Cold front and centre
Theatre comes to Ottawa in all its forms, no matter the weather
Michelle Monteith, Abbie Ootova and Linnea Swan populate the Night (photo: Andrée Lanthier)
The NAC’s English Theatre starts the winter theatre season aptly with Night (to Jan. 16), a Canadian-themed dialogue that straddles the divide between mainstream and native culture. From Jan. 12 to 30, Bertolt Brecht’s incomparable Mother Courage plays on the main stage, followed by Mrs. Dexter and Her Daily, Feb. 17 to March 6. Over at the Ottawa Little Theatre, the historical-political fiction Trying (Jan. 4-22) is followed by Norm Foster’s The Long Weekend (Feb. 8-26).
The GCTC offers some interesting provocations of what we generally consider the form of theatre: BASH’d: A Gay Rap Opera blends rap and spoken word poetry (Jan. 12-30), while blood.claat: a one oomaan story (March 2-21) “mixes theatre and dub poetry.” Sock ‘n’ Buskin presents J.M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan (Jan. 21-30) at the Kailash Mital Theatre, and the Gladstone Theatre welcomes back A Company of Fools with Shakespeare’s Danish Play (Jan. 28 to Feb. 27), directed by the skilled Andy Massingham.
The New Ottawa Repertory Theatre presents Mother Butterfly (Jan. 29 to Feb. 7) at the Nathalie Stern Theatre, while the NAC French Theatre offers Les Mauvaises herbes (Feb. 6-7), the harrowing drama Woyzeck (Feb. 9-13) and finally Une fête pour Boris (Feb. 24-27), advertised with the most fantastic, grotesque comic sentence
ever written: “The story of a legless cripple who invites a bunch of legless cripples to a birthday party for a legless cripple.”
Third Wall Theatre goes for classic with As You Like It, at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, Feb. 4-14. And Toto Too presents Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean at the Arts Court, March 3-6.
At the very final curtain of winter, the University of Ottawa’s department of theatre presents its final show: Blood Relations, April 6-10 in Academic Hall.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Jan 14, 2010
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=19134
