enough business acumen to be running the place, if she weren’t a woman in the 1970s; Doralee (Diana DeGarmo) the voluptuous, blond bombshell, and Texan, whose beauty confuses people into forgetting she might have a brain; and Judy (Mamie Parris), the recently divorced ingénue and newcomer to office politics.

The production is quite dazzling with period costumes and very elaborate sets. The stage changes seamlessly and convincingly between an office with many, many desks, to the office of the head honcho, to several different homes, to a women’s bathroom. It’s very possibly one of the best elaborate sets I’ve seen in recent years, which ensures that the stage is used well and never feels too full or too empty. Even though there may be several set pieces and several actors on stage at a time, the lighting cues are well-designed to focus the action. I just wish there were more dancing.

But the production is all spectacle and no substance. Nine to Five may have championed the feminist movement in the early 1980s, but today it is simply dated. That is not to say that musicals from the 60s or 70s should not be performed today; Hair and Hairspray still resonate today when done as period pieces. But 9 to 5: The Musical is no longer inspirational. In fact, it’s somewhat insulting that it suggests that women can only make their way in the workplace by resorting to underhanded crime; it’s supposed to be funny, but in 2011, it’s cringeworthy. The play is simply out of date. The production isn’t blameless either. Violet is probably the most modern of the women – clever, cynical, charming – but in the song-and-dance number where she is living her dream of being the empowered, career woman, it’s the first time we see her show cleavage. What kind of message is this?

Perhaps the production would seem less dated if it had been put together before the days of Mad Men being a commercial success. But we, as a culture, are already so accustomed to biting, clever commentary on the sexist office politics of the 1960s on Mad Men that it would take a lot to impress us here. 9 to 5 fails to deliver the goods. While Mad Men explores the complexities of pushing towards real culture change in business, 9 to 5 reduces these issues to two-dimensional silliness, which may have worked as empowering escapism in the 1980s, but these days, it just seems petty. Surely there are better fictitious role models out there of women changing the workplace realistically. This plays like Revenge of the Secretaries, and sometimes it’s funny but a lot of the times lines that are supposed to make me laugh, like the intentionally sexist running joke “What do you call a woman who has lost 95% of her intelligence? Divorced.”  just make me cringe and feel uncomfortable.

If a feminist musical is the goal, why not remount My Fair Lady? Compare the inspirational number, “Shine Like the Sun” (“I’m gonna shine like the sun when these clouds roll away from my door. I won’t crawl. I can run. I won’t be at your mercy no more. We’ll be singing it loud/so be proud that we’ve finally won.”) from 9 to 5 ,with the still fantastic and timeless lyrics from “Without You” in My Fair Lady (“Art and music will thrive without you. Somehow Keats will survive without you. And there still will be rain on that plain down in Spain, even that will remain without you. I can do without you.”), which is to say, there are better feminist musicals of the past that are still relevant today.

That being said, if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief, 9 to 5: The Musical is a highly competent production. The cast can sing, act, and entertain, and it’s a very, very polished production.

Life Science students spend a lot of time in the Medical Sciences building. You know which one it is – that sprawling concrete menace at the southeast corner of King’s College Circle. It is a horrible place.
First, the exterior. What were they thinking back in the late 1960s? Since pre-fabricated concrete slabs were the newest and hottest constructional material, the architects went hoop-la with it. The material seems painful to look at and even more painful to touch. I feel that, if for some reason I fell and grazed the wall, it would cut into my skin. Lucky for me, Medical students would see my suffering and come help.

Or would they? Another problem with the Med Sci building is that it lacks windows. You know, those glass portals that allow sunlight in and make you happy? If you are unfortunate enough to find yourself on the upper floors where the research labs are, you will be bathed in artificial fluorescent light. The hallways are confusing with many twists and turns. With no windows, you have no idea which direction you’re headed. I guess in the 60s people didn’t have to get to class on time so they could afford to spend ten minutes lost in a painted white cinderblock labyrinth.

Back to the exterior – it’s awful. Since there’s plenty of wasted open space on the outside, Med Sci is a magnet for smokers. Does anyone else see the irony in this?

The interior is barren and feels like a high school (complete with orange lockers and a feeling of hopelessness). One day I was walking to an office on the fourth floor and a some professors were having a conversation in the hallway. There were four of them and they occupied the entire width of the corridor. Now, there’s nothing wrong with professors talking to each other and I’m not complaining about the width of the hallways. What I find deplorable is that they had to converse in the hallway. In Med Sci, there are no lounges, no casual conference rooms, and there’s no free space. Everything is locked behind a door, out of the public realm. Every space has a rigidly defined purpose and must be booked ahead of time to be used. This leaves nowhere for impromptu conversations or places to eat lunch. Life in Med Sci is lonely and oppressive – certainly not the environment to promote creative thinking or forge interdisciplinary projects.

