Onegin at the Arts Club

Amiel Gladstone and Veda Hille clearly work well together. First, there was the smash hit Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata (written with Bill Richardson), which played the PuSh Festival in 2012 and may soon be heading to New York. Then there have been a string of East Van Pantos (written with Charlie Demers), which after three years have already become a York Theatre Christmas institution. Now comes their latest collaboration, Onegin, a "passionate new musical" currently playing at the Arts Club's new BMO Theatre in Olympic Village that Richard and I fittingly saw on Good Friday.

The work is adapted from both the Pushkin poem and the Tchaikovsky opera, and all the basic plot points are retained. Evgeni Onegin (Alessandro Juliani, making an assured Arts Club acting debut), a self-involved cad, arrives in sleepy St. Petersburg to preside impatiently over the death of his uncle. Soon he hooks up with his old friend, the poet Vladimir Lensky (Josh Epstein), who introduces Onegin to his fiancee, Olga (Lauren Jackson), and Olga's older sister, Tatyana (a stand-out Meg Roe). Tatyana, who up until this point has lived her life largely through books (as referenced in the piles of them that constitute a key feature of Drew Facey's set design), is instantly smitten with the dashing but reprobate Onegin--a man who refers to himself, in the hilarious song that heralds his arrival in town, as a "rock star."

Tatyana pours out her heart to Onegin in a letter, a scene which gives rise to one of Tchaikovsky's most famous arias, and which here, in "The Letter Song," Hille subtly references musically, while Gladstone cleverly enlists the front rows of the audience in the missive's delivery. (The thrust stage is configured in the round and Gladstone choreographs several moments of direct interaction between performers and audience members, including a drinking game involving shots of vodka. All of this feels organic to the production's overall storytelling frame rather than unnecessarily ingratiating and gimmicky.) Needless to say, Tatyana's feelings are not reciprocated by Onegin, who tells her he is not made for love, or at least the version that comes with marriage and domesticity. Tatyana is heartbroken, but unlike most tragic heroines from nineteenth-century opera the news doesn't kill her, and Gladstone and Hille give her a Heart-like power ballad to emphasize her strength and resilience--which Roe absolutely nails, complete with her own rock star guitar licks. (Another conceit of the production is that all of the actors are enlisted at different points to pick up instruments and supplement the house orchestra--Hille on piano and keyboards, Barry Mirochnick on percussion and guitar, and Marina Hasselberg on cello. This includes various turns at guitar and bass, as well as the tubular bells, and a virtuosic Caitriona Murphy--who plays Olga and Tatyana's mother--on violin.)

Onegin, having rebuffed Tatyana, is bored, and so at her name day celebrations (which features a wonderful Justin Timberlake/Bieber-esque falsetto tribute from Andrew McNee as the French tutor Monsieur Triquet) decides to flirt with her sister. Needless to say, this doesn't sit well with Lensky, who of course challenges Onegin to a duel. Neither man wants to go through with the gunfight, but their pride also prevents them from backing down. Inevitably, Lensky is killed, which sends Onegin into self-imposed exile traveling throughout Europe. Returning to St. Petersburg six years later, Onegin reencounters Tatyana at a ball thrown by Prince Gremin (Andrew Wheeler), the much older man to whom Tatyana is married. It's now Onegin's turn to be smitten, and so cue a repeat of the earlier letter scene. But while Tatyana's feelings for Onegin are undeniably rekindled, she tells him "no." Their tragedy, it would seem, boils down to a case of missed timing--something less grand and operatic than consumption, perhaps, but also something to which audience members tapping into their own "only if's" can potentially better relate. And it is to Hille and Gladstone's credit that in a musical filled with its share of belly laughs they mostly eschew their natural impulse towards irony, opting instead for plainness of meaning and unadorned sincerity. Indeed, one might say that Onegin is to Craigslist what Stephen Sondheim's Passion is to Into the Woods.

At the same time, the emotional tone of the work never feels manipulative or heavy-handed. And I think that has a lot to do with the scale of this staging. From the compactness of the company and orchestra to the subtle brocaded and damasked references to White Russian society contained in Jacqueline Firkins' costumes and Facey's drapey backdrop, and from simple dramaturgical effects (a cup of red wine on a white sheet to evoke Lensky's spilled blood on the snowy forest floor) to the intimate size of the house: nothing here feels overproduced, and so consequently every choice registers as at once inevitable and absolutely authentic.

