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APPRAISE of the Theatre: “Lauchie, Liza and Rory” at the NAC
– by Ken Godmere
[Ken Godmere is an Ottawa-based freelance actor/director with 35 years experience and offers his theatre reviews as an unbiased professional appraisal. www.kengodmere.com]
* Opening Night — Thursday April 7, 2011 *
Sheldon Currie’s Cape Breton born and raised script follows the unassuming life of Lauchie (pronounced “law-key”) MacDonald, a coal miner living with his widowed mother. A fateful evening at the bingo hall spins Lauchie into the arms of the vivacious Liza. Following a $500 bingo win, Lauchie and Liza announce their engagement and their plans to move in next door — just as Lauchie’s smooth-talking twin brother, Rory returns home. As the years pass, Liza’s choice of brothers weighs heavily on her and on the family.
The production design was aptly quaint and simple for the “company house” in a coal mine town. A little on the dark and drab side, it may have been too clay a base for life to grow or glow. An unfortunate wilting occurred with the choice of music. Although the play began with the acoustically brisk colour of Mairi Rankin’s mastery of the fiddle, she was then sat upstage in the dark as many of the musical moments underscoring the dancing, mood, atmosphere and scene transitions came from generic audio recordings. Director Mary-Colin Chisholm has been at the helm of this play from its 50-minute version; through its long and winding road; to this current full-length production by the Mulgrave Road Theatre in association with Frankie Productions. The direction is strong in the pleasant charm of the storytelling, but really thins out in want of focus, pace and energy on the stage. There are a few cleverly tight moments – the four-handed card game performed by two actors certainly stands out; and the bible/priest was good for a laugh. But with so many different staging styles (a parade of bits and bobs and tricks and schticks) the play as a whole was inconsistent and, at times distracting. The mother for example was portrayed as a painting (first by one actor, then the other actor, then a hand, then a fist). I thought perhaps she was dead and her portrait ‘coming to life’ was part of their memory, imagination and decor. I was wrong. Most of the production depended on the actors jumping back-and-forth between characters. So, when Rory Junior was played as an empty space with a disembodied voice, it took some getting used to. And then, in the next scene, he was played by one of the actors. I want to follow the “laws of the universe” created by a production, but when they drop them, they drop me.
Christian Murray, playing half of the characters in the play, brought physical, humorous, and crafty experience to his performance. His ability to snap fully between characters, especially the disparate twin brothers was often moving and memorable. Natasha MacLellan’s vocal and physical energy was lower and slower, but she did bring a sincerity to both the conflicted Liza and Lauchie’s plain-jane sister, Anne.
The line between the touching story at one end — and our theatre evening at the other — felt stretched and sagged with the loads of ideas clothespinned onto it.
MY ASSESSMENT: | Brilliant | Clear | Murky | Flawed | – a simple little stone buried in a brooch.
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“Lauchie, Liza and Rory” by Sheldon Currie continues at the NAC Studio through April 16, 2011
Tickets are available for purchase:
In person at the NAC Box Office
At all Ticketmaster outlets
By telephone from Ticketmaster, (613) 755-1111
Online through the Ticketmaster link on the NAC’s website (www.nac-cna.ca)
A service charge applies on all purchases made through Ticketmaster.
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[Requests for "APPRAISE of the Theatre" reviews should be directed to info@ottawatonite.com]
APPRAISE of the Theatre: a supplementary review of the alternate actors in The NAC’s Romeo and Juliet
–by Ken Godmere
[Ken Godmere is a freelance theatre professional based in Ottawa and offers his theatre reviews as an unbiased professional appraisal.]
On Wednesday, November 2nd, I was given the opportunity to re–view Romeo and Juliet with the title roles performed by two actors who have been alternating performances with the two we saw on opening night. Now, you should understand, with the opening and several performances behind them, all of the cast has had the chance to strengthen their rhythms and ranges. So, with that perspective I review Hugh Portman’s Romeo and Jackie Rowland’s Juliet.
Mr Portman was immediately earnest and urgent in his physical, mental and emotional approach to the role of the ill-fated young lover. The young actor’s innocence in his debut on the national stage was well connected to that of Romeo and only showed its limitation in reaching some of the top-notes of ecstasy and anguish along the tragic character’s journey. Jackie Rowland found fire and drive and moods and measures to bring Juliet to a true, timeless teenage status. Her impulsive spirit reached outward beyond the rail of her balcony and inward beneath the rails of her father.
