Capital summer stagings Ottawa’s theatre scene gets primed Summer brings a rest season to the mainstay theatre here in Ottawa, a post-bloom repose where energies can be gathered for the upcoming work beginning in the fall. But there are some options for seeing theatre in these, the most habitable of months, if you’re determined to…
“I admire a director with a strong aesthetic and conceptual sense of a piece. One who isn’t afraid to really put his fingerprints all over a production. Strong artists are always needed,” Caroline Cave’s voice pushes through my crackly mobile phone connection as strong and dry as sunlight, “and this is a really strong artistic team.”
Guns, beer and blood Ottawa Chamber Company puts on an intriguing local theatre experiment The Elmdale House Tavern isn’t a place I’ve ever seen in the afternoon. It’s a dusty, old, yellow-painted landmark bar deep in the heart of Hintonburg. The kind of peaceful harbour with the timeless charm of high ceilings, old linoleum and…
Native spirit Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar reshaped by native artist collective Mojica breathes new life into Caesar “You have to emerge from the theatre changed in some way, or else the whole thing is a waste. You can be mad at it, or you can be provoked to action, but some change has to occur.” These…
Staging of Boris Vian’s Empire Builders a brave leap for Ottawa theatre scene Empire Builders is something new for the local English theatre scene: a professionally produced absurdist play by Boris Vian, a French polymath. And Joël Beddows, artistic director of Théâtre du Catapulte, is the one cultivating it. Familiar with the French language theatre…
The set of the NAC’s new production of Macbeth is elegantly sparse. In the opening scenes we’re faced with 10 inviting chairs, all set in a perfect line with each other, spaced evenly, divided into equal groups and placed under solid rectangles of light. The natural and divine world is in order. But soldiers violently and suddenly overturn select chairs and nature starts to spiral further out of alignment as chairs appear in more haphazard and scattered places.