This is a Broadway-worthy musical that, mercifully, forgoes Broadway-style spectacle. And for that there is only one word: Nostrovia!

P.

The Tempest at Bard on the Beach

On the last weekend before school starts, Richard and I finally got to Bard on the Beach to see Meg Roe's production of The Tempest. First staged to acclaim in 2008, this reworked version is, courtesy of Christine Reimer's costumes, Alessandro Juliani's original music (played live by a quartet upstage right), and Rob Kitsos' choreography, certain a feast for the senses. The one confusing signal, however, came from Pam Johnson's cooly white and vaguely lunar set, which initially put me in the arctic hinterlands rather than the lush island tropics one assumes the play is set.

Tonally, this is certainly a "lighter" version of the play than I am used to, with the darker psychology that underscores Prospero's dark magic only occasionally bubbling to the surface. This might have been a result of the oddly passive and--it seemed to me--fatigued performance of Allan Morgan in the lead role. Interestingly, though like the other actors he was miked, I found it hard to hear Morgan's lines, and I was struck, in retrospect, by how much time Prospero spends offstage and also, when he is onstage, how often he is positioned as an observer. Lili Beaudoin's infectious performance as Miranda is certainly confident and winning, and it is charming to watch the utterly ingenuous flirtation between her and Ferdinand (a suitably besotted Daniel Doheny) unfold--in part because for once the actors match the roles in age. Again, however, it felt that the more complex emotions behind Miranda's temperament were glossed over. After all, we are introduced to her as she is offering paroxysms of shared grief for the victims of the shipwreck her father has just wrought. We seem to move from this fraught state to lively attentiveness (viz. the story Prospero has to tell regarding how they came to find themselves on this island) a bit too quickly and seamlessly.

Then, too, I wasn't all that compelled by the conspiring between Antonio (Ian Butcher) and Sebastian (Andrew McNee). Granted, the plot to kill Alonso (Scott Bellis) is presented in the play as wholly opportunistic and the arch-usurper Antonio does not give Sebastian a lot of time to rationalize--or doubt--his actions; however, I somehow wished I got a sense that the stakes were higher. Ditto my response to the key relationships between Prospero and Ariel (Jennifer Lines) and Prospero and Caliban (Todd Thomson). The former is as gossamer and delicately poised as Lines' constantly arched right foot, ready to take quick flight into the imaginative ether of beneficit master and willing servant rather than pausing to explore from a more grounded perspective the actual matter of what binds these two together. That is, of course, the perspective one associates with the monster Caliban, who has the greater grievance, and for whom the master/slave relationship is no mere dialectical exercise. But, ironically, he who provides the darkest ballast to the play is arguably overtaken (and undercut) by Roe's  most interesting dramaturgical innovation--turning the buffoonish clowns Trinculo and Stephano whom Caliban conscripts as potential assassins of Prospero into the drunken sisters Trincula and Stephana (and played uproariously by Luisa Jojic and Naomi Wright).

This casting innovation elicits all sorts of added gendered insights into the play. But the burlesque that accompanies it also firmly tips the generic hybridity of this, Shakespeare's most complex romance, firmly into the realm of comedy. And it renders Caliban as the voice of postcolonial resistance doubly impotent--by castrating him twice.

P.

Henry V at Bard

It only took 20 years, but last night I finally made it to Bard on the Beach to take in Henry V on the Studio Stage. I've never thought Shakespeare to be the ne plus ultra of theatre in the first place (and, indeed, I've seen more bad Shakespeare in performance than good), and the quirky, crunchy rusticity of its outdoor seaside setting that BOTB promotes as part of its west coast charm has never been a huge selling point for me. Plus, while the company showcases the work of some very fine local performers year-to-year, I also think it retains some lesser lights for not altogether sound repertory reasons, and could be a bit more adventurous and diverse in its casting.

However, I put aside those reservations this year. Partly this had to do with the fact that I had taught Henry V in my Intro to Drama course earlier this spring, which was organized around the theme of war. Having unpacked--with the help of the Chorus--the jingoism of some of Henry's speeches, and asked my students whether, based on his actions in the play, we should consider Harry a hero or a war criminal, I was interested in seeing director Meg Roe's take on the play's martial masculinities, and how she treated the rather dubious reasons promulgated by Henry and his advisors for going to war with France (what to do about those tennis balls, for example...). The fact that Roe had cast her husband, Alessandro Juliani, in the title role also helped. I'd long been a fan of Juliani's work as the traitorous Felix Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica, and his starring role as Frog in last year's stupendous production of after the quake only confirmed my opinion of his acting chops. Finally, my colleague Rob Kitsos--and collaborator on The Objecthood of Chairs--has contributed original choreography to the production. So, really, it was the the right alignment of elements that found me under the smaller of the two tents at Vanier Park last night.

