Here's yours truly reading Campbell McGrath’s poem The Mercy Supermarket: “Everything is alive, everything is shimmering with vitality …”
1.THE RADIANCE ARCHIVE
I’m a big fan of reading poetry out loud — for myself. If you haven’t already done so, try it. Vocalizing a poem turns you into an actor: thinking and feeling your way through it, you get so much more out of the text.
Campbell McGrath’s The Mercy Supermarket is about grief, compassion, and materiality. Reading it opened me up. If you want to read it out loud — or just read it — here’s the full text from the March 23 issue of The New Yorker.
Here’s McGrath reading the three minutes of his poem Birds and Trees.
In one of my favourite passages from The Mercy Supermarket, McGrath writes: “the things/ of this world, they are magnificent,/ they glow — the radiance archive,/ everything that shines is in it.” ...
Sadly, stubble does not protect you from Covid. (Photo of Hugh Jackman by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
2.WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?
PROBABLY NOBODY
There he was at the Tony Awards: Hugh Jackman, maskless, with his handsome face hanging out. Although there were prolific and repeated thanks at the Tonys for ushers and others who enforced Covid protocols, I don’t know if I saw a single masked face in that audience.
Hugh Jackman subsequently tested positive for Covid — for the second time during the Broadway run of The Music Man. And, for the second time, Jackson temporarily stepped out of the production.
I’m not saying that Jackson caught Covid at the Tonys, but the mutating virus hasn’t gone away, and it continues to affect individual actors and performances. This article from The Guardian lists Covid-cancelled performances from around Britain: As You Like It in Halifax, Billy Elliot in Leicester, The Hope River Girls in Glasgow …
And, from Playbill, here’s a list of recent Covid interruptions on Broadway: Beanie Feldstein got knocked out of Funny Girl, Billy Crystal got sick, which briefly shut down Mr. Saturday Night.
These interruptions are about temporary substitutions and cancelled performances, mind you, not aborted runs — although, with new variants, those could come back.
Folks I know, including young folks, are getting seriously ill with Omicron. So I’m still wearing a mask when I go to the theatre. I did take my mask off during one performance, but I felt sodumb about it afterwards. ...
Julia Arbery and her playwright brother Will in 2016. (Photo via Will Arbery and The New York Times)
3.WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, ARBERY?
Have you noticed that theatre is spending a lot of time telling us what to think these days — being issue-oriented, about something?
I’m all for progressive theatre. I’m also a fan of complexity. That’s why I was so glad to hear about playwright Will Arbery’s latest, Corsicana.
Arbery has been considered a hot talent since the debut of his 2019 script Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a nuanced portrait of a group of pro-Trump Catholic conservatives.
For all its complexity, you could certainly still say that Heroes of the Fourth Turning is about something, but Arbery tells The New York Times that Corsicana “very stubbornly defies about-ness.”
The script concerns four people who live in the small city of Corsicana, Texas, includinga young woman named Ginny, who has Down syndrome, and her aspiring filmmaker brother, Christopher. After the death of their mother, they are recalibrating their lives.
Arbery acknowledges that he’s always been drawn to professionally exploring his relationship with his older sister Julia, who has Down syndrome, but he has never had any interest in composing an “issue play”. He tells The Times that, “I wanted to do it in the way it felt like growing up, [where Julia] was just part of the fabric of daily life, a member of the family and the team.” The Times says that Corsicana depicts Christopher and Ginny’s interactions as “emotionally equal and ordinary, down to their private jokes and fights …
“In a joint video interview with Will, Julia described him as ‘my favorite brother,’ which wasn’t the only time they cracked each other up. (He’s her only brother.) She said they have always been able to talk ‘about our feelings, excitement, sadness’ and ‘about our hearts.’”
Julia has already acted in some of Will's short films. “They have also been talking about making a hybrid documentary-feature, about Will filming Julia directing a mash-up of ‘The Princess Bride’ (one of their favorites) and Liam Neeson’s ‘Taken.’”
Arbery says that Julia influenced not just Corsicana, but his approach to writing.
