David French is quite possibly the most important Canadian playwright you’ve never heard of. In the 60s a wave of writers started to push against the staid, classical nature of Canadian theatre. Their desire was for playwrights to write about Canadian lives for Canadian audiences, and the most successful of these was a young man from Toronto named David French.
As a whole, though, and to put it as gently as possible, Nativity is confused. The two main stories were thrown into a pot together and the mix never really gelled. The play is written in alternating rhyming couplets, which can feel archaic to modern ears even if you appreciate its historical origins, especially when the rhyme is sometimes forced. READ MORE
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
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
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,…
Evoking a positive negative NAC production is a beautiful and complicated piece of real art George Ryga’s play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is the story of Rita Joe and her boyfriend, Jaimie Paul, who come to the city from their First Nations community in search of a freer life, but are instead destroyed by…