As the third
annual
Luminato Festival
(Toronto’s festival of the arts) comes to a close, the reviews are
mixed. I certainly was not able to attend all of the events
(particularly in the musical category) but the ones I saw are
capsulated here.
The North American premiere of
Lipsynch from
Robert Lepage’s
Ex Machina company was one of the
big headliners of this year’s festival. The young woman in the short
black stockings and alluring bustier had been staring out at us in
print advertising for months prior to Luminato’s opening and so it was
with some anticipation that the audience settled in for this nine hour
exercise in mega-meta theatre that only Lepage can pull off. Always the
question is: how well does he pull it off and was it worth the
investment.
For me, it comes down to technical artistry versus dramaturgy;
Lipsynch is strong in the former
and weak in the latter. And investment has also become the operative
word with Ex Machina. There is something happening within the world
renowned company based in Quebec City and I think it comes with the
“genius” appellation that, although not solicited by the founder, now
plagues the work nonetheless. Why would one choose to do a nine
hour marathon? Because we have already done a six hour show? I don’t
know.
There is no need to go into the details of the nine overlapping story
lines that drive this epic except to say that the collectivist approach
to the playwrighting has perhaps seen its day within Ex Machina when
actors (plus Lepage) are also the writers. It all seems to be turned
around the wrong way with actors writing material that contributes
according to their needs allowing them to do takes according to their
abilities. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the
company restored the role of the playwright with someone on the order
of a Tony Kushner and got down to business.
The signature Lepage stagecraft (here expertly assisted by set designer
Jean Hazel and lighting
designer
Étienne Boucher)
was superb and in fact the only thing that saved the production. The
audience ooohed and aahhhed every time the magic unfolded from the
opening scenes which saw a young baby grow to a young man in the space
of a few minutes, the unseen conveyer belt that gave the illusion of
the London subway, to the creation of a virtual videographic cabaret
right before our very eyes. But, not unlike the problem I had after
seeing Lepage’s production of
KA
that he created for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, after all the
jiggery-pokery, it left you kind of wondering why they thought the
whole thing was worth doing in the first place. There seemed to be a
commission occupying the space where a heart should be.
Nevermore (The
Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe),
presented by
Catalyst Theatre,
and
A Poe
Cabaret: A Dream Within a Dream was a bit of overkill I thought
by the artistic programming department of the Luminato festival that
apparently wanted to honor the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth
of Edgar Allen Poe.
Nevermore was the better of
the two, although the Sweeney Toddy approach to this bio-musical began
to wear thin after awhile with a repetitive nursery rhyme score (by
Jonathan Christenson) that was
framed within some tight and well choreographed segments by
Laura Krewski.
A Poe Cabaret featured the
excellent musicianship of the
Penderecki
String Quartet but it was not enough to lift the lifeless
reading by
Tom Allen of Poe’s
poem,
The Raven,
that precipitated an event seldom seen by Toronto theatre goers who are
normally an extremely polite bunch of folks. They began to walk out.
One by one, they quietly hunched over and scampered up the aisle to
make their way to freedom – over a dozen by my count in an audience
that the house manager told me numbered around 120 patrons at the
Buddies in Bad Times space.
This was disappointing because I attended the performance with the
hopes that the cabaret format might capture some of the great lyricism
of Poe’s writing in the same way that the folksinger Phil Ochs set
Poe’s less well known poem, The Bells, to music so simply and so
beautifully.
Although this forum is not usually the space to review dance, I do want
to commend the Luminato Festival for doing such a wonderful job with
the two major dance companies that they programmed this year.
The National Ballet of Canada’s
gender bended production of
Carmen dealt
with this aging bull of a ballet in a number of creative ways that
deserve all the praise it received while the
Nederlands Dans Theatre gave
audiences something truly to rave about. Well done.
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