Before Hamilton there was A Chorus Line. I was thinking about the relationship between Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 hit musical (which Richard and I will finally get a chance to see in LA this October) and the Marvin Hamlisch/Edward Kleban/James Kirkwood/Nicholas Dante classic from 1976 as I watched a matinee performance of Fighting Chance Productions' staging of the latter yesterday at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island.
Though the subject matter of both musicals couldn't be more different, the connections between them are striking. Both originated as off-Broadway productions at the Public Theatre that then went on to become massive Broadway hits, each earning a slew of Tony Awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize (two of only nine musicals in history to do so). They both also spawned successful touring productions, and as with A Chorus Line I'm sure Hamilton will soon be adapted to film. But what most came to mind yesterday as I looked at the cast Fighting Chance director and choreographer Rachael Carlson had assembled on stage was how A Chorus Line had begun to tackle the issue of diversity on Broadway some 40 years before Hamilton. Asian, Latinx, and Black actors are all featured prominently alongside white singers and dancers, and the ensemble of the musical, famously developed out of conversational workshops Bennett conducted with members of the cast, additionally features characters who self-identify as gay and Jewish.
Of course the deliberate irony of A Chorus Line's conceit is that this celebration of individual difference, so wonderfully brought out through the stories the sixteen "gypsies" narrate and sing over the course of being whittled down to a final selection of eight for director Zach's casting cut, will per force be subsumed into the absolute sameness and unison precision of a singular dancing machine--memorably encapsulated in the musical's high kicking, top hat popping, gold lamed concluding number, "One." As Zach (played here by Chris King) tells the dancers early on, and as he subsequently quarrels with Cassie, an ex-flame whose planned Hollywood career didn't pan out, in the line no one can stand out or pull focus from the star whom they are meant to support. That Cassie (a winning Lucia Forward) is in fact given a show-stopping solo number, "The Music and the Mirror," as illustration of her desire to return to being an anonymous member of the ensemble is just one of the many inside jokes this piece revels in.
In this semi-professional staging by Fighting Chance (King is the only Equity member in the ensemble), it must be said that the women stand out better than the men. Vanessa Quarinto as Diana Morales, who sings the memorable numbers "Nothing" (about a disastrous high school improv class) and the penultimate "What I Did for Love," is a definite triple threat, with a pure, soaring voice, clear technical dance training, and natural stage presence. Lindsay Marshall brings the house down as the sassy Val, who gets the cheeky (in more senses than one) song "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three." Alishia Suitor nicely reveals the vulnerability behind Sheila's hard-edged exterior in "At the Ballet" (where she is joined by Haley Allen's Bebe and Amanda Lourenco's Maggie). And Kailley Roesler has great comic timing as the tone-deaf Kristine. Kaden Chad, as Kristine's husband Al, does a good job playing off of Roseler in the tricky duet "Sing!," but elsewhere his voice was all over the place. Greg Liow as Mike is a phenomenal dancer, but his singing of "I Can Do That" at the top of the show was likewise only so-so. Jesse Alvarez, as Paul, is very moving in the monologue he delivers about his relationship with his parents; however, it was interesting to me in watching him and other of the men dance that the diversity in body size among the male cast members didn't really extend to the women.
Some things, I guess, never change.
P
Showing posts with label Waterfront Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Waterfront Theatre. Show all posts
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Sunday, September 11, 2016
Fringe Festival 2016: Great Day for Up
The second Fringe Festival show I saw yesterday, also at the Waterfront, was Electric Company Theatre's production of Great Day for Up. Originally written and performed by ECT Artistic Director Jonathon Young in 1996 as his graduating project from Studio 58, the company has revived the piece on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.
Great Day is a short Beckettian exploration of the limits of language, the materiality of objects, the body's estrangement from itself and its environment, and the meta-ness of the theatre. It showcases Young's immense talents as a physical performer, as well as ECT's trademark sensitivity to total theatrical design (the lighting is by Adrian Muir and the terrific sound score is by Owen Belton). Young plays an unnamed striver who climbs on stage through what looks like a roof-top skylight of the sort one would find on an old tenement building. He has brought with him a plastic bag of junk and, literally willing his legs to move, he gradually explores his surroundings. The dilemma facing him is where does he go from here? Danger lurks in the wings and there appears no way out behind the safety curtain stage left. Our erstwhile hero is willing to take direction: from the objects around him; from the scraps of paper whose messages he initially receives as oracular pronouncements, only to subsequently revise the text; and from someone named Will to whom he occasionally directs an existential query. It would seem--especially given the immense second ladder positioned upstage left--that the only way forward for the character is to go further up. Except, we eventually learn, up is actually "in."
