Happy Holidays! (Carol of the Bells)

I don't have any footage of Pavlov's Dogs performing The Dreidel Song for Chanukah, but as a general holiday treat, please enjoy our performance of Carol of the Bells at Lunacy Cabaret on December 10th. This is probably the only time you will hear a handbell group get heckled, but it's worth it to hear the heckler get shouted down (he was later ejected). Thanks to Wm. Perry (myvideoscrapbook) for the video, and the audience for the lovely standing ovation!



-Ilana

Handbells and Singing and Concerts, Oh My!

It occurs to me that, though this is a theatre blog predominantly, it is an arts blog in general, and most of my arts-related activities lately have been in the form of music. I belong to two music groups; the Amadeus Choir, an auditioned SATB chorus with approximately 100 members, led by Lydia Adams, and Pavlov’s Dogs, a nerd-rock 6-woman handbell ensemble that plays anything from Queen to the Mario theme. The two groups couldn’t be more different in tone; one tackles large, serious choral masterworks and the other…well, sometimes we spend 15 minutes of practice in serious discussion of the My Little Pony reboot…out of musical necessity, of course. Both are a lot of fun and I find them very fulfilling for different reasons.

One of the reasons I am so fond of musical theatre is that my first love is vocal music. I have been singing in various groups since I was a child, from the Dr. Rao Choir and North York Festival Singers, to Chamber Choir and Earl Haig Singers in high school, to the FireHazards and Koleinu in college and the Barnard/Columbia Chorus and its chamber choir in grad school. I was pretty upset when I had to quit the Columbia Chorus my first year of grad school; filling two nights a week, it was too much, even if I was starting to get the solos I wanted. When I moved back to Toronto, I felt a need for structured singing in my life, and my friend Kelli convinced me that Amadeus was where I wanted to be. Amadeus Choir moves lightning-quickly when it comes to learning new music, and we tend to sing beautiful, compelling pieces. I think my favourite piece of choral music I’ve ever performed was When David Heard by Eric Whitacre, from my first concert last year. I actually felt pained handing the music back.

I love Pavlov’s Dogs, not just because it gives me a chance to play music with some awesome ladies, but because there’s something fantastic about deciding you are going to pick up an instrument and learn it well enough to perform it in a matter of weeks. When I was in college, I decided to pick up the alto saxophone I had put down permanently after grade eight, and for the heck of it, to join the Princeton University Band. I had never played handbells before mid-summer 2010. There’s something to be said for a musical trial by fire. Some might argue a woman of my level of coordination should never attempt to play an instrument where you need to pick up a new thing for every new note you play. But handbells are lovely and make a terrific rounded sound; they have an even more fascinating quality when they are unexpectedly juxtaposed with David Bowie or MGMT. Playing handbells gives you an increased appreciation for the components and composition of music. Because each note is a separate instrument, you become hyper-aware of how a piece is put together and how notes run and mesh. Songs that are easy on saxophone or voice because there are a lot of close runs become feats of dexterity when you are in charge of a specific half-octave. Want to see us in action? Here's the video from our performance at Nerd Girl Pinups' Gunpowder Plot (it's my first concert, so ignore a few clunks), and here are two videos from last year's Christmas show at the Rivoli:Wizards in Winter and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

This Friday, Amadeus performed Handel’s Messiah, which was a lovely experience. Our first concert of the year was Karl Jenkins’ “The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace,” a complex work which deserves a post in itself. On December 17^th, at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, we’re performing an evening of traditional carols, along with new ones; the choir sponsors a yearly competition that alternates between a children’s competition and adult/youth amateurs and professionals. This year is the adult year, and the new carols, from both seasoned professionals and up-and-coming undergraduate composers, are really quite beautiful. One of my favourites so far is the solstice carol, “The Shortest Day;” a little unusual and filled with gorgeous harmonies. We are performing both separately and with the Bach Children’s Chorus. For more info on “Glorious Sounds of the Season,” check here.

