Canadian Stage opened a production of Amy Herzog’s adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Bluma Appel Theatre on Wednesday evening. It’s directed by Brendan Healey and stars Hailey Gillis and Gray Powell as Nora and Thorvald. It runs two hours without a break and it’s mesmerizing from start to finish. Direction, acting and designs are all of the highest quality and Gillis gives one of the best performances I have ever experienced.
This season’s main stage production from Tapestry Opera will be Ten Days in a Madhouse; music by Rene Orth, music by Hannah Moscovitch. It’s based on the true story of 19th century journalist Nellie Bly who pretended to be insane in order to expose the conditions women patients were being kept under at New York’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum. It’s the Canadian premiere of a Tapestry/Opera Philadelphia commission co-presented with the COC and Luminato. This follows a critically acclaimed run last year at Opera Philadelphia.
The Far Side of the Moon opened at Canadian Stage on Saturday evening. It’s a Robert Lepage production; written, designed and directed by him. It’s very Lepage with the strengths and weaknesses one might expect. We will come to that in more detail. It’s a homage to Lepage’s childhood obsession with the US and Soviet space programmes and to the moon in general. It plays out in two parallel narratives; the space programmes from Sputnik 1 to the Apollo Soyuz mission in 1975 and the tale of two brothers in Quebec City circa late 1990s. The older is an introverted nerd working on a doctoral thesis about popular perceptions of the space programmes and narcissism. The younger brother is a presenter for the Weather Channel and is shallower than the water over Dogger Bank at low spring tide. Their mother has just died and they are clearing out her apartment in an Old People’s Home.
Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree has been around for 20 years and has been performed about 400 times and it still feels very experimental and rather weird in a good way. It mucks about with time and space and identity while layering on multiple meta-theatrical elements that create an experience that is simultaneously engrossing and somewhat disorienting.
Mahabharata is one of the great epics. It’s long (my somewhat abridged translation runs 1400 pages) and it’s complex. To condense it into five hours or so of theatre and still have it retain its essential qualities is astonishing but, based on the first part which I saw at the Bluma Appel Theatre last night, Why Not Theatre’s production does just that.
Edward Albee’s 1962 classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened at Canadian Stage on Thursday evening in a production directed by Brendan Healy. It’s a long (not far short of 3.5 hours with two short intervals) and complex play; heavily dependent on quick-fire dialogue and with occasional outbreaks of absurdism. An older academic couple invite the “new man” and his wife back for drinks after a faculty party at a small New England college. George, a historian of modest distinction, is married to Martha, the daughter of the college president. The newcomers are Nick, a biologist, and his wife Honey.
I saw My Name is Lucy Barton; adapted for the stage by Rona Munro from Elizabeth Strout’s novel and directed by Jackie Maxwell on Wednesday evening. It’s a one woman show featuring an astonishing performance by Maev Beaty who is on stage for the entire play, which is little short of two hours long. She plays Lucy Barton and her mother and all the other characters are described not shown. In some ways it feels more like a book reading than a stage play.
So it was back to the Bluma Appel on Thursday evening to see part 2 of Matthew López’ The Inheritance. Part 1 had certainly left plenty of active plot lines to be resolved (or not) so it looked like being an interesting ride.
Matthew López’ The Inheritance is an epic adaptation of EM Forster’s Howard’s End. It’s epic in scale and scope. It runs for two evenings; each over three hours long and it features a rich, and sometimes bewildering, cast of characters. I was going to wait until after part 2 before writing about it but I actually think it will work better to review it in two parts. So here is part 1 as seen on opening night (Wednesday) at the Bluma Appel Theatre.
New comic operas are rare. New comic operas that are actually funny are vanishingly rare. The Overcoat: A Musical Tailoring is such a beast. It’s a new piece with music by James Rolfe and a libretto by Morris Panych derived from his twenty year old stage adaptation of Gogol’s short story. Originally commissioned by Tapestry Opera, the Toronto staging was under the joint auspices of that company and Canadian Stage with the work also to be staged by co-producer Vancouver Opera as part of their summer festival.
operaramblings 