Tag Archives: griffith

Wine in the Wilderness

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Wine in the Wilderness is a 1969 play by Alice Childress set in Harlem during the 1964 riots. It’s currently playing at Canadian Stage Berkeley Street in a production directed by Jordan Laffrenier (who also directed Slave Play). It’s a deceptively complex and nuanced analysis of the intersection of race, class and gender in the African-American community at a time of considerable change. The Civil Rights Movement is under way. Educational opportunities have opened up enough to allow the emergence of an aspirational African-American middle class. But this is still a deeply racist USA with police brutality a common occurrence and plenty of people left behind in an increasingly polarized African-American community.

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There’s the rub!

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It’s the rub that makes the difference, not the sauce.  Or so we are told by Fancy’s stepfather and uncle who now runs the family BBQ restaurant somewhere far south of Elsinore in James ljames’ Fat Ham which opened on Wednesday at Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street.  Director Philip Akin describes it as an “overlay” on a well known play by Shakespeare and that’s probably as good a way of looking at it as any.

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And over, and over

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Ho Ka Kei’s take on the last canonical part of the story of the House of Atreus; Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) opened last night at the Aki Studio in a production directed by Jonathan Seinen.  It’s a very funny and very thought provoking take on the story that will likely be best known to opera goers as the plot of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride.  I want to start with the three questions that the playwright set out to answer:

  • What does it mean for mainly POC’s and marginalized folks to be taking this tale on?
  • What do we gain/ what do we lose/ what may feel erased/ what is truly universal about this tale or is that an assumption due to its status in the canon?
  • When we end a cycle, say a cycle of vengeance, what other cycles emerge?

This interests me especially because I’m not in any real sense a marginalized person.  Indeed I’m almost “archetypically” of the group that has made the classical canon its own; i.e a white male with a traditional classical education(1).

7 iphigeniastills-photobydahliakatz-virgilia griffith

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La scala di seta

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So here’s another Rossini one act farsa from Schwetzingen.  It’s a 1990 La scala di seta in, inevitably, a production by Michal Hampe.  It’s predictably pretty to look at and well constructed dramaturgically.  The Paris background is a nice touch.  There’s some fine singing and energetic fooling from Alessandro Corbelli as the servant Germano.  The principal quartet of lovers; Luciana Serra, David Kuebler, Jane Bunnel and Alberto Rinaldi backed up by David Griffith as the girls’ guardian are stylish and toss off the various quick fire ensembles with aplomb.  Gianluigi Gelmetti and the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart round things out with an equally accomplished reading.  So there it is, straightforward Rossini in a typical Hampe production pulled of nicely in Scwetzingen’s elegant rococo theatre.

1.room

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