Pavlov’s Dogs’ upcoming guest spot is at Lunacy Cabaret’s “A Grotesque Christmas,” in support of Circus Without Borders. We’ll be playing “Carol of the Bells” this time – because, as awesome as it is to play rock handbells, there are just some situations, like Christmas shows, where there is actually music written for handbells, and it would be a shame not to play it occasionally.

The show is at:

Centre of Gravity EAST
Vaudeville Theatre & Circus Training Studio
1300 Gerrard St. East
Toronto, Ontario

Advance tickets (they tend to sell out) available at:

Sideshow Cafe
Next to Centre of Gravity East
1300 Gerrard St. East
Toronto, Ontario

Shanti Baba Trading Company
546 Queen St. West
Toronto, Ontario

Check here for details!

That’s where the music in my life is at right now; more updates to come.

-Ilana

(Photo screengrab from video by YouTube user mizzmonsta - thanks for the terrific video!)

Ride The Cylone - Revisited

I went to see Ride The Cyclone at Passe Muraille tonight; I really enjoyed the show when I saw it at SummerWorks last year, and was glad to get a chance to see the slightly-revamped version. My previous review still stands (with some slightly-revamped observations); do see the show if you can. It's a wonderfully quirky musical that's full of heart, and I've been unable to decide whether it's one of the funniest depressing shows I've seen, or one of the most depressing funny shows. (This is the sort of line it's riding.) There's been an actor change (Matthew Coulson plays Misha Bachinsky with a new ballet-inflected rap flair), but the beats have mostly stayed the same.

The thing I'm most pleased about in this remount is that we get more moments where the characters are real, human, three-dimensional, and sad; some of the archer moments that seemed to be there for sheer incongruity have been taken out. In my last review I complained about the intrusion of nonsense lyrics about a cartoon bear and the appearance of a bear costume; this has been excised (naturally, as a random Internet blogging dramaturg, I feel entirely responsible for this). In recompense, we get more of the haunting moments that feel like splashes of cold water amidst the warmth that zany humour brings. Jane Doe (Sarah Pelzer) has a longer solo with which to beguile and chill us, the operatic soprano notes floating effortlessly above the choreographed circus cabaret. Ocean's (Rielle Braid) sudden realization that she will never eat beavertails while visiting her mother in Ottawa again was a small emotional moment that I'm not sure is new but was certainly highlighted beautifully. The spooky atmosphere that I loved last time around holds up well on second viewing, as do the very impressive voices of the cast. (I did, however, find the balance and blend occasionally slightly off in some of the choral bits; I wasn't sure whether the high-strung, Type-A Ocean was attempting to overpower the other voices as a character choice or not. It's a very small quibble, however.)

I was left with a question with the realization that the climax of Ocean's debate scene (the opponent in the wheelchair, the topic of whether humans are good) is the same scenario (resolved differently) of one of the few episodes of Community I've gotten a chance to see. Strange coincidence, or nod to the show?

I'm very happy that the show appears to be selling out; it was tonight, with a number of added seats. It appears to be one of those rare shows that has deservedly found its eager audience. That's probably because it's a hell of a ride.

-Ilana

Theatre Instruction On Speed!

I’ve been creating an undergraduate course about communication that will be taken as an intro course by every person who goes through the new program its being created for. Because this is a course designed by me, I have a certain license to indulge my predilections for content, which, if you haven’t notice, include theatre. However, much as my inclination tells me otherwise, I am not allowed to turn this into a theatre course. Two weeks is all I’m going to spend on the subject; I have essays, journalism, poetry, short stories, and a novel to teach as well.

Here’s the trouble – how do you introduce undergraduates to theatre in two weeks? The impossibility of the task, in a way, is both completely binding and utterly freeing. I have no possibility of actually introducing theatre in a complete and meaningful way; my goal is to teach some interesting plays and to get across the uniqueness of theatre as a communications medium. What I’ve decided to go for is a combination of two classically-structured plays (one drama, one comedy) for the first week, with a couple of unconventional plays and a monologue to really “play” with the idea of audience and theatrical convention in the second. I’m hoping that a group exercise where the students will read out loud will help them understand how theatre is meaningful on the page, but “pops” on the stage. I’ve done some crowdsourcing, because I have an exceptionally wide base of friends who work in and study theatre, and have turned to a piece I wrote in grad school where I actually had to alter an entire syllabus on 20^th-century American plays.

