The national capital boasts a huge variety of acts over the coming months
The summer theatre season in the city looks to be varied and lush. The first thing on your summer plate is This Is What Happens Next, a show from the marvellous, mercurial performer and writer Daniel MacIvor – an honest-to-goodness star in the world of Canadian drama. It’s at the GCTC now until June 12.
June 1-5 the Ottawa Children’s Festival takes over Lebreton Flats, bringing five days of excitement, colour and adventure to your children’s summer routines. Though it’s a festival aimed at children, they aren’t playing around – there are acts here drawn from an international pool of performers. Theatre from Italy, Switzerland, Scotland and America is there to help you manage your child’s short attention span and boundless, endless, horrifyingly limitless summer energy.
From June 3 to 11 the city plays host to the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, one of the most successful festivals of contemporary professional theatre currently playing in Canada. It shifts restlessly around the country, but came to rest this year in Ottawa. Kawasaki Exit from Calgary’s famed One Yellow Rabbit troupe tells a story that’s “inspired by the real-life dark side of Japanese social networking sites,” from June 7-10. That’s followed by Silicone Diaries from Toronto’s equally famous gay theatre company Buddies in Bad Times. Silicone Diaries tells the story of one woman’s transition from “an awkward man into a jaw dropping silicone bombshell.” Let’s face it – this is the most interesting life story you’re going to hear in all of 2011. It rounds out with Kismet from June 9 to 11, a piece about the vagaries of fate and destiny based on interviews and recordings with 100 individual Canadians.
Also finishing on June 11th is Ottawa Little Theatre’s final show of its season – an evangelical comedy called Messiah on the Frigidaire, set in a small American trailer park.
Ottawa’s long-running Odyssey theatre bring their commedia-based style of masked comedy to a couple of interesting events in the NCR, first being an exhibit at the National Gallery of their commedia dell’arte masks, with a live animation on certain specific days starting in June. They also produce their traditional Theatre Under the Stars performance from July 21 to August 21. This year they produce Carlo Goldoni’s The Fan, said to be a “masterpiece of farce.”
For those interested in more community-based theatre, the Orpheus Musical Society, a group known for its high-quality productions, mounts Dirty Rotten Scoundrels June 3-12. Based on the movie of the same name, this high-energy musical comedy ran for years on Broadway.
Then the terrific hairy mess of the Ottawa Fringe Festival happens June 16-26. Like every year, the lineup of dozens of performers boasts some interesting names, some familiar and eagerly anticipated names, and some that I cringe to see again. And that’s pretty much exactly as it should be. Who wants a Fringe Festival without awful productions? How would you even tell what’s wonderful without the bracingly terrible?
Disney’s landmark musical The Lion King rolls through the National Arts Centre from July 14 to August 7. It’s a breathtaking spectacle of sheer energy and mass, and isn’t something you should miss out on.
As seen in the Ottawa XPress, June 02, 2011: http://ottawaxpress.ca/2011/06/02/hot-summer-guide-theatre-the-lions-share/