“’From a very young age,” he says, “she keyed me into this idea that a way a person uses language is a fingerprint. It always felt very clear to me that she was the reason I was doing some of this.’”
Commenting on Corsicana, Time Out New York says, “Will Arbery’s showing us how language, even at its most beautiful, can destabilize a mind, a backyard, the world.”
Corsicana is running at Playwrights Horizons in New York City until July 10. Here’s where to get tickets. ...
Heidi Damayo, Emily Dallas, Christopher Allen, and Olivia Hutt in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Photo by Tim Matheson)
4.BIG-DEAL REVIEWS
I usually title the theatre-review section of FRESH SHEET “Seeing Things”, but the new reviews from this week all feel like big deals — for different reasons. I’m going to list these shows in the order in which I saw them.
New Theatre
Director Scott Bellis’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dreamfor Bard on the Beach is a prime example of Bard’s Big Mistake. Too often, it feels like Vancouver’s marquee presenter of Shakespeare’s plays is afraid of the language, afraid Vancouver audiences won’t understand it, so Bard dumbs down the plays by slathering them with coarse comic business. In this production of Dream, for instance, the hilarity of the verbal smackdown in which Helena and Hermia insult one another about their differing physical statures — “You bead, you acorn!”, “Painted maypole!” — gets lost because Bellis directs the actors playing Demetrius and Lysander to be so horny for Helena that they’re crawling around on their bellies, virtually humping the floor and trying to grab her. Carly Street, who plays Bottom, has great comic timing and she’s inventive — but she doesn’t know when to stop and Bellis hasn’t stopped her. Street breaks the play’s internal reality by inserting colloquial asides (“I have no idea what’s going on”), she indulges in cheap physical humour, stabbing herself in the crotch in the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, and she’s such a show-off that she sucks the air out of every scene she’s in. Amid the mayhem, some performances, including Billy Marchenski’s coolly sexy Oberon, survive. To their great credit, Emily Dallas (Helena) and Christopher Allen (Demetrius) also manage to maintain emotionally credible characterizations within the broad style. The physical production is gorgeous. In Amir Ofek’s set, Athens is a stark art deco ruin, and Christine Reimer’s costumes, which combine fantasy and 1920s fashion, are knockouts: in Oberon’s first entrance, he’s a walking, ten-foot-tall tree. But somebody really needs to tell Bard’s artistic director Christopher Gaze and executive director Claire Sakaki that Vancouver audiences deserve more than the condescension implicit in the apparent assumption that we won’t understand Shakespeare’s language and stories unless they’re turned into cartoons.
Here's my full review of this Bard on the Beach production, which is running in the BMO Mainstage tent until September 24. And here’s where to get tickets.
Jeffrey Follis, Joshua Lalisan, Stewart Adam McKensy, Ryan Maschke, and Andrew J. Hampton in Kinky Boots (Photo by Moonrider Productions)
Stewart Adam McKensy, who’s playing Lola, the central drag queen in the Arts Club’s production of Kinky Boots, is a star! In a show that has already established itself as the hit of this Vancouver summer, McKensy delivers a performance that is simultaneously huge — big gestures, exaggerated vocal patterns — and informed by an emotional understanding of the character. When McKensy’s Lola is suddenly stark still, delivering “I Am Not My Father’s Son”, it’s devastating. Kinky Boots isn’t perfect. In Harvey Fierstein’s book, the set-up is so obvious that the musical marks time until it finally hits a groove, and the opening number is record-breakingly boring: in Cyndi Lauper’s lyrics, a song about how great shoes are repeats the word beautiful 43 times. But that groove does get hit and director Barbara Tomasic’s production is stuffed with talent. Playing Charlie, the gormless guy who tries to save his family’s failing shoe factory by manufacturing sturdy, stylin’ boots for drag queens, Sayer Roberts contributes a bright tenor and solid acting chops. As Lauren, the factory worker who finds herself smitten with Charlie, Kelli Ogmundson is deliciously eccentric. And so is Andrew Wheeler as George, the conservative factory foreman whose eyes start to open to other possibilities when he meets Lola. Julie Tomaino’s choreography made me want to dance and Pam Johnson’s factory set pulls off chameleon-like transformations. I’ve got to say that, as a guy who’s been doing drag since I was three, it was a deep pleasure to sit in a mainstream audience that was expressing its raucous, rapturous support of drag and drag queens.