In a way, this exercise maddens me, because I want to teach an entire theatre semester (I tried, but was kindly rebuffed). I want to be able to spend an entire week on Angels in America, but because of these constraints I can’t really teach it at all, as it can’t have an entire week to itself. I’d like to show various modes of theatre and theatre through history; I’d like to get some serious diversity in the plays I teach. Heck, I’d like to teach musical theatre but that’s putting the cart before the horse, theatrically-speaking. I’d like to teach an entire course on theatre as a vessel for social justice, or the way theatre deals with illness; I’d like to teach a course on the monologue, on Canadian playwrights; I’d like to get the chance to teach several of the courses I found immensely valuable in grad school, such as the 20^th-century one, the modern theatre history one, or the evolving theory of comedy. But I also find this idea of comparative media to be exciting. I designed this course so that I wouldn’t be “penned down” (pardon the pun) to any particular type of writing, and that came with its advantages and disadvantages. The comparisons between the types of writing are going to be very interesting, but each style/form subset of writing has driven me to its own particular crisis of “what to include?” The range of students in this program, in terms of background, level of English skill, and country of origin will likely be breathtaking.

With that, the starting point changes. Last week, in one of my classes a large percentage of students stared blankly when asked to place the reference, “Alas, poor Yorick!” The grad student in me wanted to lie down and cry. The professor in me decided that this was an awesome learning opportunity, and explained the reference and its meaning with enthusiasm. And, honestly, I think the meaning was understood – that’s the great thing about writers who deal sensitively with universal issues.

In the end, whatever plays these students are taught in this new course (and five is definitely pushing it, even if some are short), the key word is enthusiasm. I’m not going to be able to give anyone a thorough grounding in theatre theory in two weeks, but an idea about why theatre is special and exciting and fun, conveyed through a combination of study and enthusiasm, seems possible.

I’m not going to tell you which plays I’m choosing, because, in the end, the syllabus, particularly pre-approval, is a private matter between the institution and the course developer. I’m hoping I haven’t overstepped my bounds here by just talking out some of my mental process. Feel free to speculate or suggest, though!

-Ilana

Review: Those Who Can't Do... (TPM)

As a 26-year-old (sessional) English professor who occasionally feels out of her depth (such as when she gets assigned to teach technical report writing instead of literary analysis), the 27-year-old teacher protagonist of Erin Fleck’s Those Who Can’t Do… (directed by Shari Hollett) resonated with me strongly when I spent 75 minutes with her on Thursday night. In fact, I was taking a break between teaching, grading and then grading some more when I watched the show, so let’s just say I was primed for understanding.

As difficult as it is to teach engineers how to write memos sometimes, I imagine it is vastly more awkward to teach 14-year-olds sex ed. This is the unenviable position Lillian Campbell finds herself in at the beginning of the school year; the low woman on the totem pole gets switched from English and Ancient Civ to Health, with only a manual of objectives from 1999 (the most recent edition) for company. Factor in a progressive attitude, paucity of personal sexual experience, and students who take her message both too seriously and not seriously enough, and you have a potentially explosive mix in a small town. A scandal catapults the program, and Lillian, into the public eye, or at least the parents’ eyes.

Playwright/performer Fleck takes us through Lillian’s tumultuous “experiment,” in which the teacher struggles to end the cycle of shame that she feels has ruined her own approach to sexuality and threatens to do the same to the school’s young women. The topic is in many ways as timely now as it has ever been, and Fleck’s script deals with it sensitively but is not afraid to raise the frustration level, both with her unresponsive students and the even less responsive town. The one dramatic issue here is that Lillian seems so obviously in the right that some of the other adult characters sometimes appear more nuanced versions of villains out of a Victorian children’s fantasy.