Thankfully, there are alternatives. The Terrence Donnelley Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research is a perfect example of how a research institute should be designed (it’s the new tower which is attached to Med Sci and has a main entrance that faces College). There, the exterior walls are completely glass! There’s plenty of communal space with plant life to spur the creative juices. I bet the researchers in the Donnelley building would report that they have a higher quality of life than those in Med Sci.

Med Sci can be saved. To bring it into the twenty first century, tear down walls. Literally make open spaces for people to have lunch. Drill holes into the ceiling and allow sunlight to filter into its cavernous depths.

That, or tear the whole building down and start fresh. Perhaps a glass and steel phoenix will rise from the concrete and rebar mess.

The Canadian Opera Company completes its trio of productions for the spring session with Cristoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. The names Orfeo and Euridice may sound familiar to you because the opera is based on the story of Orpheus the lyre player, who literally went to hell and back in an attempt to bring his dead lover, Eurydice, back to life.

Orfeo ed Euridice was memorable for the simplistic sets and costumes that helped set the tone for the tragedy that drives the plot and raison d’être of the show. The cast consisted of very proficient actors who expressed their grief convincingly. However, in song, they were, for the most part, unmemorable.

Maybe my expectations for the opera were too high (my standard Orfeo is, after all, the goddess Maria Callas – the video linked here is one where she sings the most famous aria of the opera, but in French rather than Italian), but I felt that the sadness and the drama of the entire production was only conveyed by the brilliant mise-en-scene. The scene in hell was particularly well done and is perhaps the only thing that I will give special mention for this review. However, even this positive quality seems to have failed Orfeo ed Euridice at the end when Orfeo and the chorus are celebrating Euridice’s return to the land of the mortals. The cast’s black costumes and the barren set overpowered the celebratory song and it felt as if they were at a funeral of someone who wasn’t well-liked in life.

In any case, Orfeo ed Euridice is running from May 8th to May 28th at the Four Seasons Centre for Performing Arts. For those living on a student budget, rush tickets are $20 and are available starting at 11 AM the day of the performance. All rush tickets seats are in the 5th ring. If you are under the age of 30, you are eligible for Opera for a New Age tickets, which cost $22 and will get you seats in the 5th or 3rd ring.

For more information on Orfeo ed Euridice and the Canadian Opera Company, click here.

Since this is my last opera review for blogUT, I would like to end with a brief personal note.

I decided to review productions by the COC purely for the purpose of generating curiosity, in hopes that students will, at least once in their lives, attend an opera production. From reading my reviews, you can probably guess that I’m not an opera expert and I’m still learning the finer details of the art. However, I feel justified in writing the way I do and in expressing the opinions I have expressed because I want to introduce the art of opera to an audience who may initially be turned off by the conception that it’s a kind of art form where one needs a lot of prior knowledge to appreciate it. To some people, that may be true, but I don’t see why the average person can’t enjoy opera for its amusing plots or beautiful music. In the end, I hope that my reviews have generated some interest, because the opera is truly a magnificent experience that everyone can enjoy.

Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos is not an opera about Ariadne and her tale of woe and romance but a whimsical tale of an opera production going… in a way that it doesn’t usually go. The show follows an opera troupe who learns that they have to perform alongside a ‘vulgar’ comedy troupe at a nobleman’s dinner.

The first act, in which the audience follows the two troupes and observes their pre-show nervousness and anxiety about the changes being made to their productions, is wonderfully entertaining. A special mention goes to Alice Coote, who plays the talented but angsty composer of Ariadne auf Naxos (the opera in the opera). Her superb acting and voice brings us the highs and lows as the composer goes into his diva-esque fits at the prospect of having his opera changed.

Another special mention goes to Jane Archibald, who plays the feisty and flirty Zerbinetta. She’s the star of the second act, which shows the result of the mash-up of the two productions, where her voice and spunky personality is the cause of much laughter. When I went to the dress rehearsal, Amber Wagner, Adrianne Pieczonka’s understudy, took the role of Ariadne/the Prima Donna halfway through the production in act II. It seems that fate has been on my side, because Wagner seems to have taken the role for the current productions of the opera (until further notice). Wagner is a powerful singer whose voice should not be forever relegated to being an understudy.

Overall, the direction, set and costumes were appropriate and did not detract from the performance or the libretto of the opera. The show was absolutely brilliant and is sure to draw a few laughs – I highly recommend it. A few opera virgins came with me to this production and were as delighted by it as I was.

Ariadne auf Naxos is running from April 30th to May 29th at the Four Seasons Centre for Performing Arts. For those living on a student budget, rush tickets are $20 and are available starting at 11 AM the day of the performance. All rush tickets seats are in the 5th ring. If you are under the age of 30, you are eligible for Opera for a New Age tickets, which cost $22 and will get you seats in the 5th or 3rd ring.

For more information on Ariadne auf Naxos and the Canadian Opera Company, click here.

Thanks for reading! I will be reviewing Orfeo ed Eurydice in a few days. Enjoy!