Next Stage Festival Reviews

This past weekend I took in four shows at the Next Stage Theatre Festival, on now until January 17. Despite being an avid Fringe Festival attendee, this is the first time I have attended this curated festival which gives promising Fringe artists development opportunities beyond the summer festival. With ticket prices of no more than $15, I have to say, it is an excellent value! But here are the details of what I happened to see:

Up first,  
 Mockingbird.
Written and directed by Rob Kempson, Mockingbird examines the grey areas between absolute right and wrong. Using a high school teacher’s romantic relationship with a student as the jumping off point, it examines how this event is interpreted and dealt with by others in the school.
What ends up on stage is a fully engaging piece, smartly written, and cleanly executed.  While the play certainly builds to an emotional climax, the road to it is fully entertaining. The action takes place in the English department staff room of Toronto high school, and I often found myself thinking “I know these teachers! I’ve been taught by these teachers!” While I’m sure that not all of the dysfunction and mayhem in this particular staff room would have reasonably transpired all at the same time in the real world, I had no trouble believing it here.
Yes, there is much laughter in this play, and also much to consider. The performances were uniformly tight, and while I felt the final emotional release built a touch too quickly, it was still impactful.
Recommended

All Our Yesterdays
I have to admit, I passed on seeing this show when it played at the Fringe festival. The program description seemed over-ambitious for a 60-minute piece. I am tremendously grateful that I rethought my opinion to take it in at this festival.
Inspired by the events of April 2014, the show revolves around two sisters who are removed from their school in Nigeria by Boko Haram. Ladi (Chiamaka Umeh), the eldest has been claimed by one of her captures. Hasana (Amanda Weise), the younger, perhaps due to her autism, is less of interest to the captors. The action moves between their present captivity, and their previous history.
Umeh and Weise both give grounded and full performances. I was particularly impressed, however, by Weise’s portrayal of Hasana, which moved fluently through each moment, investing me in her story without playing in any way to sentiment or sympathy.
A well formed, and well performed two-hander.
Recommended

Agamemnon
This revisiting of The Agamemnon, first play of the Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies, set the time in Ancient Greece and the location firmly in the present day. The juxtaposition works, for the most part: I enjoy the idea of the fall of Troy being discovered over twitter.
Stylistically rich, and playing intelligently with its source material, my qualm with this show was that it played like prequel. These larger-than-life characters seemed to lack emotional depth. That said, Brigit Wilson as Clytemnestra delivers an excellent speech on how she has suffered though the war. Though the characters motivations are selfish, the passion and content raises some interesting questions.
Overall, there is a lot of style. A ghostly Iphigenia on stilts -- Zita Nyarady proving that you do not need lines to have stage presence – stand foremost in my mind. Though the imagery in the direction, and some of the text, point to a larger statement about war, on refection I feel it fell short of the mark.
The result: an engaging performance that feels like a first act rather than a whole statement.
For someone with an interest in the classics, passing or otherwise: recommended.

Heart of Steel

Heard of Steel narrates the experience of four women who apply for work at the Cape Breton steel mill as the men are shipped off to fight in WWII. Not to wave the flag too much, but it was refreshing to see a new Canadian musical telling a story taking place unabashedly in Canada. And it was good. Also, not to play up too much Toronto pride, the talent in this production demonstrates to me what a depth of raw musical theatre talent we have locally.
The script is snappy, and the music shows that Wesley J. Colford (writer and composer) has a lot of potential in this form. If the script and score are ever revisited, I would really like to see the music more fully developed. As it stands, I found myself wanting there to be more music. For example, at a few points in the evening, I felt like the scene work I was watching might have been more effective if sung. Script-wise, I felt that the stakes (emotional or otherwise) could have been higher. We are told often how dangerous the steel plant is, and indeed there is at least one death in the show. However, it landed a bit like the death of a red-suited ensign: it served remind the audience of the seriousness of the situation but didn’t carry enough weight to cause me to fear for the main characters.
These issues aside, the piece is still strong. In particular, the themes of family and friendship (and how those two areas of life can come into conflict with each other) are well explored. It certainly looks at its time period with more than a little nostalgia and plenty of lightness, but these are aspects that add charm.
Overall: recommended and I hope you will forgive my pun, but at $15/ticket, this is a “steel” of a show.

All of these shows run until Jan 17 in repetory at the Factory Theatre. Check the festival website (http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival/) for exact dates and times.

Day one

Three shows to open my Fringe with tonight. First, Interrogation, a play by Karry Yano and Even Andrew Mackay.
The show attempts to explore questions of national identity, loyalty, and survival. Matrha and Kanao (played by Loretta Yu and Benaldo Yeung) are two twenty-something Japanese-Canadians living in BC in 1936. When Kanao leaves to work at his grandfather's company in Japan, the two stay in touch through a set of letter, the recitation of which makes up almost the entirety of this performance. As WWII comes and passes, Martha and her family are moved to an internment camp and Kanao is drafted into the Japanese army.

This show takes on more than it can chew for 60 minutes of stage time, and the writing is unfocused. The monologues lacked thoughtful shape, and there were often emotions without clear reason.