Where Fleck succeeds is when she asks the questions that are extremely difficult to answer: what is the difference between sexual empowerment and being taken advantage of, by the media or others, or being reduced to the sexual impulse? How can we support the healthy sexuality of our youth while still giving them a firm grounding in the possible consequences of this exploration? How does anyone know if he or she is truly “ready”? How do parents reconcile their own teenage experiences, desires and mistakes with their current protective impulses? And how do we expect teachers to be the ones to discuss these sensitive, confidential subjects with their students, attempting to build trust while ultimately required to be responsible for parental opinion?

The play is not just a diatribe on these subjects; while asking these questions, Fleck gives us a moving portrayal of a woman who is coming to terms with her mother’s past disapproval of any sexual expression, whether it be toward the neighbours’ son or Leonardo DiCaprio’s brooding expression in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. As well, we listen to the teenagers, and here we see a greater richness of character and conflict that could serve some of the adult characters. Each character is introduced by the writing of his or her name on a chalkboard, a potentially time-consuming or awkward signifier that is actually quite helpful. That is, Fleck’s styling of each signature is an effective exercise in non-verbal explanation. We can figure out when a character is uptight and proper, or understand immediately the unbalanced, sloppy lettering of a teenage boy. It’s extremely helpful, in part because we’ve got an initial mental image, but also in part because each character’s voice and physicality are not as defined in performance as they could be, though Fleck’s performance remains compelling.

At the end of the performance, each patron is given a button that reads, “know thyself.” I won’t do you the disservice of explaining why, but the message is a good one. Some more focus on character and a little less on message, and Those Who Can’t Do… will be an even better teacher.

-Ilana

Reviewing the Reviewer: A Response to Bruce DeMara's Attack on Dramaturgy

It’s been some time since Bruce DeMara’s quasi love-hate letter to the Fringe (“How To Spot the Duds at the Fringe Festival,” which essentially ruled out 100% of Fringe shows) was published in the Toronto Star, but reviewing Fringe shows has made me think about it again. And with renewed thought comes renewed irritation, as DeMara proves in his article that, not only has he no idea what Fringe spirit is (if you can have a theatrical experience completely ruined by a somewhat uncomfortable seat, to the point where you eliminate promising shows entirely from your roster, preferring comfort over discovery, then you are officially not relevant to a serious discussion about the festival) but that he has absolutely no idea what a dramaturg is.

DeMara has this odd idea that a dramaturg is there to, I suppose, overthink things; to make the play experimental, obtuse, and boring. To many people, the word dramaturg is equated with pretension. (Well, to many people the equation is actually dramaturg = dramaturge = what is that?) I guess that’s fair – to call back to Avenue Q, the word is scary and German, so “experimental and pretentious? That is German!” But, if a dramaturg makes his or her work convoluted and purely academic, “savagely dissecting” someone’s work, then he or she is not a good dramaturg, which does happen. There are dramaturgs involved in “turgid drama” out there, just like there directors who are dire, playwrights who are just playing at writing and inactive actors. But I have never walked out of a badly written show and thought “That’s it, I’m never watching anything scripted again!” (Except for perhaps John Patrick Shanley’s Romantic Poetry, which was such an abomination that I almost never watched anything again, because I almost clawed my own eyes out...by the way, that show had one writer/director and credited no dramaturg, and it was obvious.)

It’s ludicrous to dismiss an entire profession because DeMara thinks that only pretentious fussbudgets would have a dramaturg for a Fringe show. I, instead, call that treating “even” a Fringe show with the respect and communication it deserves. DeMara posits that a show must be fresh and spontaneous, which rules out the idea of dramaturgy, or, in fact, any careful consideration of the show at all, suggesting that a “true” Fringe show just throws the first thing that comes to mind at the audience. If that is so, the festival should be improv-only, or at very least, allow no rewrites and only one rehearsal from the actors. Rewriting IS dramaturgy. The rehearsal process IS dramaturgy.

