Glut of music overwhelms provocative production
Marat/Sade
(out of 4) By Peter Weiss. Directed by Albert Schultz. Until Oct. 17 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca or 416-8668666
Yes, you can have too much of a good thing and the Soulpepper production of Marat/Sade that opened last week proves it.
For the past few years, the music of Mike Ross has been one of the major joys of Soulpepper shows like Alligator Pie and Spoon River. Now director Albert Schultz has given Ross virtual carte blanche to put the songs of Marat/Sade front and centre, which he has.
The original show calls for a dozen musical numbers, but Ross has easily doubled that, setting scenes and speeches that were unadorned in the original to a wildly eclectic assortment of tunes.
They are all highly melodic, terribly inventive and superbly performed by most of the cast, but they seriously damage the show.
Peter Weiss’s original play is already a complex piece of work. It’s set in 1808 in the French asylum where the Marquis de Sade often performed plays with the inmates during his imprisonment. On this occasion, he has us looking at the assassination of French Revolution firebrand JeanPaul Marat by the demented partisan Charlotte Corday.
It’s a loose but compelling format for a riveting debate about personal will (de Sade) against political action (Marat) with the ensemble of disturbed inmates providing a searing commentary as the acting company.
Schultz has added another not totally convincing layer by supposedly having the play performed by the mentally challenged from Toronto in 2015, but it’s not really worked through.
Soon enough you realize that everything in the evening is going to be about the music and, effective though it is, it smothers everything else. We start to realize these randomly chosen inmates are awfully inventive musicians as well as skilled vocalists, and that their staging is complex and impeccably done.
And at that moment, the play goes out the window. We are never really threatened, never really shocked, never really surprised. It’s all clever and, in the second act, it crosses the line into camp.
The cast all try hard, but each one just misses the boat slightly. Stuart Hughes is a passionate Marat, but he doesn’t seem to be suffering from any mental affliction. Diego Matamorosis a deeply cynical de Sade, but he’s the one cast member who shouldn’t have been made to sing. And Oliver Dennis brings his usual nicely dry comedy to the Herald but lacks the demonic sweep the man should possess.
Katherine Gauthier brings a strong air of Taylor Swift to Charlotte Corday, but her somnambulism is treated as a joke. And while Gregory Prest sings with bravura passion as her would-be lover Duperret, the sexual compulsion that’s supposed to drive him comes as an afterthought.
It’s nice to meet this provocative script again and Ross’s music is wonderful, even if there’s far too much of it. But in the end, there’s no sense of danger about the proceedings and you really don’t want Marat/Sade to become Marat/Safe.