Although their final scene was less connected and somewhat less impressive, it is obvious both Jackie Rowland and Hugh Portman have a love of their art and of believing; and that has translated to a palpable love within the play.
MY ASSESSMENT: | Brilliant | Clear | Murky | Flawed | – with engagement.
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Romeo and Juliet plays at the NAC Theatre through November 6, 2010
Evening performances Tuesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday matinees are at 2 p.m.
(no performances on Sunday or Monday)
Tickets start at $38
Tickets are available for purchase:
In person at the NAC Box Office
At all Ticketmaster outlets
By telephone from Ticketmaster, (613) 755-1111
Online through the Ticketmaster link on the NAC’s website (www.nac-cna.ca)
A service charge applies on all purchases made through Ticketmaster
Preview of a dress rehearsal
Mother Courage and Her Children is open; it has been quite a week for the National Arts Centre’s English Acting Company.
I wrote previously about the immense challenges presented to us by mounting a play that is considered one of Brecht’s masterworks. The outcome of working through those challenges was a Pay-What-You-Can dress rehearsal this past Tuesday, and I want to tell you a bit about that day. I’m not writing this in the spirit of gossip, but because I have often talked in my own blog about the beautiful moments that can come with a career in the theatre, I think it’s important to describe the opposite end of the spectrum. If you’ve been keeping track of our work on this play, you know that the preview performance that was supposed to take place on Wednesday night was canceled; after reading this, you may understand some of the reasons why.
To recap the events of the lead-up to last Tuesday, allow me to quote myself:
With six very full and focused days of rehearsal on the stage, we have yet to finish working all the way through the play once, and I am only cautiously optimistic that we may manage to wrap it up some time tomorrow, during day seven. We’re still figuring out where the pedals in the car are, and how to adjust the mirrors, and hoping we never have to parallel park in the snow.
Well: at the end of day seven, we had managed to work through almost the entire play. This left us five hours of rehearsal to finish working through the final scene-and-a-half or so, and then to work through the sound and light cues for the first four scenes or so. It was a pretty tall order. And regardless of our progress on Tuesday afternoon, we knew that our audience on Tuesday night would be seeing us run the play from end to end for the first time. Ever.
Speaking personally, I was very excited about Tuesday. I thought, as many of us did, that it was actually going to be a terrific experience: for us, because we’d finally get to feel the entire play, with all the bells and whistles; and for an audience, because stopping the show was basically going to be an inevitable occurrence, meaning they’d get a cool and utterly unique glimpse into how a theatre company works.
At 4:45 PM in the afternoon, though, we had run out of rehearsal time, and did not complete our ambitious plan for the day. The stage manager used the final moments to show us some lighting states that we didn’t get a chance to look at, and then we broke for dinner. Our assistant director, Stephen Ouimette, assured us that he’d be in the house with the script for the performance, in case we needed to ask for help with a line. Tanja Jacobs, our Mother Courage, suggested that Stephen might benefit from a vocal warmup.
7:30 PM arrived faster than many of us hoped. Our director, Peter Hinton, addressed the dress rehearsal crowd of about 300 before we started. “Tonight’s a bit different than other dress rehearsals in the past,” he said. “It’s the very first time we’ve put all of the scenes, costumes, sound, lights, music, props, and special effects together and run this play right through from beginning to end.” He explained that actors would very likely be asking for help with lines, because a first runthrough can be overwhelming. He warned the audience that we would very likely have to halt the show at some point, to correct something, and that we’d get going again as quickly as we could. And he thanked everyone for being patient.
The performance began, and went off the rails almost immediately, as we all expected it would. The net effect on the cast was both crushing and galvanizing. The audience saw some very raw rehearsal work: lines were dropped and prompting was common; actors missed cues or were in the wrong places; one scene was done in the wrong lighting cue; set pieces knocked into each other or were moved incorrectly; actors saw each other in costume or in wigs for the first time, which affected focus; songs had to be stopped and restarted due to sound balance problems; props were missing or didn’t work or got lost in the shuffle of scene changes; the show had to be stopped many times — eight or so? — in order to correct issues. At one point a disgruntled man in the balcony screamed “SPEAK UP!!” at the stage. Many of our guests left at intermission. Those that stayed witnessed a production that ran for about four hours. After all was said and done, most of the cast was found sitting together in a single dressing room, not speaking, sipping beer and slowly shaking their heads.