The idea that a show should only be dramaturged after its production shows that DeMara seems to have confused a show’s dramaturg with a reviewer. As I’ve demonstrated in this blog, a dramaturg can write reviews – of other people's shows. But dramaturgy, an attempt to ensure a show’s cohesion on the stage, needs to take place before the show opens. It is intertwined with the process; it can’t exist apart from the process. There is a reason that critics aren’t invited in to review a show before opening night. Criticism is reactive, and thus largely useless to the particular production it is about; it’s for the audience, for history, perhaps for the team to think about for their next show. Dramaturgy is, and must be, active.

There is a reason that you get an MA in Theatre, but an MFA in Dramaturgy. That’s because an MFA signifies some sort of connection with the real world (and don’t snicker, I realize that spending money to get an MFA signifies a certain amount of disconnect with the “real world”) as well as an academic background, while an MA can potentially focus on only the latter. The moment I decided that I wanted a degree in Dramaturgy and not Theatre was sitting at the academic conference portion of the show I was involved in staging, and I realized that the active state of translating this academic knowledge into a valid and immediate performance for an audience was what particularly excited me. For an MFA, you have to put your academic background into practice and make it work. You have to work on shows. You have to take a look at the realities of theatre in the current climate. You study season planning, how to create an artistic vision that is also accessible; you study marketing, fundraising, grant writing: distilling a message. You can be as academic as you like at the table read or in the privacy of your own home, but the only things an audience will see out of your production are perhaps a program note and the production itself, not the explanation behind it. So you have to make your intention and message clear and interesting.

An MFA in Dramaturgy should carry with it an additional designation in Communications, because that’s what it is. You communicate the playwright’s wishes to the director, the actors, the designers, and the audience, and you communicate all of those people’s wishes to each other so that you are all on the same page. A dramaturg isn’t there to laugh at and muddle the audience; a dramaturg is an audience’s advocate in the room. A dramaturg is there to ask why a director has decided to stage Polonius’ famous speech in Pig Latin, to ask a playwright why his character has a sudden, inexplicable change in personality, to ask an actor if he has all the information he needs to deal with a complicated Greek legend, a designer why the entire cast of Hedda Gabler has been outfitted as space pirates. A dramaturg is there to streamline and demystify and to make sure everyone respects each other’s contribution to the project.

Perhaps you don’t like a creative team’s aesthetic. Does that mean the dramaturg is terrible, or are we all individual people and it just might not be your cup of tea? It’s like having a bad experience with a doctor and then declaring that “the job of any doctor is to kill the patient.” The job of any doctor is to save the patient, even if the patient sometimes dies. The basic fact that a dramaturg can be an almost indescribable position because it is so many things to so many people signifies that the profession cannot be lumped together as either homogenous or useless.

Saying that a dramaturg ruins things is saying that research ruins historical drama, that mediation is never necessary between creative minds, an issue DeMara touches on as potentially ruinous in the same article. It’s saying that a second pair of eyes is never helpful (again, DeMara criticizes not having enough people on the creative team), and what’s more, it’s saying that a dramaturg doesn’t care about the audience, which I take as a personal affront, because I absolutely care about the audience, and because, furthermore, I *am* part of the audience, so it’s saying that I don’t even care about my own experience. At this Fringe Festival, I guess I was lucky because I didn’t see any “duds.” I saw a large number of artists telling stories, more or less successfully. I guess it’s true, though, that I spotted one “dud” at the Fringe Festival. I think his name was Bruce.

-Ilana

Fringe 2011 Reviews: Misprint (1st Issue)

As a reviewer, the first commitment you make is to review shows only once you have seen each complete show. The cardinal sin of reviewing is to leave before the performance is completely finished but to submit a review anyway (this happened to a show I was in junior year of undergrad, and it proved the reporter’s eventual downfall). Misprint presents the conundrum: how do you review a show that is presented as Part One of a two-part piece, but one that the team has chosen to present singly, as a first act to an audience paying full price (well, Fringe price) who won’t get the second act until much later if at all? Taking both things into consideration, the answer seems to be to review it as a full show while acknowledging that there is a second act both planned and in the works. In many ways that does not change the initial reaction to the play, though it’s difficult to judge story pacing and thematic import.

