‘Virtues outshine the flaws’
THE NEXT STAGE THEATRE FESTIVAL IN TORONTO IS FULL OF SPIRIT AND PRECISION
Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Theatre
In the musical Blood Ties, at the Next Stage theatre festival, there’s a song whose singer is exploring the clothes- closet of someone recently deceased and who is impressed by what he finds. It goes, in part, like this:
His suits are tailored with skill and finesse. Each shoe is a small work of art. This was a man who knew how to dress;
It’s a shame that he had to depart.
You don’t often hear lyrics as neat as that in a new musical — Canadian or otherwise. And it gets even better. We hear, concerning the sartorial choices of defunct celebrities “from JFK to Marvin Gaye” that “they wore the right costume so even posthumously they could impress.” Imagine that: an internal rhyme.
Lyricists who can rhyme with point and accuracy at the end of a line are rare enough these days; those who can do it in the middle of one are phoenixes.
Need I add that the words sit perfectly on the music, and that the music is also fine, theatrical and contemporary at once?
The words, sung and spoken, and the music are the joint work of Anika Johnson and Barbara Johnston; near-namesakes but not related.
Although some confusion may arise from the fact that Anika has also been known to collaborate with her equally talented sister Britta.
The Johnson and Johnston of Blood Ties are also performers. Johnson plays Sheila, who is about to get married; Johnston plays Franny, her friend.
Judged from moment to moment, Blood Ties is dark, funny and a joy. But I have to admit that its separate pieces don’t hold together very well.
The clothes- conscious corpse at its centre is Sheila’s uncle who appears, most inconsiderately, to have blown his brains out in the bathroom on the eve of his niece’s nuptials. The bride’s three best buds — Franny and two guys — come to the house, and find themselves commandeered into cleaning up the mess.
Sheila herself is very tightly wound, a condition that seems to derive from the death of her parents in a car accident, a disaster for which her three friends were partly responsible.
This event is set up, with great verbal and musical tension, in the show’s opening number, and it must be meant to overhang all the subsequent action. But it doesn’t.
For much of the time, we forget about it. The authors also say that the show explores what weddings mean in today’s secular society. But, again, it doesn’t.
It branches out into other stories, entertaining ones that are not so much sub- plots as parallel plots. For a 75- minute piece, it’s pretty diffuse. The authors have no trouble with dialogue but they do have problems with structure.
The virtues far outshine the flaws. The performances, under Ann Merriam’s direction, are spirited and precise. In addition to Johnson and Johnston, there’s delightful work from Carter Hayden as an earnest medical intern, aching to make the girl next door see him as something more than the boy next door, and from Jeremy Lapalme as the friend with the wardrobe fixation. He’s gay, and I may convey the show’s exhilarating quality by quoting more of his big song:
If I had a closet that held this much clout,
I’ ll tell you one thing: I’d have never come out.
The Next Stage festival, also known as the son-and-daughter of the Toronto Fringe, is spread over three spaces at the Factory Theatre, which between them house 10 shows. I’ve seen three.
Kawa Ada, esteemed actor, turns playwright- director for The Death of Mrs. Gandhi and the Beginning of New Physics (a Political Fantasy). This is a past-and-future play. In 1984, four female leaders, actual and potential, are assembled for the funeral of Indira Gandhi.
The gathering comprises Margaret Thatcher (who convened it), Imelda Marcos, Benazir Bhutto and a young Kim Campbell. Suddenly there erupts among them, from the year 2030, Malala Yousafzai. She claims, plausibly, to have grown richer, and certainly seems harder.
We’re in Caryl Churchill territory, with a whiff of Shaw and a hint of Stoppard. Malala has come, she says, to awaken them to their full personal and political potential.
As in Churchill’s Top Girls, there’s the danger that they’ ll merely replicate men’s mistakes. It looks, indeed, as if this is what will happen though it seems to be Thatcher’s fault, a point that Churchill also made but with more subtlety and more clarity. The play’s argument is muddy, and the physics, relating to Malala’s time-travel, merely get in the way of the politics.
The laughs are few and forced. Ada’s staging is good but the acting, with the honourable exceptions of Trenna Keating’s Campbell and Tennille Read’s Bhutto, stridently reinforces the obscurity: Ellen-Ray Hennesy’s Thatcher looks at first glance as if she’s wearing a mask and sounds, for much of the play, as if she’s speaking through one.
The play lasts 90 minutes. Date Me, an improv piece, clocks in at a pleasant 30.
Two performers, Ted Hallett and Lisa Merchant, play out a first date between people randomly selected from descriptions in Internet ads, in locations selected by the audience.
So, it’s a different show every time. The one I saw was amusing enough, with Hallett, already the taller of the two, standing most of the time on a platform, to denote macho insecurity.
I can’t help feeling that some of their material could be re-used for any dating scenario, shared awkwardness being a given in such circumstances, but I’m mean that way.
The Next Stage Festival runs through Jan. 15.