And, in this respect, an equally interesting aspect of attending this show is that Young includes, as part of the program, an inserted "Afterword," in which he lets audience members in on the original genesis of the piece's composition, as well as his thoughts on returning to it 20 years later. It's a most compelling--and quite moving--piece of writing: not least for the way it gives us more "texture and colour" to a show Young variously refers to as a "thing" or a "blob."
P
Great Day is a short Beckettian exploration of the limits of language, the materiality of objects, the body's estrangement from itself and its environment, and the meta-ness of the theatre. It showcases Young's immense talents as a physical performer, as well as ECT's trademark sensitivity to total theatrical design (the lighting is by Adrian Muir and the terrific sound score is by Owen Belton). Young plays an unnamed striver who climbs on stage through what looks like a roof-top skylight of the sort one would find on an old tenement building. He has brought with him a plastic bag of junk and, literally willing his legs to move, he gradually explores his surroundings. The dilemma facing him is where does he go from here? Danger lurks in the wings and there appears no way out behind the safety curtain stage left. Our erstwhile hero is willing to take direction: from the objects around him; from the scraps of paper whose messages he initially receives as oracular pronouncements, only to subsequently revise the text; and from someone named Will to whom he occasionally directs an existential query. It would seem--especially given the immense second ladder positioned upstage left--that the only way forward for the character is to go further up. Except, we eventually learn, up is actually "in."
And, in this respect, an equally interesting aspect of attending this show is that Young includes, as part of the program, an inserted "Afterword," in which he lets audience members in on the original genesis of the piece's composition, as well as his thoughts on returning to it 20 years later. It's a most compelling--and quite moving--piece of writing: not least for the way it gives us more "texture and colour" to a show Young variously refers to as a "thing" or a "blob."
P
Fringe Festival 2016: The Girl Who Was Raised by Wolverine
This is my dedicated weekend to see Fringe Festival shows, as I anticipate next week will be a bit of a time-suck between teaching and other projects (although, who knows?). I picked two shows, both at the Waterfront Theatre, for yesterday afternoon.
The first was The Girl Who Was Raised by Wolverine, by Deneh'Cho Thompson, whom I know as a very talented actor in the School for the Contemporary Arts' Theatre program. This is Deneh's first play, and it focuses on a young mixed-raced Indigenous woman named Stephanie whose blood apparently holds the cure for a mysterious contagion that has befallen the world in the not-too-distant future. Stephanie has been held against her will for psychiatric observation and physiological experimentation in a state hospital since childhood and is now faced with an impossible decision: she must decide which of her parents--her Indigenous father or her white mother--must die as part of a "culling" that has decreed that one-third of the population must be exterminated.
I think it's a very interesting choice to fuse the dystopic YA genre (Stephanie's defiance of her captors bears more than a hint of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games) with traditional Indigenous storytelling conventions. However, in its current form Thompson's play is a bit of a mess. Not only do the scenes shift awkwardly between Stephanie's present in the hospital and her past memories of life with her parents, but the action is repeatedly halted to have the actors playing said parents argue with each other about the plot and solicit audience advice on how the story should proceed. Normally I have no animus against breaking the fourth wall, but here the device seems less a sincere address to, or even undermining of, audience sentiment than a glib invocation of a well-worn Brechtian theatrical conceit. Then, too, the final address to the audience which ends the play presents us with a choice as impossible as Stephanie's, one involving the small rock that each of us is handed upon entering to the theatre--and that upon exiting I could only refuse to dispose of according to instruction.
From reading the brief description of the play in the Fringe Fest program guide, and also talking to my SCA colleagues, it sounds as if Deneh's play has shifted quite radically from its original conception. There is certainly an interesting story here, but at present it's a bit hard to locate.
P
The first was The Girl Who Was Raised by Wolverine, by Deneh'Cho Thompson, whom I know as a very talented actor in the School for the Contemporary Arts' Theatre program. This is Deneh's first play, and it focuses on a young mixed-raced Indigenous woman named Stephanie whose blood apparently holds the cure for a mysterious contagion that has befallen the world in the not-too-distant future. Stephanie has been held against her will for psychiatric observation and physiological experimentation in a state hospital since childhood and is now faced with an impossible decision: she must decide which of her parents--her Indigenous father or her white mother--must die as part of a "culling" that has decreed that one-third of the population must be exterminated.