First of all, Roe's production is a miracle of concision. Any mounting of the play that can get us all the way through to 4.1 and the crucial pre-Battle of Agincourt scene pre-intermission needs to be applauded. What might be sacrificed in terms of plot and character complexity (especially regarding the Archbishops' opening discussion of Henry's surprising switch from wayward rebellion to pious devotion to duty upon the death of his father and his assumption of the throne, and equally in terms of the Archbishops' own conspiring reasons to convince Henry to invade France) is made up for in terms of a swift pacing that recognizes that the play really only gets going once Henry and his men reach the gates of Harfleur. Then, too, Roe takes the Chorus at her word when she says at the outset that the "wooden O" of a theatrical stage cannot do their story proper justice in truly representing the scale and scope of a story that moves between England and France, that features pitched battlefield scenes, and a cast of literally thousands of characters. Heeding the Chorus' advice for us in the audience to use our imaginations, Roe plays on the intimacy of Bard's Studio Stage, using simple design effects to turn the upstage entrance into the prow of a ship or the gates to Harfleur, and having her actors switch between their doubled roles as soldiers of France and soldiers of England by making some clever signals in costuming.

As the Chorus, Colleen Wheeler brings great stage presence and a suitable gravitas to the role, anchoring us in the story, if not exactly trying to colour our interpretation of that story, as in some revisionist productions. And here is where I would say my only real criticism of this staging comes in: this most political play is for all intents and purposes devoid of politics. Roe certainly does not shy away from showing us the brutality of war, and the scene where the Welsh Captain Fluellen (an excellent Andrew McNee) enters carrying the brutally murdered young Boy (a preternaturally poised Joseph Gustafson) is gut-wrenching. But at the same time there is little to no questioning of Henry's motives for going to war in the first place, nor of some of the decisions Henry makes in the name of war: the executions at Southampton of the traitorous Scroop, Grey, and Cambridge; the execution of Bardolph for his looting in France (an act that while interestingly performed on stage in this production had curiously little effect/affect on this viewer in terms of how we're meant to interpret the King's treatment of his former friends); and the order of the slaughter of the French prisoners, an order that's crucially given in Shakespeare's text before Henry knows of the French massacre of the young boys attending the English luggage).

Granted, I have not seen Bard's production of Falstaff, the reworked version of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 running in rep with Henry V, so I can't say exactly what continuities and/or changes in character we witness in Prince Hal/King Henry over the course of the two plays. And yet while I appreciated Juliani's naturalism in the title role, I didn't get much of a sense of him wrestling with his conscience regarding the justness of his war, nor in his arguments with Williams in 4.1--and in the soliloquy that follows--a sense of just what is at stake morally and ethically in his adherence (despite the sins of his father and grandfather and great-uncle) to kingly duty and ceremony. Whatever gender politics one might also discern in the final love scene between Henry and Katherine (a winning Amber Lewis) tend to be likewise obscured by the overt playing of this scene for comedy--which, in the expert hands of Juliani, did work, I have to say.

Where I think Roe takes the most risks in this production is in her approach to movement on stage. She correctly recognizes that this is a very physical play, and does not shy away from representing the labour of war. Which is where Rob's contributions come in, using a combination of dance choreography and martial arts moves to both abstract and literalize the kinesthetics of medieval battle, with its strange and heavy weaponry (swords and crossbows), its close proximity (ie, mostly hand-to-hand combat), and its interminability (pitched battles that go on for days). All of this is aptly signaled in the heaviness of the men's backwards and forwards steps, in the massings of bodies on stage, in the repeated and exchanged gestures that telegraph futility and exhaustion among the rank and file. Showcased on its own at select moments throughout the play, especially during the climactic Battle of Agincourt, Rob's choreography allows the audience a pause from the text, but by no means from the action represented in/by the text. Indeed, in daring to show us what the combat we hear about actually might look light, Roe and Kitsos also suggest that this battle isn't going to be won, as the Dauphin (an energetic Charlie Gallant) thinks, by superior steeds on the French side, nor even, as Henry thinks, by the hand of God guiding the English, but rather by which side has the most men left standing at the end of the day.

And therein lies the politics of this play: in its movement.

P.