Specificity was missing in much of the show. By example, the program indicates that Kanao proved his Japanese loyalty by acting as a POW interrogator; this is not clear in the text and action of the performance however. Yu and Yeung do a decent enough job, but at opening still had some points of shakiness with the text, and were not aided by the non-existant direction from Mackay.

It is disappointing that the story of Kano in particular has a lot of dramatic and emotional potential, and the ideas in this production are worth further development. At this stage, however, it still comes across as early draft.

Recommendation: You will not miss anything by missing this show.

Next up was Rukmini's Gold, by Radha S. Menon.
Rukmini's Gold won the 2015 Toronto Fringe new Play Contest, and it is not hard to see why. The script was tight, the scenes well formed, and the plot and theme paired well.
As the play opens, Rukmini, played by Dia Frid, sits waiting for a train in Samsara in 1960, reflecing on her life. She is about to make a journey, the nature of which becomes quickly apparent. Acting as a pivot for the whole show, we see how her life an experience connect directly and indirectly with her predecessors and successors as scenes from 1911 to 2008 play out at train stations in India, Canada, and the U.K.

While not a perfect piece, (the time jumps are double-casting made the relationships between scenes very hard to follow, and some elements of magical realism seemed to have been abandoned in a rewrite but not excised everywhere) there is a lot to like about this show. The dialog is witty and engaging, and the characters are well formed. A personal highlight was a monologue of a woman who had, for various reasons, watched as the lives of her sister and niece fall slowly apart; a powerful moment indeed.

Recommendation: Worth taking the time to check out.

Finally, Fruit Fruit Mouth Mouth, by the Illume Collective
I almost want to call this production, something like "The Goblin Variations." The production bills itself as "An exploration of Rossetti's Goblin Market" but gets seriously derailed leaving me at many moments to ask "what the frack? No really, what the veritable frack?"

Opening with a dramatic recitation of the poem, the performance starts by oddly combining a sort of melodrama parody in the sisters with a strange commedia-ish lazzi performance from the goblin men. Then it gets weird.

The initial recition over, one of the performers then starts asking us "get you thinking question" that felt to me as if they came from a less-than-engaging first year college English lecture.

What if the poem weren't as written? What if it were gender reversed? What if we look at this and read it as explicitly sexual? What if we read it as a coming of age? What if I told you something I head once about how Victorian norms were different from moden? What if? What if? What if? (I head the goblins calling the question now).

These what if questions are useful tools for exmploration when working through the creative process, but they are not in and of themselves enough ot make a performance satisfying.

I commend the performers for committing themselves fully to this production. They have, all of them, skill on display and commitment to their work. The material, however, is a rather awkward mish-mash: arguments in search of a thesis.

Recommendation: As much as I really wanted to like this show, I can't really recommend seeing it.

First Time Last Time - Enjoyable time

Note: This review is based on a preview performance of the show.

First Time Last Time, written and directed by Scott Sharplin, tells the story of Ben and Airlea, and their 15 or so years together (the math, we are told, is fuzzy.)

While Sharplin's notes indicate this is a play about "non-traditional relationships" what strikes me is just how traditional their relationship is. Which is not to say it is without interest.

The story is a twist on a standard: boy-with-goals Ben meets goth-chick LARPer Airlea. The twist comes in that neither one (they protest) is looking for a relationship, so they agree to a one night stand. That turns into two, three, and then years of nights. So long as it stays fresh, they state, each time counts as the first.

Ben is played with earnest eagerness by co-producer Wesley J. Colford. Meanwhile, Jenna Lahey gives Airlea some surprising turns of emotional depth.

The preview performance began a bit stilted, not helped by a slightly awkward frame narrative that lands well but doesn't have a strong take off. However, the two actors, and the script itself, find their sea-legs in the second act when the lies begin and the subject turns (as it must inevitably do) to babies. This includes a delicious moment in which Airlea speaks to us about Ben's growing obsession with babies, while being pelted by an increasingly dense shower of baby toys. It is in this act, as well, that the set, a pile of storage boxes, (designer uncredited in the program) earns its keep.

I left this production feeling like the script could be tighter. Each scene contained good moments, and the characters invited me to care. However, my efforts were regularly blocked as forward thrust of the scenes would stall and circle before moving onward. This was not helped by repeated references in the script to how the middle of a story is full of blur. I would suggest that this script could be pulled in to a single act to keep the scenes fresh and showcase better the story and relationship arc.

Wesley J. Colford and Jenna Lahey as Ben and Airlea Photo Credit: Chris Walzak

This is, as the poster might suggest, a comedy, and the jokes are certainly there. They did not land as strongly as they could have done at the preview I attended, but I suspect that both Colford and Lahey will hit the comic marks more easily after opening and during the run. A Toronto crowd on a Wednesday night is a tough room.

Recommendation: An enjoyable night.

First Time Last Time runs to June 21st, 2015 At Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave
General Admission: $20
Student/Youth/Artworker Price: $15
Sundays: PWYC
Tickets can be purchase online at http://passemuraille.ca
Or by phone at: (416) 504-7529