Be grateful for Thanks for Giving’s vivid portrait THEATRE

THANKS FOR GIVING

Written and directed by Kevin Loring. An Arts Club Theatre Company production. At the Granville Island Stage on Wednesday, October 11. Continues until November 4

“It’s the 21st century. Get your 2

head out of your ass!”

If you haven’t said this to someone in your family, chances are you’ve thought it, or maybe even been on the receiving end of it. It perfectly captures modern dinner tables all over the world as families come together to mark major holidays with the maximum amounts of muss, fuss, and emotional labour.

Thanks for Giving is an exquisite portrait of a contemporary family, and one that is immediately and wholly familiar thanks to Governor General’s Award–winning playwright and director Kevin Loring’s gifted work in establishing fully realized characters with just a few lines. Nan (Margo Kane), the matriarch, presides over her brood, which includes second husband Clifford (Tom Mcbeath), a gruff hunter and settler Canadian whose casual racism extends toward the Indigenous family he married into and helped raise; daughter Sue (Andrea Menard), a lifelong addict teetering on the edge; her twins, John (čaačumhi—aaron M. Wells) and Marie (Tai Amy Grauman), returning home from university for Thanksgiving; their cousin Clayton (Deneh’cho Thompson), and Marie’s secret girlfriend, Sam (Leslie Dos Remedios).

There are other secrets, too, that spill out through Act 1, as the family eventually gathers around the table and fights, eats, laughs, and fights some more. When Nan discovers that Clifford illegally shot and killed a grizzly bear and her two cubs, she storms off, hurt and betrayed that her husband would disregard her wishes and her lineage so flagrantly. (The legend of Nan’s family is that they are descended from the grizzly bear.)

Act 2 tackles three years rather than just one day, and as such, it feels rushed. We’re so immersed in this family, we want to spend time with them and we want to savour it. The actors are wonderfully believable, particularly the great Margo Kane, whose Nan is the heart and soul of the page and the stage. Loring’s direction is seamless. He gives small scenes a few extra beats just so we can breathe with the characters, and he integrates the Bear Dancer (Shyama-priya) beautifully in a variety of ways. Ted Roberts’s set design is gorgeous and effective, from the tall, wooded backdrop to the slowly turning circular inlay on which the dinner sequence is set.

Thanks for Giving tackles vitally important realities of colonialism, intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities, mixed families and racism, culture, legacy, and belonging, LGBTQ issues, and so much more, and it does so with humour and heart and deep compassion. They’re family, you’re stuck with them, you might as well love them, Nan says at one point, and honestly, with writing and performances this vivid, it’s impossible not to.

> ANDREA WARNER A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by Hugh Wheeler. Directed by Peter Jorgensen. Produced by Patrick Street Productions. At Gateway Theatre on Saturday, October 14. Continues until October 21

The summer night in Sweden 2

smiles three times: once on the young, then on the foolish, and finally on the old. We’re told this in the first moments of A Little Night Music, and this evocation of a Scandinavian twilight presages the musical’s plot.

The story line is full of horny Swedes. It’s the turn of the 20th century, and the middle-aged Fredrik (Warren Kimmel) has taken a second wife, the 18-year-old Anne (Arenia Hermans). Henrik (Caleb Di Pomponio) is Fredrik’s sad-sack seminarian of a son, but he’s also in love with his young stepmother.

Fredrik reconnects with a former lover, the exotic Desiree (Katey Wright). Her current paramour is Count Carl-magnus (Nick Fontaine), a buffoonish dragoon who carefully divides his amorous hours between Desiree and his long-suffering wife (Lindsay Warnock). These liaisons are blithely observed by Desiree’s daughter Fredrika (Elizabeth Irving) and her mother (Patti Allan), herself a veteran breaker of hearts and loins across the Continent.

If this reminds you of Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, that’s because they both draw from the same source material, the classic Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night.

A Little Night Music is a Sondheim musical, so the singing is as complicated as the romantic dalliances. It’s a score filled with pitch changes, complex metres, and contrapuntal group numbers where performers sing different songs simultaneously. The cast does admirably, mastering the challenging music. Hermans and Rose Mcneil as the maidservant Petra stand out among the singers. Warnock is also a sardonic delight with great comic timing between songs.

The musical is most famous for “Send in the Clowns”, a maudlin little number made famous in recordings by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins, among many others. Sung by the veteran actor Desiree, the song bears a title that comes from vaudeville, where, if the show wasn’t going well, they sent in clowns to distract the audience.

Unlike many musicals, though, this show does not leave you waiting around for a familiar tune. The whole production is full of wry, jaunty songs that make for a very entertaining evening.

It’s a sex comedy written in the ’70s and set 70 years earlier, so the gender politics leave a lot to be desired. In the vaguely rapey song “Now”, Fredrik contemplates how he might deflower his young wife: “The option that follows, of course: A, the deployment of charm, or B, the adoption of physical force.”

Director Peter Jorgensen tries to update the show by starting it with the cast in modern clothing, and by having Petra sing about marrying “the miller’s son” while putting clothes back on a female lover.

Unusually, I reserve my main criticism for the audience at Saturday night’s show. They were slow to warm, missed all the best jokes, and didn’t appreciate the production’s quality. During the closing bows, a couple of rude audience members actually stood not to applaud, but to leave prematurely.

A Little Night Music is a great musical in its bones, and this rendition made it look gauzy and effortless, like an enchanted summer evening.

> DARREN BAREFOOT

Thanks for Giving.