I think it's a very interesting choice to fuse the dystopic YA genre (Stephanie's defiance of her captors bears more than a hint of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games) with traditional Indigenous storytelling conventions. However, in its current form Thompson's play is a bit of a mess. Not only do the scenes shift awkwardly between Stephanie's present in the hospital and her past memories of life with her parents, but the action is repeatedly halted to have the actors playing said parents argue with each other about the plot and solicit audience advice on how the story should proceed. Normally I have no animus against breaking the fourth wall, but here the device seems less a sincere address to, or even undermining of, audience sentiment than a glib invocation of a well-worn Brechtian theatrical conceit. Then, too, the final address to the audience which ends the play presents us with a choice as impossible as Stephanie's, one involving the small rock that each of us is handed upon entering to the theatre--and that upon exiting I could only refuse to dispose of according to instruction.
From reading the brief description of the play in the Fringe Fest program guide, and also talking to my SCA colleagues, it sounds as if Deneh's play has shifted quite radically from its original conception. There is certainly an interesting story here, but at present it's a bit hard to locate.
P
Thursday, January 30, 2014
PuSh 2014: Have I No Mouth (Excerpt)
Last night the Dublin theatre company Brokentalkers took a break from the tech rehearsal for their show Have I No Mouth to share an excerpt from the work with members of PuSh's Patrons Circle. The excerpt began with a short super-8 film composed of several shots of empty or half-empty Guinness glasses. We soon learn from Feidlim Cannon, one of the creators and performers of the piece, that he made the film as a memorial to his dead father, shooting the pint glass in successive spots that reminded him of his dad.
If this opening seems a somewhat unusual way to work through the loss of a loved one, consider the fact that for the remainder of the show Cannon appears on stage with his real-life mother, Ann, and with their psychotherapist, Erich--who is there to help mother and son process the complicated layers of their grief over a death, we eventually learn, that could have been prevented. In doing so, Erich employs several visualization exercises that happen to dovetail nicely with devised theatre practice more generally: he asks Ann to choose several objects that remind her of her husband; he instructs audience members on how to relax and breathe more deeply in their seats; and he asks us to fill the balloon we each received upon entering the theatre with our negative energy, and then to slowly release the air in a long whine by holding and stretching the neck of the balloon.
At the brief artist's talk that PuSh Artistic and Executive Director Norman Armour led with Ann, Feidlim, Erich and director Gary Keegan, I asked about the ethical negotiations involved in the creation of a play in which client-therapist privilege is largely thrown out the window. We learned that Erich was originally brought on as a sort of professional outside eye, to advise with the representation of trauma and familial grief on stage; however, Brokentalkers founders Cannon and Keegan quickly realized that the piece would be that much stronger if Erich were part of the action on stage. So the "therapy" we witness is actually coincident with the devising of the play, and nothing was used unless it was agreed upon by all members of the process.
Judging by what I heard last night, this process takes Ann and Feidlim (and presumably the audience) to some very dark places indeed. I only regret that my schedule prevents me from seeing the results.
Have I No Mouth opens at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island tonight and runs through Saturday evening.
P.
If this opening seems a somewhat unusual way to work through the loss of a loved one, consider the fact that for the remainder of the show Cannon appears on stage with his real-life mother, Ann, and with their psychotherapist, Erich--who is there to help mother and son process the complicated layers of their grief over a death, we eventually learn, that could have been prevented. In doing so, Erich employs several visualization exercises that happen to dovetail nicely with devised theatre practice more generally: he asks Ann to choose several objects that remind her of her husband; he instructs audience members on how to relax and breathe more deeply in their seats; and he asks us to fill the balloon we each received upon entering the theatre with our negative energy, and then to slowly release the air in a long whine by holding and stretching the neck of the balloon.
At the brief artist's talk that PuSh Artistic and Executive Director Norman Armour led with Ann, Feidlim, Erich and director Gary Keegan, I asked about the ethical negotiations involved in the creation of a play in which client-therapist privilege is largely thrown out the window. We learned that Erich was originally brought on as a sort of professional outside eye, to advise with the representation of trauma and familial grief on stage; however, Brokentalkers founders Cannon and Keegan quickly realized that the piece would be that much stronger if Erich were part of the action on stage. So the "therapy" we witness is actually coincident with the devising of the play, and nothing was used unless it was agreed upon by all members of the process.
Judging by what I heard last night, this process takes Ann and Feidlim (and presumably the audience) to some very dark places indeed. I only regret that my schedule prevents me from seeing the results.
Have I No Mouth opens at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island tonight and runs through Saturday evening.
P.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