Misprint has been described as “Archie Comics meets The Truman Show,” and this is the most accurate description I can think of. Perpetually sixteen-year-old Elly (Lauren Toffan, also the show’s co-writer and director) is the only person in the world of Sunnydale (this fictional Sunnydale, sadly, contains no Buffy or vampires) who does not know that her town is actually the artificial setting of a long-running comic strip. The story is an interesting concept, and the takeoff on Archie comics pitch-perfect; as a child who spent too much time and money feeding an Archie Comics addiction, I found the twisted Archie characters were hilarious; all landed with me as adept take-offs. Unfortunately, while the performance was ultimately entertaining, much of the time this show is a triumph of style and archness (no pun intended) over substance.

The show has a strong candy-coloured, cartoon aesthetic; there is a clear director’s vision, but the execution doesn’t always work out. For example, the characters move as if they are two-dimensional, unable to turn as they shuffle sideways, in and out of frame. This is a neat sight gag, but it sacrifices the ability to be fluid in its attempts to land the joke for the rest of the show. The director appears to feel this constraint, as the particular movement is picked up and left off whenever it is convenient, which is jarring.

The music is often entertaining, but many of the lyrics are unfortunately banal (and not banal in the sense that life in Sunnydale is supposed to be banal, just a bit lazy-sounding), and sound like rambling stream of consciousness meditations instead of carefully constructed gems; though the characters are in many cases nervous and losing their grip, and not everyone needs to think in Sondheim, it just seems tired. Slightly more polished lyrics would be welcome, even if it is “just” a Fringe show.

The lyrics occasionally seem to be deliberately constructed in order not to rhyme; it was hard to tell whether this was to signify that something was wrong, or whether it was an affectation. Though there are enough rhymes to suggest this is untrue and not a consistent thing, it’s particularly strange to the ear when lines which could rhyme are twisted for no reason not to rhyme (not an exact example, but say a rhyme that could have been made with “me” and “forty-three” would be changed so that “me” is “rhymed” with “forty-two”). Lyrics aren't required to rhyme, and there is certainly a place in musical theatre for recitative, but if the lyricist isn't showing us why this piece needs to be in song specifically using the heightened rhythmic language of rhyme, the lyrics have to be particularly well-crafted to stand in their own blank verse. Exceptions that heighten interest in the show’s possibilities include the standout penultimate song, an Elly solo which actually reaches a kind of emotional truth, and a Betty-vs-Veronica duet between happy (future) homemaker Elly and jet-setting Monica with support from a classroom of girls direct from the chorus of Grease. The score’s strong point is its counterpoint melodies, which are particularly difficult to write, but manage to be successful and intriguing, suggesting that composer and co-writer Yan Li has some tricks up his sleeve.

Acting, like the sideways-shuffle-motion, is variable, mostly in the smaller parts where the risk of over-mugging increases; Elly and Monica (Kristen Sehn) are standouts (Monica, in particular, demands attention). The character of Charlie is deeply confusing; is he creepy and awful, just a bad actor (the character, that is), suffering from severe health problems or all of the above? His song, a version of that gospel song included in every ironic musical since Urinetown, is a sincerely off-putting piece about divesting clothing. As usual, the female vocals are generally stronger, but the singers mostly hit the right notes.

The only problem with the Truman Show meets Archie Comics premise is, besides predisposing me towards assumptions as to how the show would unfold, that it is never satisfactorily explained why Elly’s predicament a necessary thing to happen in this world. There is the issue of suspense in this case (not wanting to let on what exactly is going on before the big reveal), but premise can be explained without ruining this suspense. Why is it important or a big selling point that only Elly not know that she is in a comic book, and for this to be a comic book where time is circular and her 16^th year is lived over and over? In fact, as far as we know, this doesn’t seem to be a major selling point to the audience; issue sales are apparently way down, and its not strongly conveyed that the audience of the comic knows Elly is ignorant of her situation. It’s also unexplained how everyone remains the same age, though perhaps a certain injection shown early on has something to do with it, and exactly how the comic world interacts with the real world. It’s just so hard to judge character, story, arcs, and particularly payoffs because this is only the first part. Perhaps in issue two?

-Ilana