Here’s my full review of this Arts Club production, which is running at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage until July 31. Tickets. Vocal Eyeis offering described performances on Sunday, July 10, at 2:00 p.m. and Friday, July 15, at 8:00 p.m.
Chris Francisque and Kwasi Thomas in Pass Over (Photo by Emily Cooper)
Playwright Antoinette Kwandu’s Pass Overis a big-deal script; Pass Over was the first show to open on Broadway when the pandemic shutdown started to ease, so it’s impressive that Vancouver’s Ensemble Theatre Company has secured the rights — and delivered such a rewarding production. Pass Over riffs on the Bible’s Book of Exodus and, more thoroughly, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Pals Moses and Kitch, who are Black, hang out on a street corner — which they can’t leave. When a white policeman, whom Moses and Kitch call Ossifer, shows up, he makes the mechanics of their enslavement/entrapment clear: “One foot off this block and I’ll shoot you dead.” Another, more insidiously creepy, white guy also shows up. He’s all gosh-golly politeness. And then he reveals that his name is Master: “Just a family name. Pass it on. Pass it on.” As with Godot, Pass Over’s weighty subject matter is leavened by rhythmically propulsive language, wit, and poetry. Moses and Kitch play a game called Top Ten Promised Land, in which they list the top ten pleasures they’ll experience when they’re truly free. And, when they pause to list friends who have been murdered by the police, they do so with poetic specificity: there’s Ed with the dreadlocks, “not light-skinned Ed”, “dat tall dude got dat elbow rash”, and Mike with “dat messed-up knee.” With the help of Omari Newton’s direction, all three actors in this production deliver. Chris Francisque (Moses) and Kwasi Thomas (Kitch) persuasively embody the script’s musicality, joy, affection, and despair and Alexander Forsyth (Master and Ossifer) is unnervingly effective. This production’s 80-minute running time flies by.
Here's my full review of this Ensemble Theatre Company production, which is running in rep at the Waterfront Theatre until July 2, and here’s where to get tickets.
Ongoing Theatre
It takes a long time for Vietgoneto find itself, partly because the story doesn’t click into gear until Act 2. At the beginning of the evening, an actor impersonating the play’s author Qui Nguyen tells us that the script is definitely not about his parents, which means, of course, that it definitely is. Quang and Tong both escape Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975, but they don’t meet until they’re at a refugee centre in Arkansas. Tong describes herself as being unlike any other Vietnamese woman and she’s a fantastically original character, assertively sexual and determinedly unsentimental. Quang, who fought as a helicopter pilot alongside American forces, turned my head around in more fundamental ways: his defence of American military involvement in South Vietnam reminded me that anybody who was there knows vastly more about that situation than I can pretend to. The script is flawed: in its short, disjointed — and often flippant — scenes, relationships are barely sketched in. And this production doesn’t have the resources to fully flesh out the pop-culture phantasmagoria that I think Nguyen has in mind. (There is line-dancing as well as a whole lot of anachronistic rapping. Ninjas suddenly manifest to defend a redneck biker.) But Alison Chang as Tong and Christopher Lam as Quang both deliver grounded, affecting performances. And the final passage, in which the young playwright interviews his aging father, lands in a deep place, thanks largely to Lam’s performance.
Here's my full review of this United Players production and here’s where to get tickets. Vietgone is running at the Jericho Arts Centre until June 26.
Upcoming Theatre
As summer shows continue to open, I will be seeing Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of Marjorie Primetonight (Thursday, June 23) and Harlem Duet at Bard on the Beach tomorrow. You can look for these reviews on my blog; I will post ‘em late in the afternoon the day after I see ‘em. ...
Here’s the link to last week’s issue, “Ecstasy, Genius, and Weirdness”. It's been getting some nice attention. The links to the videos of Mascall Dance’s ecstatic neighbourhood performance Privilege@Homeand Deirdre O’Connell’s Tony acceptance speech —“Make the weird art”— are particularly popular.
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