I’ve made a decision. I’m tying the course of my life to the fate of a musical. If Ride The Cyclone achieves the massive success it deserves, I will continue to work hard, seek wisdom and make sound choices. If it peters out and leaves its contributors on E.I., I will make all significant decisions on the basis of where darts hit the board. I’ll play Russian roulette. I’ll buy lottery tickets. Because if this show does not become a phenomenon causing obsession, there is no rhyme or reason in the world.
Ryan M. Sero’s dystopic comedy A Modicum of Freedom (produced by make.art.theatre as part of SummerWorks) is set in an Orwellian future where the totalitarian government exerts complete control over the citizens. While the setting is far from original, the twist is new; the entire population is given day-to-day instructions on how to live their personal lives, as dictated by ministry-appointed writers and overseen by omnipresent security officers. Unfortunately this potential-heavy premise never quite manages to get off the ground, leaving the audience more preoccupied with imagining Sero’s world for themselves than attending the details put forth on stage....
This quick fire comedy from playwright Liz Duffy Adams and presented by Seventh Stage Productions as part of the SummerWorks Festival manages to be an utter crowd pleaser without resorting to any broad strokes. A wonderfully neat plot about Aphra Behn, an aspiring female playwright with a 9-5 job as a war time spy for King Charles of England, is both a delightful and bawdy comedy of errors and a surprisingly open and insightful examination of issues of gender, sexual politics, and equality. Duffy populates her work with cheeky and likable characters, making for a very welcome break...
With The Small Ones (on as part of SummerWorks), creator/performer Shannon Roszell is really trying something. It’s evident in her intensity. In the stillness and silence captured onstage. In the starkness and precision of the text. I’m just not yet sure what it is.
“I am an atypical child,” Nicholas, our protagonist, tells us. And yet there’s something deeply familiar about him. In this young and somewhat skeletal production (currently on at SummerWorks), creator/performer Johnnie Walker introduces us to the titular young redhead discovering his budding homosexuality while navigating otherness. And he demonstrates sizeable talent in the process. Walker’s physical awkwardness works wonderfully for the misfit Nicholas, though with less success as his alterego Rufus Vermilion, who could use more precision and a physical status to match his suave flamboyance. Maryanne, Nicholas’ new stepmom is simply delicious under the direction of Morgan Norwich....
Dave: Despite our industry being constantly underfunded and in many cases struggling to find audience amid all of the summer options this city has to offer, every so often a show manages to get mainstream media attention. The scale of that attention for Catherine Frid’s Homegrown (on as part of SummerWorks) is almost unfathomable.
Director Alistair Newton and his company Ecce Homo have become Summerworks regulars, first bursting onto the scene with attention grabbing The Pastor Phelps Project, a delightful and scathing cabaret deconstruction of ultra-controversial (99% percent of people would say ultra-hateful) American religious leader Fred Phelps, and then a surprising if not unreasonable dissection of humanitarian icon Mother Teresa.
Despite the title, there are no ghosts in The Haunted Hillbilly (currently on at SummerWorks); however, there are plenty of hillbillies, along with a three-piece band, dazzling outfits, bits of stage magic, a rhinestone-studded prosthetic leg, and at least one paraplegic vampire. Montreal’s Sidemart Theatrical Grocery may have gone a bit over the top in their adaptation of Derek McCormack’s novel, but boy howdy, they had themselves a rootin’ tootin’ good time doing it.
Theatre festivals in the last few years have been somewhat glutted on plays tacking the nouveau topic of the quarter-life crisis, approaching it through every means from musical to monologue. This thematic suffusion, along with the tendency to get mired in self-referential irony, have resulted in this reviewer becoming pretty ambivalent on new projects about the dubious difficulties of twentysomething life.
Whimsical. It’s the word that kept pervading every thought I had while playing with the impressive cast of Countries Shaped Like Stars (which is on as part of SummerWorks). I say play because each audience member serves purposes well beyond spectator in this gem of a piece, we all become part of this intimate and quirky love story – we’re even given roles (mine was Ursa Major).