In all honesty, nothing that went wrong was terribly unusual; it’s all stuff that I expect to happen on any show when it’s being run for the first time from end-to-end with full tech and costumes. In fact, I’ve been involved with first run-throughs that were far worse: the difference here was that we had a few hundred people sitting in the audience watching us; and despite the pre-show speech, some people’s expectations simply could not be met. It was a frightening realization of the kinds of bad dreams I have before opening nights, and I hope I don’t have to experience another night like it for a while.
And so, for these and a few other complicating reasons, the decision was made to cancel our subsequent preview performance, giving us a much-needed extra day of rehearsal. We took what we learned from Tuesday night — a great deal, indeed — and poured it into preparation for our “first” preview on Thursday; that outing was far, far better, as evidenced by the fact that we shaved 18 minutes off the first act alone. And now that we’ve finished our first weekend of performances, I can say that we all look back on Tuesday as a gift of a failure for what it taught us about the show and about each other; ultimately, Mother Courage and Her Children is better for it, and with heartfelt thanks to the audience members who were with us on Tuesday, we are now ready to present the show we always intended to present. And it’s pretty damned good.
Blowout
Bad things come in threes. Number two tonight was a lit candle falling on my head onstage; number three was an apron falling off in the middle of the Fezziwig Christmas Party dance. The first bad thing happened before the show began, and is why I want to say that the National Arts Centre’s wardrobe staff are godsends.
We got the five minute call for the beginning of A Christmas Carol and, as is customary, the cast began to gather in the wings and voms of the theatre to start the show. Niall Patrick McNeil, who plays the beggar boy, was with me at stage left, running over the lyrics to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” softly, with his beggar-boy-cap placed jauntily askew on his head. In my capecoat and top hat — looking like Abe Lincoln after a few too many Christmas dinners — I chuckled and suggested that it might be fun to rap the song on stage. “God rest ye, merry GIN-el-minz!”, I said, and began to crunk for my own amusement. I worked my way down into a squat position in a fit of improvised choreographic bliss, and then heard a telltale ripping sound from my posterior. At this point it was three minutes to curtain, and I was to be one of the first actors on stage at the top of the show.
I exited the backstage area quickly and reported sheepishly to the wardrobe room. “I think I ripped my pants,” I said. “But I mostly wear a coat in the show, so maybe it’s okay for now?”
“Turn around and let’s see,” said Linda. I did, and lifted my coattail. Linda’s eyes went wide for all the wrong reasons. “Wow,” she said. “You blew the ass right outta those things.”
“Were you goofing around?” asked Ann, somewhat rhetorically.
“No,” I lied, and put on my innocent actor face. I could have argued that dancing is a great pre-show energy-booster and necessary for my craft, but crunking to a rap version of a 19th century holiday carol is not truly a part of my regular routine. I’m sure they both saw through my denial anyway. “I was warming up.” I smiled, for added cuteness.
We quickly determined that I couldn’t go on stage with the rip as it was, because the pants would likely split right in half before long. We also quickly clocked the fact that I have to wear the pants through the whole show, so there was no chance for me to get out of them to have them fixed. In addition, there’s the scene at Fezziwig’s Christmas party, where the apron I wear leaves my back end rather exposed. Finally, as Peter Hinton began his pre-show announcement on stage, I reminded them that I had to be in the wings again imminently.
“Well, then, I have to do something right now,” said Ann. Then, with a twinkle in her eye of the sort I’ve only ever seen on a few other occasions in my life, she said, “turn around and bend over.”
And so, under stern orders not to break wind, a makeshift, under-two-minute repair was made to my pants just so they’d hold together for the show. “I’ve done this before for dancers,” she said. I am SO not a dancer. “It’ll hold for a bit, but no more squatting. And warm up before you get into costume, okay?” I was back in the wings and ready to start the show with time to spare.
We have two wardrobe staff working with us on the show. They get about 90 minutes to do their setup for each performance, and the two of them are looking after costumes for 21 actors. In addition to looking after laundry, they need to make sure every item of clothing in the show is prepped and in its proper location in the theatre before we start. In short, they bust their asses for us, and I don’t help them much by busting the ass out of my trousers. But they grin and bear it and keep everything working for us, and so we owe them a huge debt of gratitude for literally making us all look good. SO here’s to them, and here’s to refraining from fantastic backstage choreography while wearing a capecoat and trousers.
–photo by AndyRob on Flickr
