This evening, I saw, La Belle et la Bete: A contemporary Retellng, performed as part of the Toronto Luminato festival.
Using as its jumping-off point three elements, the famous Perault fairy-tale, Henry Fuseli's painting, The Nightmare, and the question: "Who are you?" this play asks us to adress the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives that we create and participate in, and the roles we play for ourselves, and for each other.
I'll start by telling you what I didn't like. Then I'll tell you why it's worth seeing.
The production has two key faults:
First, it tries to juggle far too many balls, and ends up dropping most of them. In the fisrt few minutes of a 90- minute performance, the production opens up questions of roles, of narrative, perspective, and humanity. It introduces motifs of fairy-tale and of stories-within-stories. It introduces interesting and damaged characters, and motifs of painting, and of scarring (emotional and physical). Unfortunately, by mid-way through the production, so many of these themes have fallen by the way-side, and motivations make less sense.
The scar motif, so rich in the first half of the show, dissapears.
Belle's relationship to her "distant" father seems to path itself up when the plot requires her to be away from her beast.
Even the question of what role we play in our own and each other's stories seems to take back-seat for all characters excpet The Lady.
Second, the production has a voice that is inconsistant with the subject matter, and with itself. I don't know if this is a fault in the original script, or a fault of the translation, but this is a show dealing with myth and story. The text succeeds best when it is in an elevated voice and I often found myself wishing for the text to be in poetry rather than prose. The show has such amazingly vivid and engrossing visuals (one of the reasons that it is so worth seeing) that the plain and rather stilted dialog, delivered in an unfortunately plain and stilted way by Benedicte Decary and Stephe Demers as Belle and The Beast respectively, felt incongruous. The staging and story deserve an elevated language and depth of emotion in delivery. Generally, I got neither.
Despite these faults, however, this is still a show worth taking in.
First, the performance of Diane D'Aquila is a beauty indeed. She manages always to strike the right note, and turns her meaning and motivation on a dime, making the very utmost of the text and character she is given. As a result, her journey as The Lady (witch or fairy?) is the one that is most engaging of all.
Second, the design of this production is outstanding! I saw in this production some visual effects that even now I have no idea how they were achieved. Gates appearing and dissapearing; actors interacting with projection that seem to move in three-dimentions; projected sets that grow out into the audience; scenes that changes seemlessly and echo or react to the scenes taking part. Visually, this is a piece of beauty, and showcases, I have no doubt, the state of the art in visual interaction.
Even more to their credit, the visuals don't overwhelm the action. They serve the narrative, they serve the story. Likewise, the score of this show is wonderfully suited to it, underscoring the scene work, assisting the narrative, but not drawing attention to iteself above the action.
Overall, the visual and auditory experience is poety, and I feel the narrative flow (overall) has the potential for poetry. I would LOVE to see the team behind the design and technology of this show have a run at something highly poetic, like The Tempest.
In summary, I feel that had the language been more elevated and the themes more focused, this could have been a truly sublime performance. As it stands, however, I can only say that it is worth seeing, but not worth raving about.
La Belle et la Bête: A contemporary Retelling
Created and directed by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon
Created and written by Pierre-Yves Lemieux
Translated by Maureen Labonté
Plays until Jun 12 at the Bluma Appel Theatre as part of the Luminato Festival.
Using as its jumping-off point three elements, the famous Perault fairy-tale, Henry Fuseli's painting, The Nightmare, and the question: "Who are you?" this play asks us to adress the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives that we create and participate in, and the roles we play for ourselves, and for each other.
I'll start by telling you what I didn't like. Then I'll tell you why it's worth seeing.
The production has two key faults:
First, it tries to juggle far too many balls, and ends up dropping most of them. In the fisrt few minutes of a 90- minute performance, the production opens up questions of roles, of narrative, perspective, and humanity. It introduces motifs of fairy-tale and of stories-within-stories. It introduces interesting and damaged characters, and motifs of painting, and of scarring (emotional and physical). Unfortunately, by mid-way through the production, so many of these themes have fallen by the way-side, and motivations make less sense.
The scar motif, so rich in the first half of the show, dissapears.
Belle's relationship to her "distant" father seems to path itself up when the plot requires her to be away from her beast.
Even the question of what role we play in our own and each other's stories seems to take back-seat for all characters excpet The Lady.
Second, the production has a voice that is inconsistant with the subject matter, and with itself. I don't know if this is a fault in the original script, or a fault of the translation, but this is a show dealing with myth and story. The text succeeds best when it is in an elevated voice and I often found myself wishing for the text to be in poetry rather than prose. The show has such amazingly vivid and engrossing visuals (one of the reasons that it is so worth seeing) that the plain and rather stilted dialog, delivered in an unfortunately plain and stilted way by Benedicte Decary and Stephe Demers as Belle and The Beast respectively, felt incongruous. The staging and story deserve an elevated language and depth of emotion in delivery. Generally, I got neither.
Despite these faults, however, this is still a show worth taking in.
First, the performance of Diane D'Aquila is a beauty indeed. She manages always to strike the right note, and turns her meaning and motivation on a dime, making the very utmost of the text and character she is given. As a result, her journey as The Lady (witch or fairy?) is the one that is most engaging of all.
Second, the design of this production is outstanding! I saw in this production some visual effects that even now I have no idea how they were achieved. Gates appearing and dissapearing; actors interacting with projection that seem to move in three-dimentions; projected sets that grow out into the audience; scenes that changes seemlessly and echo or react to the scenes taking part. Visually, this is a piece of beauty, and showcases, I have no doubt, the state of the art in visual interaction.
Even more to their credit, the visuals don't overwhelm the action. They serve the narrative, they serve the story. Likewise, the score of this show is wonderfully suited to it, underscoring the scene work, assisting the narrative, but not drawing attention to iteself above the action.
Overall, the visual and auditory experience is poety, and I feel the narrative flow (overall) has the potential for poetry. I would LOVE to see the team behind the design and technology of this show have a run at something highly poetic, like The Tempest.
In summary, I feel that had the language been more elevated and the themes more focused, this could have been a truly sublime performance. As it stands, however, I can only say that it is worth seeing, but not worth raving about.
La Belle et la Bête: A contemporary Retelling
Created and directed by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon
Created and written by Pierre-Yves Lemieux
Translated by Maureen Labonté
Plays until Jun 12 at the Bluma Appel Theatre as part of the Luminato Festival.