Not just a soldier’s story

The first thing you will notice about the GCTC/NAC co-production of Vimy is that it looks amazing. The costumes are wonderfully detailed and, thankfully, not stylized: The greens and browns of military garb are real, the heft and clank of the props show they’re real equipment. The set and scenery are all evocative of trenches, dirty wood and burnt trees. A lot of love and care have gone into the look of this play, and it pays huge dividends in drawing you in through the senses. READ MORE

More than merely players

Taking up the burden of a classic with the stature of Romeo and Juliet is a huge task. It’s even ballsier to try to reformulate it to say something new. There’s an enormous inertia to Shakespeare plays: Like a rolling rock, they simply resist a push in any other direction. This production is classical in nature – a spectacle on a thrust stage full of light, shadow, merriment, festival, death and duels. In entertaining, little is restrained. READ MORE

Naked truths

To call David Harrower’s Blackbird a bare bones play is nearly an understatement. It’s stripped down in almost every way that comprises a work of drama: two actors, a man (Ray) and a woman (Una), interact in sentences that more resembles a hail of verbal bullets than human thoughts – they stop and start, they fragment and halt. When you read it on a page, it’s almost ambiguous; it could be either be genius or drivel. What makes it sing is that it doesn’t merely stay on the page. READ MORE

Curtain call

Watching the movement of the different poles of the Ottawa theatre community is an interesting thing. On the one side there are the National Arts Centre theatre programs, newly remastered to take up a place of national importance. On the other there are those local theatre companies trying to fill their seats and pay their bills in a city that is often criminally neglectful of theatre. READ MORE

Odyssey returns home

After a two-year hiatus from summer performance in the verdant Strathcona Park, Odyssey Theatre returns to its bread and butter: theatre under the stars. This year the company presents They All Do It, a commissioned work from local playwright Jan Irwin. Loosely based on the opera Cosi fan tutte, the company aims to straddle the divide between the old-fashioned classical opera and contemporary theatre with a genre-mixing, intellectually interesting show. READ MORE

Hit hits the road

Hit hits the road Touring production of Broadway success Avenue Q arrives in Ottawa Whenever I get tasked with an article about one of the touring Broadway productions, it’s always a bit of a headache. What is there left to say about Avenue Q? Unless you’ve been living under a rock with poor television reception,…